Bad teachers create students. Good teachers awaken the teacher in you.

A former colleague used to say that marking exam papers for teachers is like unloading trucks... at least you have the sensation of doing something real, like other jobs do

I spent three whole days marking papers for my new "operating Systems" course, and it was amazing: you can't predict the outcome of what you say during the course to the students. It's simply a matter of hope to believe they are really involved in what you teach.

Ilaria strongly believes that I'm a good teacher, but I much prefer thinking that I'm mostly NOT a bad teacher: _my_ models of bad teaching are the first and only ones I try to avoid. Some teachers in my youth were apparently concerned only with the best eggheads in the class, and I hated that. Some teachers patronised the class, and I hated that. Some teachers terrified the class, and I was revolted by their responsibility and how they managed it... puah

That said, the exam papers where splitted in some clusters:
- the majority was citing the book, citing my words (gosh, somebody even cited my example of a trip between Turin and London...)
- some of them wrote "highly common-sensed" sentences
- but...

...but some of them really made something out of what they learned... it was not only the concepts, the lines in a book, the boring details of the subject for them. It was engaging their brain in something new, it was trying and focusing their attention on *other* details that I wasn't even mentioning

On the question "how can you define this xxxx policy"? a student wrote "this is self-explanatory, and I won't explain it...", but oh
...after that s/he gave a long, amazing, appealing dissertation on a more open question and I was gazing the paper and I was happy

As a student, I had never been THAT clever: but, boy, it feels GREAT to have such students