One of the most important moments in my teaching career came about 25 years ago when I contemplated leaving it. I had just finished writing my first academic book, which applied family systems theory to 19th-century literature. My thesis was that ideas associated with family therapy could be brought to bear on domestic novels—revealing how the heroines reflected behavior patterns of daughters in 19th-century middle-class English families and how the novels themselves mirrored and reinforced cultural tendencies.

The book got me thinking about families to the point where I considered trading academia for family therapy. My interest in family systems and in literary heroines spoke to a need I felt to understand my interactions with my family and to help others understand theirs.

I applied to a University of Pennsylvania externship that allowed me to sit in on family therapy sessions and consider whether I wanted to pursue the field. I went to a clinic at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, walking distance from my office at Drexel University. I was placed with a group of about eight students, all of them trained clinical social workers or psychologists. We spent one or two afternoons a week sitting behind a one-way mirror watching one of the students engage in therapy with a family.

The sessions gave me a glimpse of how poverty exacerbates family problems. And the technique they employed made an equally lasting impression. Whenever those of us watching behind the one-way mirror had a suggestion, we could call into the room and speak to the therapist. If the therapist was stumped about what to do next, they could call in to us for advice. I remember thinking how helpful this approach might be for a beginning teacher, if only it were feasible.

For a variety of reasons, I chose not to train as a family therapist, but I began to apply to my own family and to my classes some of the lessons I’d learned. Perhaps the most important of these was not to overly personalize my interactions with students. I had been the sort of teacher who got nervous and hurt when a student looked at her watch. A small indication of boredom or disinterest would break my rhythm and throw me off my line of thought. I came to see that much of what my students did—and my children, too, for that matter—had little to do with me. A student looking at her watch might be bored, but she also might have a doctor’s appointment in a half hour or a date with her boyfriend after class. Even if she were bored, would that be so bad? Her boredom might have to do with me, but then, it might not.

A few years after my externship, I started individual therapy. My mother was sick with an eventually fatal neurological illness that would last eight years, and it brought to my attention problems I could not deal with. Here, the experience was not positive. Where family therapy had affirmed and enlightened me, individual therapy individual therapy felt oppressive. Possibly, this was because in the former case I focused not on myself but on lifting ideas and techniques for my own use. But now, with my own life under scrutiny, I felt put on the spot and anxious.

I stopped going. Years later, I entered therapy again with a much better outcome. Some of the same problems that had precipitated my anxiety 25 years ago were still present, but this time, the therapist bridged awkward silences and gave advice that soothed me. Again, the therapy helped me as a mother, wife, and daughter, but just as much as a teacher. It used to be that I felt either loved or disdained by students—but talking it over, I discovered that neither was realistic. Yes, there would be students on occasion who would like me a lot and students who wouldn’t. But the turbulent ups and downs in my mood as a teacher leveled off. I still have that exhilaratingly good class, and I still have classes that don’t click—but a more general sense of well-being tempers the quasi-hysteria that used to accompany those feelings.

Psychiatrist Irvin Yalom won the 2000 Oscar Pfister Prize, awarded by the American Psychiatric Association for important contributions to religion and psychiatry. Although Yalom is an atheist, he explores the emotional and intellectual nourishment that belief in God gives people and tries to find other ways it might be obtained. He calls his psychiatric practice “existential”—which is to say that it involves an examination of the meaning of life for the patient in therapy.

What about existential teaching? This would connect the subjects being taught to larger questions, prompting students to think about their role in the world, consider why they are studying what they are studying, and inevitably lead them to the ultimate questions of life and death.

This sort of teaching might be a challenge in certain subjects—calculus, for example. Certainly, in the realm of physics and biology, big ideas are always lurking. The turn toward Creationism in schools in some parts of the country reflects the need to think of larger issues alongside the study of particulars. But to slap God on as an addendum or twist the facts of science to suit a fundamentalist reading of scripture undermines deeper thinking about existential questions.

Literature, my subject, also lends itself to larger questions. Why would someone choose to write a story, even a bad one? What is the creative impulse that fuels a poem? What do the best stories and poems tell us about the meaning of life? Students are hungry for this kind of conversation—not necessarily for answers but for the chance to ask the right questions. They want to connect with writers or with fictional characters struggling with the same issues. They want a connection in uncertainty to others readers. This allays their existential isolation, while also asserting its validity. If nothing more, it helps them feel less isolated in their own existential uncertainty.

Discussing Act V of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, my class arrived at the point in the play where the mistaken and disguised identities of the characters fall away and there follows a last-minute pairing off into couples. Students questioned the quickness with which the main characters agreed to transfer their love to others in place of their original preferences.

One student noted: “It’s weird that Olivia agrees to be married to Sebastian, Viola’s brother, when she’s been in love with Viola all the time. Even if Viola was dressed as a man, it’s not like Sebastian is the same person.”

“It’s a very random idea of love,” agreed another student.

“It might be Shakespeare is saying we can adjust to loving who we need to love, if we have to.”

“But Sebastian is Viola’s brother. The play makes a big point of saying how they come from the same father.”

“But sisters and brothers can be very different,” observed someone else.

There was a general murmur of assent.

“But she probably copied her brother in playing the role of the boy, Caesario, so maybe she acted even more like him than she acted like herself.”

“If she was playing at being him, then Olivia sort of fell in love with Sebastian more than she fell in love with Olivia.”

“Or maybe Sebastian was enough like Viola for Olivia to be satisfied. He wasn’t exactly what she wanted, but close enough.”

Then an Indian student raised his hand. He didn’t usually talk much, but on this subject he shared an insight: the marriage of Olivia and Sebastian was like an arranged marriage, he said. Indian parents sometimes attempt to match their children with the sort of person the child has been interested in in the past. My student acknowledged that the practice is not prevalent—especially since many Indian children try to hide premarital relationships from their parents for fear of displeasing them—but it does happen and, indeed, had occurred within his own family.

What an interesting way to understand the union of Sebastian and Olivia. In life, after all, we don’t get just what we want and often have to settle for an approximation.

I recently asked my class to read John Steinbeck’s story entitled “The Chrysanthemums.” It’s about a woman who grows chrysanthemums as a pastime when she is not laboring on the farm where she lives in relative isolation with her husband. Her cultivation of the flowers represents her need for something missing in the workaday aspects of her life.

One evening, her husband suggests that they go into town for dinner, and she dresses carefully for the occasion. When she comes out of her room, he looks up at her appreciatively and says, “You look nice.”

In discussing the story, the class immediately responded along gender lines. My female students were annoyed by the husband’s remark. His inability to give his wife more than a simple compliment when she had gone to so much trouble to dress up, struck them as the point of the story. “How sad that that’s all he can say,” said one. “No wonder she’s unfulfilled.” Another said, “I’d leave a man who said ‘you look nice’ to me like that. It shows he barely sees his wife, that he has no concept of her needs at all.”

Meanwhile, the males in the class were confused. “He told her she looked nice,” one man said. “He registered that she had gotten dressed up. What more should he say? So he’s not a literary guy. What’s wrong with that?”

After some probing I concluded that what the women felt was missing in the remark was narrative, not eloquence. The husband needed to express to his wife the fact that he appreciated her beauty and her companionship, that he was devoted to making her happy, and that he cared about her finding fulfillment. Instead of an observation, the women wanted a story in which she had a place—the difference, I suppose, between “you look nice” and “you are the love of my life.”

I’ll never forget a freshman course I took as a university student in the 1970s. The woman who taught it, now dead, had once occupied a tenured position at a university on the West Coast. But she had followed her husband to my college, where he promptly dumped her for someone younger.

My teacher, a Holocaust survivor, had a deep well of bitterness, which would surface occasionally when she was teaching, say, Measure for Measure. Usually, though, literature seemed a source of solace and uplift for her.

Reading Paradise Lost in her class was especially memorable. She was not one for undirected discussion, and had particular points in mind that she wanted to make. She would often begin a sentence and leave the last word open for us to fill in (a technique parodied in the 1986 movie, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, when the teacher, played by Ben Stein, prompts his profoundly uninterested class for the missing term: “Anyone? Anyone?”).

Normally, I would have found her method narrow and annoyingly pedagogical, but somehow Mrs. F. carried it off. Perhaps because she possessed the rare quality of wisdom, whatever word she was seeking came as close to the Word as my impious nature was ever going to get.

When we were reading Book IV of Paradise Lost, she asked us: “What is it that Satan feels on first seeing Adam and Eve in the Garden?”

“Anger,” “envy,” “malice,” we offered. But that was not what she wanted. She pointed us to the opening argument of Book IV: “Satan’s first sight of Adam and Eve; his wonder at their excellent form and happy state …”

The answer she wanted was “wonder.” It proved that Satan still had vestiges of his former glory. His first response to innocence and beauty was wonder, though his fallen nature immediately turned to envy and the desire to destroy.

To feel wonder—and, more importantly, to sustain that feeling—is to be blessed. This idea has remained with me as the great lesson from Mrs. F.’s class—a touchstone for my life and my teaching. Because of Mrs. F. I am aware when I feel wonder. I cherish it, seek it, and seek to sustain it. For many years, I have tried to elicit it from students, and to make them value it as well.

One of my favorite teaching texts is The Communist Manifesto, written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1848. It is an excellent addendum to most anything. If I assign a story, show a film, try to explain persuasion, or define the concept of ideology—this slim volume will invariably help illuminate the material. It has never failed to initiate an exciting and surprising discussion. One doesn’t need to be a Marxist—indeed, it’s better if one isn’t—to use the book creatively.

What is perhaps most impressive about The Communist Manifesto is its style—the schematic beauty of its structure and the simple eloquence of its language. I generally teach Books I, II, and IV (omitting the more topical material covered in Book III). Students are impressed by the way the argument thickens, as ideas presented early get fleshed out and amplified as they go along.

We invariably spend time savoring the following paragraph in Book I with its interplay of contraries and paradoxes:

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors,” and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment.” It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom—Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

We parse the adjectives—“feudal, patriarchal, idyllic”—traversing the whole of Western history in the process. We talk about the use of quotation marks around “natural superiors” and “cash payment,” and analyze the nature of irony. We discuss the relationship between the phrases “religious fervour,” “chivalrous enthusiasm,” and “philistine sentimentalism,” and come to a better understanding of how meanings change as we apply different metaphors. I like to cite the line from George Eliot’s Middlemarch: “For we all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them.”

What I like about city life is the chance to learn through chance encounters with strangers. Only in a city—and I’m thinking here of New York, where I lived for many years and still visit often—can you spend the day in serendipitous meetings with people—in diners, on the street, in museums, in buses or on the subway. The opportunities for random talk are endless.

I chat with people about their dogs and always learn some minor fact that I didn’t know: like that the Welsh terrier is a breed derived from the airedale terrier.

A woman I ran into in a coffee shop on the Upper East Side once told me where I could get a terrific foot massage. Another in a thrift shop in Murray Hill tipped me off to the 23rd Street thrift shop crawl—about five shops, all superlative where it is possible to unearth an endless supply of inexpensive, if superfluous, items. We ended up shopping there together.

Then there’s the woman at the Museum of Modern Art, who recommended the exhibit of Renaissance drawings at the Morgan. And the guy selling the bracelets on the street who told me that I could get a cheaper bottle of water at another vender a few blocks down.

Mostly, though, I speak to people not to learn anything but to connect—to have that fleeting moment of goodwill. Like when I complimented a woman on her boots and she said: “Really? I wasn’t sure about them. They cost too much.” Or when I told the guy in the guitar store, who had mentioned that he’d been working there for 40 years, that he didn’t look a day over 30. He said the same of me, which brought to mind a line from a Shakespeare sonnet—“and so I lie with her and she with me / and so we both with lies in comfort be.”

Sometimes, of course, one’s collegiality is not returned, like the other day in Soho when I asked a man with a baby slung around his neck how old the infant was. He answered peremptorily, “six weeks,” then moved away, as though annoyed that he might be asked more questions. I felt like telling him that he had no business bringing a six-week-old outside in a cute carryall and refusing to talk. It’s an unwritten law of the city that dogs and babies are fair game for people like me to fawn over. If he can’t conform to this law, he should keep his kid inside.

I recently received an email from a former student who is working as a writer for a nonprofit company. He reminisced about the courses he had taken with me a few years back, and then he got to his point: I would like to know how to do what you do? What would be involved in achieving this goal? Do you think it would be feasible for me to aspire to the life you have?

The life I have? The questions, which made me laugh at first, were, I realized, fundamental questions. I had asked them myself after college as I thought about what I wanted to do with my life. At the time, it seemed natural to want the life of my professors. They were my most impressive adult role models. I saw them regularly outside of class—in their cozy offices, in the library, over lunch, or in town, where they’d push their children around in strollers. At the end of the term, they’d sometimes invite us students over for dinner. Their homes, though not luxurious, were inviting. And their lives—full of reading, writing, and good talk—seemed just the sort of life I wanted.

But the professorial life is not what it was when I was in college. There are fewer jobs for Ph.D.s, especially in the humanities, and the demands are greater, or at least very different from what they were when I was a student. Today, there are more prescriptive elements involved in becoming a university professor: metrics regarding what has to be done to be hired, to pass a third-year review, to get tenure and promotion. The pressure to publish is greater, the demands of committee work and grant-getting more fierce. Moreover, many tenure-track positions are likely to be replaced by contract positions that involve more teaching and less scholarship, larger and more online classes, and more introductory and survey-course teaching. Is it desirable, or even feasible, for a student now to aspire to do what I do? Probably not.

The more I considered my former student’s questions, the luckier I felt to have squeezed through the door before it closed. But it also made me feel old, not in the swing of things, engaged in a way of life that is fast becoming obsolete. I love the seminar I am teaching now, with 15 students who write a paper every week (to be turned in in hard copy), who come to class for lively talk, after which I go home to write about topics in literature and culture that interest me. What I do is fulfilling and, in its way, useful, but I feel guilty about it. What I’m doing seems out of joint with what the world is doing.

I’m sure that people will find a way in the coming years to make a career in higher education rewarding, but I am pretty certain that it will not take the form that my career has taken. In short, I explained to the student who emailed me, I don’t think it is possible for him to do what I do.

I like black licorice, but my husband can’t abide it. I like frills, but my sister wears Eileen Fisher. I like Victorian houses, but my friends prefer Modernist boxes. Our relationships go uninjured by these differences. Yet sometimes, a divergence in taste can feel like an affront—as though their liking for this and my disliking of that calls into question our liking for each other. How could my dearest friends and relations differ so radically from me in their taste? How could they possibly like or dislike this or that and still like me? Sometimes taste seems to go beyond shallow predilection and become something deeper, imbued with a moral coloration.

The moral element is always lurking for me in literary taste. I feel it whenever I try to explain what is good about a work of literature to students who are predisposed against it. This happens frequently with Henry James. I can’t help but feel that his work opens readers to finer and deeper perceptions. I therefore see it as my duty to teach my students how, if not to appreciate James, then at least to reject him intelligently. The last time I taught The Turn of the Screw, I read the first few pages of the story aloud to the class, stopping and explaining some of the difficult passages, pointing out interesting resonances, and generally whetting their appetite for the ambiguities to follow. In this instance, I essentially “set up” the story, which helped convert more students to James’s side.

In my colleague’s film course, which includes many movies from the 1930s and ’40s, paced and shot in ways unfamiliar to students, he makes sure to introduce the films before screening them. He’ll talk about the production and the filmmaker, and points out things to look for in the film that make it “great.” Afterward, students can watch a film like Preston Sturges’s The Lady Eve primed to appreciate it.

I recently assigned my students two short stories—“The Furnished Room” by O. Henry and “Araby” by James Joyce—and asked them to write a paragraph about which story they liked better. More than half the class chose the O. Henry story. But after spending the next class examining their response and discussing both stories at length, I took another poll. Three students had shifted their loyalties to the Joyce story.

Had I indoctrinated these students? Were they trying, if only unconsciously, to please me? Or had I improved their taste? I don’t know. Indeed, I wonder about my certainty on this subject. We explored larger, deeper issues during our discussion of “Araby” than we did while talking about “The Furnished Room.” But is a work that inspires discussion of larger, deeper issues necessarily the better work or simply one that lends itself to better discussion? I often wonder if the moral value that I take so seriously in literature isn’t, in fact, more of an instrumental value—that which makes it work better for me in the classroom.

Still, nothing can shake my conviction that “Araby” is the better story and that my job as a teacher is to persuade as many students as possible to share that view.

In the past few years, I have had occasion to read a number of academic papers in English by professors from other countries. It was often frustrating to read this work: articles dropped by the Russians and the Chinese, pronouns confused by the French and Spanish, subject-verb agreements off kilter by all and sundry. Here were mistakes by chaired professors that students in my freshman English classes wouldn’t make. But there were also advantages to reading these papers. They provided me with a kind of X-ray vision that cut through the pretension and excess that so often obscures the meaning in papers by native speakers.

Reading these papers in flawed English, I could see the seams of the argument. If the author’s thinking was original, it jumped out at me, despite the awkward syntax and grammar; if it was derivative or conventional, I could see this immediately as well. Foreign writers have more difficulty disguising misguided or used-up ideas in good prose. Indeed, reading their papers has made me more alert to problems in my own writing and that of my native peers. I can see what the current buzz words are, what kinds of arguments are in vogue, what connections, taken for granted, are flawed in their basic logic. These non-native writers are writing under a handicap, but in doing so, they can teach us a lot.

Having been engaged in literary studies for more than 30 years, I have often felt myself behind the curve. I finished graduate school just as French literary theory was coming into vogue. As soon as I got a handle on Foucault, he was eclipsed by Derrida. Once I grasped Derrida, Deleuze was in the ascendancy.

I recently decided to address my problem by launching my own literary methodology. What I propose is an entirely new approach to literary praxis: Mother-in-Law Studies. As yet I am the sole practitioner, but I see no reason why the method won’t catch on—and not just in my own area of expertise. Any field of study characterized by affected posturing and lumpy, esoteric prose can profit by it.

Mother-in-Law Studies involves the insertion of the mother-in-law into some aspect of the academic process. No need to be doctrinaire here: one can bring the mother-in-law’s inimitable perspective to bear by having her read a text, but it works just as well (and possibly better) to involve her in the discourse that surrounds it.  For example, one can bring the mother-in-law, as I did, to an academic conference and clock her tolerance for the proceedings (three papers—the last one, as she put it, “gibberish”). You can also sound her out for her response to your own paper (as in: “you were the best, which isn’t saying much”).

The mother-in-law’s presence can be valuable by virtue of its arbitrariness—the introduction of noise into an otherwise steady-state system. It can also be a useful mediator between patriarchal oppression and female self-assertion, given that the mother-in-law is likely to have one foot in an earlier era and another in the present—a position supported by her irrational championship of Hillary Clinton for president long after she’d lost the primary campaign to Obama.

Perhaps you have hit on an objection: not everyone has a mother-in-law. But this is part of the appeal of the methodology. It is selective without incurring a bias against any individual group. It’s true, you may not have a mother-in-law now, but nothing prevents you from getting one if you are sufficiently motivated.

The mother-in-law’s dogged failure to comprehend what it is you do acts as a helpful frame by which to gain a new understanding of your field. Moreover, the mother-in-law is likely to have a healthy skepticism not only about your line of work but also about why it is that her son (or daughter) married you. This resistance allows her to speak truth to power in a way that blood relations, familiar with your tendency to throw tantrums, may be less inclined to do.

Here are a few samples of the sort of cogent critique a mother-in-law is likely to offer at an academic conference:

“Who is this Agamben and why are they always talking about him?”

“Why doesn’t she just spit it out, instead of hemming and hawing?”

“Can’t they deliver the papers with more eye contact?”

“Why doesn’t that one on the end comb his hair?”

“Is this really what you do?”

Note that the mother-in-law’s favored mode of locution is interrogatory, though this does not mean that she wants an answer. The mother-in-law is the master of the rhetorical question.

The best way to deal with the plummeting self-esteem that can follow a mother-in-law’s caustic appraisal is to chalk it up to social service. One of the prerequisites of a literary methodology nowadays is that it be (or appear to be) virtuous. Yet the weakness of existing methodologies, which point out the generalized evils of racism, sexism, and other sorts of ideological oppression, is that they tend to exist purely in the realm of the abstract. Sure, you’re a good, right-thinking person and have analyzed the slave trade in the margins of Mansfield Park, but what exactly does that mean in concrete, altruistic terms? With Mother-in-Law Studies, not only must you subject yourself to the critique of her gimlet-eyed appraisal of your work, but you must also take her to dinner at a nice restaurant after the conference and listen to her recount all the adorable things your spouse did as a child. That’s good works with a vengeance.

Recently, in The New York Times, bestselling mystery writer Lee Child drew a connection between writing a mystery novel and baking a cake.

The question, he wrote, is not how to bake the cake, but how to make someone hungry for it. The same goes for mystery writing—how do you make a reader hunger for the solution to a mystery?

We should ask the same question about teaching: How do you make students hungry about this or that? How do you keep them from looking at their watches, checking their iPhones, or daydreaming?

Having written a suspense novel, I can see the connection between teaching and suspense. In both cases, you must apply the maxim: “Make them laugh, make them cry, make them wait.” Of course, “making them wait” will not by itself produce a good mystery—or a good class. You have to make them wait in a certain way: planting clues, presenting ideas that resonate, making the journey interesting, and, if possible, making them laugh and cry.

But a good mystery and a good class also differ in a fundamental way: the mystery has a solution; the class doesn’t. We give students a first bite of the cake—or the apple, to switch into a grander metaphor—but only enough to make them want another bite.

When I was a young teacher—and even now, when I am not in the right mood—I rushed to give responses to questions from students. I used to think that my error was hurrying to answer; now I see it was my assumption that there were answers to give. Even the simplest questions don’t have simple answers. This is what derails novice teachers—they haven’t yet realized that there are an infinite number of answers to any questions. They think they are moving inexorably toward a given end without realizing that there are avenues, just as good, that might lead to somewhere else entirely, if they only trusted themselves and their students more.

This is what makes teaching so rewarding and learning so much fun. It is also what makes both so frustrating and difficult. In the best cases, what teachers and students learn is that knowledge ends up making you hungrier than when you began. That is its pleasure and its pain.

At least three times a week, I go to Curves, a gym for women that offers an undemanding regimen for the exercise-averse. Its clients range widely in age, ethnicity, creed, socio-economic status, and political beliefs. We sometimes get a little brusque with each other, particularly when important legislation or elections are in the offing, but we soon get over it.

What I notice about the women at Curves is that, for all their differences, many of them are teachers—most in public schools, and a good number in special-needs education. Some are still working: they come on their way to or from school. Most are retired: the gym gives them a place to go when, from habit, they wake up at 6 a.m. ready for school. Whatever the reason, teachers abound, and teaching is a major topic of conversation. I’ve learned a lot about education from women I’ve met at Curves.

One of my favorite members is a sign-language instructor who teaches both signing and vocalization to hearing-impaired children. We’ve discussed the fraught politics associated with her work and the changes in attitude that she’s seen over time. Another woman I like to talk to teaches cognitively impaired children. She knows about the plasticity of the brain and likes to discuss how certain kinds of activities that focus on concentration and self-control help her students learn. “Why should you try to solve this problem, even though it’s hard?” she’ll ask her students. “Because it will make your brain smarter.”

Another woman teaches high school math at a troubled inner-city school. She complains about systemic problems; her attitude is often angry and pessimistic. Yet she has not given up on her students. I recently talked to a woman who had spent 30 years teaching seventh grade and is now volunteering with second graders—“in order to get a taste of a different age group,” she says. She said one of the wisest things I’ve heard in a while: “Our job as teachers, like our job as parents, is to render ourselves obsolete.”

I am always buoyed by the conversations I have at Curves. The teachers I meet there are great women. They are not pushovers, they see the obstacles in their jobs clearly, they are sometimes despondent and disgusted, but they genuinely love kids, take their work seriously, and don’t give up. Curves gives me hope for the future of education, even if my workout is pretty lame.

MIT Technology Review recently published an article about the growing appeal of massive open online courses, or MOOCs.

Such courses offer intriguing possibilities, but also point to paradoxes in our system of higher education. These won’t be solved easily, if at all, but they are worth considering as we incorporate online courses into the college curriculum.

The most striking paradox is that MOOCs are being offered by many of the best (or perhaps, I should say, the most prestigious) universities: Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Princeton, and MIT. This makes sense. If people are going to choose to take a course online, especially during this early phase, they will want to go with a brand-name institution. Web advertising accompanying the online course materials can bring these  universities considerable revenue, meaning that MOOCs might help underwrite on-site education. As a result, the gap between online and on-site education could widen, even as courses at these institutions increasingly become available to the public.

By the same token, if good coursework is the basis of a good education, then these universities, by releasing this material free online, are giving away their most valuable resource. In an ideal, egalitarian society, this would be a good thing. But in a market-driven society like ours, it might just cheapen the brand. Assuming that it were possible to measure how much someone has learned through an on-site course, why would an A in biology online mean less than an A on-site? The question is bound to make institutions nervous, since it threatens to expose the problematic nature of college admission: the degree to which attendance at an elite college may be more of a credentialing mechanism than an educational one.

Moreover, if the free, elite online education can be equated with the expensive, elite on-site one, this poses problems for other universities. Most private schools charge high tuition fees in order to be competitive with each other. Less elite universities will sometimes charge even higher fees than more elite ones so they can build facilities (gymnasiums, cafeterias, state-of-the-art buildings) that compensate for their lack of reputation. These institutions are also more expensive because they lack the hefty endowments that more elite institutions use to offset the price of scholarships, honorariums, long-term maintenance, and other less glamorous costs.

How will MOOCs affect these less prestigious private universities?

The answer given by both elite and less-than-elite universities is that nothing equals an on-site education—that students can benefit by learning online, but they derive enormous value from meeting with professors and other students face-to-face. I agree with this. And yet, we see universities incorporating elements of online learning for their fulltime students. It is a final irony that as institutions become more receptive to student desires—building better gyms and more eateries, offering more lavish student centers and more upscale and spacious dormitories—they are also catering to the comfort factor with regard to coursework, offering more courses online to accommodate students who want to do other things (play sports, work, sleep late). In short, as universities become more market-driven, they become more susceptible to the caprices of the market they serve: 18-year old kids, whose sense of what they want from an education is necessarily limited. The paradox here is that one needs to be educated to know what an education looks like. This simple fact undermines the validity of a market-driven education.

You may counter that the market for a university education is not prospective students but the parents who will be footing the bill. This is not true. University marketers sell the idea of an ideal match between school and student. So much is made of this that many parents don’t dare interfere if a child says that a given university is her “dream school”—a ridiculous phrase, if there ever was one. How can an 18-year-old have a “dream school,” unless that dream has to do with beer parties, ivy-covered brick, or climbing walls?

The tensions between egalitarianism and elitism, form (brand names) and content (learning), and cost and value seem to have grown more pronounced in recent years. I like the idea of MOOCs, but I wonder if they will be a means of reinforcing, in new form, the inequities and paradoxes of an educational system whose basic premises need to be re-examined.

One of the greatest lessons I’ve learned over my years of teaching is not to judge a student based on an initial impression. Early in my career, when I received a paper riddled with sentence fragments, diction errors, and faulty logic, I would write the student off. How could I teach Shakespeare or Milton, Emerson or Austen to someone who couldn’t write a correct sentence?

But I soon put aside these sorts of judgments.

Believing in students, even when the evidence suggests you shouldn’t, is an integral part of teaching that must be cultivated through the exercise of will, imagination, and faith.

Adam Cox, a psychologist who works with adolescents and young adults, addresses this subject in his book, On Purpose Before Twenty, which I discussed in an earlier column. Cox writes:

Deciding to believe in someone is not a publicity campaign employed to disguise grave doubt. It is more fundamentally a decision to suspend preconceptions about how well a person can do, and what form that person’s accomplishments might assume. Cultivating an atmosphere of seriousness is the difference between merely expressing confidence in someone, and allowing oneself to believe that exceptional achievement is actually possible. It relies upon the lopsided bias of unconditional belief—a determination to look past obstacles toward what might be possible.

The lopsided bias of unconditional belief—a terrific phrase. Often, although I believe in a student’s potential, the end result is not what I’d hoped. You would be dismayed to read the final papers of some of my students. But does this mean they gained nothing from my class? How do we measure the value of unconditional belief? I would argue that these students have become alert to their potential and open to the possibility of eventually getting to a better place. But you can’t necessarily see it in their writing—or, indeed, in any other way.

When quantitative assessments say that certain approaches (smaller classes, more one-on-one interaction) make no difference in student outcomes, I can only say that we need a different means of assessment—a more nuanced measure and a longer tracking period. I recently had a student contact me who had performed poorly in my class 10 years ago but whose potential I had believed in. He is now writing copy for a Philadelphia ad agency. His email was pithy and correct. He had realized his potential, though it had taken a decade to do so. For some students it may take longer, maybe even a lifetime. Some may never realize it, but since we cannot know who will and who won’t, even years after they’ve left the classroom, every student deserves our lopsided support.