We just had graduation here on our beautiful Queens campus. It’s been a while since I attended commencement, and I was immediately reminded of the joys of coming to these university-wide events. The most important joy, the thing I like the most, is meeting professors from the far-reaches of the University and hearing what they have to say.

The conversation among a number of them at first was about our contract negotiations, now looking like they will extend into a second year. But the person sitting next to me on the stage sparked the most interesting question for me. She kept talking about how various graduates, when they crossed the stage to get their diploma, were “good students.”

I wondered what she meant by calling someone a good student. It wasn’t clear (“you know, good students!”) and seemed to involve a number of traits such as being prepared, doing excellent work, and the like. The more I heard about it the more I drew the conclusion that a good student is someone who has already learned. There’s not much else for them to do or learn in the class. Therefore, there’s little for the teacher to do but to stamp this passing judgement on them: “They were a good student.”

It feels extremely dangerous to me to think of a good student this way, someone who doesn’t require anything more from the instructor other than the certification that they arrived in the class fully baked. This conflates being a student, on the whole, with being an autodidact. Someone who is quite good at teaching themselves probably shouldn’t be thought of as a student at all, much less the model for what all students should be.

As I said to my friend at the ceremony, “good student” seems like a goal we should strive to reach as instructors rather than some trait or status we wish were present in the classroom on day one. Instead, the teacher’s role might be to make someone into a better student. What does that look like?

Here’s a great quote about being a student from the Buddhist tradition:

I have this quote on my door and look at it every time I enter my office, which might be a good reminder. This reminder isn’t often enough though, as it is easy to feel that as a teacher we are no longer a student – they are out there, they are others. By making the flow of epistemology one-way, I feel comfortable in knowing what needs to be known and dare I say it, superior to them in the sense of “what matters.” If we take this quote seriously though and decide to see them as teachers, the impact is overwhelming in good and bad ways. A fresh look at a reading, idea, or approach is all it takes to be taught.

Taking this approach we learn what students learn. We are now shoulder-to-shoulder with our class in the start of what Staughton Lynd has suggested we should do. They teach us what the world looks like to them. From this point, we can then share what we think has helped us to become better students.

A good student is a student who works to improve their ability to be a student. Since that is all there is to be, one is always, intentionally or not, working on one’s capacity to learn from ‘teachers’ out there – events, people, moments, or encounters in the world. Taking on this perspective of “what does this teach me?” versus “What do I have to deal with now” is the only way to approach students as a student in order to increase everyone’s practice of being students.

Unfortunately, teaching, like a lot of other professions, attracts those who want to bask in their self-importance, who want to correct others through harshness and discipline, and inform those in front of them that they have no business being there, and are lucky to be in the presence of a teacher. The seductiveness of being in control, having power over others, and having captive attention for an hour a day is too attractive to the elements of society that probably should be doing something else with their time.

The definition of good student from those who probably shouldn’t be teaching will have more in common with what an autodidact does. From those who should be in the role of teacher, it will have nothing in common with it. Instead of the idea that a student who needs nothing from a teacher is a “good one,” the good student is a goal, a position or identity we aspire to be. We work to get there with our students as a shared experience, one that sees the classroom or the institution as a place to practice this and watch the practice happening – although practicing this will be with us for the rest of our lives.

The good student is one who is confused, asks, answers, discusses, and tries to practice these elements: confusion, inquiry, assistance, and discourse with others and tries to improve their practice of them. The good student is an aspiration not an inherent quality, and like many things if we don’t use it we lose it.