I wondered for a long while why I had such a difficult time in teaching undergraduate courses and finally hit on an answer today: I do not remember any professors who impressed me so much so that my life had changed ever since. Well, there are a few "bad" ones who have taught me what I ought NOT to do, but I know no model teacher whose pedagogical style I want to imitate positively. Indeed, the more I reflect on my undergraduate years--my graduate years are a different story--the more I realize that the reason why I decided to go to graduate school lied less in what I learned in classes than in the books I read alone. It strikes me that I devoured an incredibly broad range of books in my junior and senior years and talked about them with nobody for a very very long time. At least I don't remember that I had such occasions in my undergraduate life. I had to wait for a few more years to finally, and merely by chance, discover my interlocutors; but they came very late in my life, perhaps a bit too late. Now I understand quite well why I'm such an autodidact as has little desire to communicate what he's abundantly learned in isolation.
