How To Be An Ideal Student

How to be an Ideal College or Graduate Student—Or How to Help Frustrated Professors Teach

By Douglas Groothuis, PhD

Therefore consider carefully how you listen. Whoever has will be given more; whoever does not have, even what they think they have will be taken from them (Luke 8:18).

Professors who care about their discipline, their teaching, and the learning of their students are in a contest to hold their student’s attention and to engage them intellectually. This is a perennial pedagogical problem. I tell my students, “God is a jealous God and I am a jealous professor.” By this, I mean that I am jealous that they learn as much as possible from their course with me. I am vigilant in guarding and presenting that knowledge. (I don’t mean I am jealous of other professors.) Even the Apostle Paul lost a student when he fell asleep, fell out of a window, and then died! Paul was at Troas, when this teaching nightmare occurred.

Seated in a window was a young man named Eutychus, who was sinking into a deep sleep as Paul talked on and on. When he was sound asleep, he fell to the ground from the third story and was picked up dead. Paul went down, threw himself on the young man and put his arms around him. “Don’t be alarmed,” he said. “He’s alive!” Then he went upstairs again and broke bread and ate. After talking until daylight, he left. The people took the young man home alive and were greatly comforted (Acts 20:9-12).

Paul must have been greatly comforted as well, given the lethal result of his teaching. The supernatural judgment of Ananias and Saphira, who were killed by God for lying to the Holy Spirit built up the church (Acts 5), but death by teaching would have been another matter. Paul taught for hours, but most college teachers only have to hold their student’s attention for an hour or two a day, once or twice a week. I have not yet killed a student by teaching (to my knowledge), but perhaps some have said they were “bored to death.”

Rather than discussing compelling pedagogy, we need to take up the art of being a student in the classroom, to address the disciplines required for deep learning. Professor may want to share this with students. If you are a student reading this, listen up! In what follows, I assume a classroom worth attending and a class worth taking. But even in a subpar class, attention is needed for discernment and for showing basic respect.

First, anything worth doing is worth praying about. Ask the Lord for wisdom to flow through your professor and to you through classroom engagement, reading, and assignments. “If any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to you” (James 1:5).

Second, students should attend class in person and be on time. Being in person is preferred to online for many reasons I will not discuss here. Showing up displays basic civility and is required for interactive learning. Even if the professor doesn’t use small groups or solicit responses or questions, there is still an interactive element in live teaching and learning, since everyone is present and together in one room. I respond to student’s facial expressions and body language as well as to their words. It hurts classroom morale when students arrive late or leave early without prior permission.

Third, just as teachers need to be prepared to teach, learners need to be prepared to learn. In fact, teachers are not teaching if no one is learning, since teaching and learning are correlative. Basic student preparation involves old-fashioned reading of the assigned material before class. I usually lecture over assigned reading and add to the material in that reading. I provide detailed lecture outlines that typically follow the structure of the textbooks I am using. But the best outlines—and I work hard on mine—do not substitute for the knowledge acquired in the reading for that class.

Yes, there has been a decline in reading—especially reading physical books—for decades. Attention spans are lessened by too much time scrolling, scanning, and skimming online. Students become habituated to information taken in small bites, not digested as whole meals. James Carr noted this malady fifteen years ago in The Shallows. Sitting and reading a hard copy book, with no distractions, is a neglected discipline. But it also gives the neglected benefits of intellectual insight and the discovery of knowledge. To reach the joy of knowing requires avoiding the distractions of multi-tasking and image-based stimulation. It usually means unplugging.

Fourth, students should avoid any distractions from the lecture and class discussions. As philosopher, Simone Weil, wrote, attention is a kind of prayer. You offer it with the intent of learning, of listening, of humbly coming to grips with reality through a teacher or book. While we are sentient if not sleeping, we are seldom attending to anything with a singleness of mind. Since we are finite, attending to X means we must avoid or minimize attending to Y and Z. This is why we sometimes close our eyes when listening to compelling music. We want to give attention to it by listening. (This is less so for live performances.) To multi-task necessarily means to do each of several tasks less well than if one were doing one task (which I dub, uni-tasking). One hopes that a surgeon is uni-tasking while operating, not multitasking. The same holds true for a pilot flying an airplane. These serious matters demand undivided and focused attention.

Jesus said, “Be careful how you listen” (Luke 8:18). This applies to all of life, since we should be alert and discerning about the information we receive, sorting the true from the false ardently and holding fast to what is true and good and worthwhile, whether we find that in the classroom or elsewhere (Hebrews 5:11-14; 1 John 4:1-4).