I recently wrote a tenure review for a Professor at RIT that deserves it.

It was interesting to write. One of the questions was, roughly, “Is the Professor concerned for the individual student?” The question is pretty standard and applies to all majors and programs I am sure, but I had to stop and think about what it means to “care” about your students.

I started to answer the question by addressing the obvious: If a student is struggling, does the Professor help them? Does the Professor give each individual fair warning when they are not keeping up? Is any child left behind, basically. All of which was answered appropriately and accurately.

The students that are left behind are not all the students in the spectrum of the classroom, however. What helps make this Professor special is the attention he gives students that are bored, that want to excel. This Professor enabled students that could do better to do better. Shouldn’t this be recognized more?

And perhaps this is why I like the education I got from RIT. It was project based, which has its down sides, but also lets a student go further than they would with a scan-a-tron test. It has vocational practicalities, of course, learning just a touch what the real world is like … but it also lets the student go well outside of the spectrum of what is expected. It lets them find what they enjoy the most.

For me, personally, I owe a lot to the format of projects and I owe a lot to teachers that enable students to push themselves. I think that allowing students to go as far as they can is just as important as making sure students keep up.

Did this make any sense?