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Preface xi think) and had skipped a few grades on the way. Suddenly he found himself at New York University, which in those days was located in the Bronx. This is what he remembered most about college in 1923: Apart from the poverty stories, the “how hard he had to work to support himself” stories, the stories about watching the Yankees from the el- evated train and wishing he could go to a game, he remembered that teachers lectured, that you had to memorize what they told you and then tell it back to them on a test. He thought college was stupid, but he assured me (in 1960) that college surely had changed by now and that teachers wouldn't still be doing this. Oh yeah? In 1962, when I entered college, they were doing exactly that. And, in 2000, when I retired from 32 years of professoring, not that much had changed. So I was thinking about teaching before I got to college and I was thinking about it while I was a professor and I am thinking about it now that I have, for the most part, finished teaching. To make sure I have been thinking about it correctly, I asked former Ph.D, students of mine, (now tenured professors mostly and some industry executives) what they had learned from me while they were spending 4—7 years studying with me. I thought their answers might help me think about teaching in a new way. I sent an e-mail to maybe 20 former students whose e-mail addresses I happened to have, and most responded. Here are some excerpts. 1. [remember quite specifically a homework presentation I made in your class. When I presented it in class, I was a junior in college, and all the other students in that class were grad students. When I was done you smiled at everyone (a rare event) and said, “Anyone care to follow that act?” Your clearly heartfelt endorsement of my little research product was a key moment in my coming to trust my own ideas. I just submitted a $16.7 million proposal to NIH that would create the first all- computational genome center. The kind of chutzpah embodied in that proposal is one consequence of my experience with you. 2. The way you assigned me to a project—you sent me to each existing project for 2 weeks until I hit on a project with a good fit (I was enthusiastic and coherent talking about it). I used this technique when I was assigning people at Accenture. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023741