Many seminars and courses bore students to death. This will come as no surprise to anybody reading this article. But uninspiring-or uninspired-teaching is caused as much by the larger academic and even cultural environment as by the teacher him or herself. It is not by chance that the term "boredom"didn't enter the English language until the late 18th century; it was a feeling that surely reached new heights in weighing the age-old process of scholarship against the new acceleration of life at that time.
Interestingly, the professors that I now value the most were the ones who seemed the most boring when I was a student. In hindsight, the reason for this is rather simple: Teaching students had become tedious. They were bored too! They preferred working on their books (interestingly they had a tendency to writing books instead of articles) instead of wasting time and energy on students who more or less wanted to be entertained, or discuss their half-baked ideas, rather than be educated.
At the time of Smith, Kant, or Hegel, the process was simpler: Professors would talk; students would write down every word they said, and at the end of the term the professor would go around and ask the students how much they were willing to pay for what they had learned. Of course, hardly anyone could absorb what Hegel, Kant, or Smith had said - but students enrolled in their classes more to celebrate the greatness of their minds than to understand them. That's what those thinkers' books were for, and the more books they had written, the better.
Today, things are different. Students apparently have shorter attention spans, and are certainly less apt to sit still and concentrate through two hours of lectures. Even Ritalin does not help there. And the halos of the professors seem to gleam less. The new model for professors is that of the show master: role-playing, clever jokes, and game experiments that are coordinated so as to engage and motivate by entertaining. Officially, that is called "student-centered and output-oriented teaching."
You don't need books for that - or reading. The modern seminar does not culminate in a "right answer" that some know-it-all professor puts elegantly on paper, but in the motivation of the students to think and study more about the topic. In order to achieve this purpose the professor has to think about techniques for engaging the students - not about books that should be written. This approach is not wrong: Students should learn how to think about a subject or idea, not what to think about it.
Still, in the end, it's still very important to work with those professors who concentrate on writing good books for good publishers (more so even than writing the best articles in the best journals), even if they can not inspire. These people have shown that they can sit down and endure the silence: They slogged through the boredom of not knowing and came out the other side having made something out of it.
