Puffing

In his book, Save the World on Your Own, Stanley Fish wrote that college and university teachers could legitimately do two things: first, introduce students to bodies of knowledge and traditions of inquiry that had not previously been part of their experience, and second, equip those same students with the analytical skills--of argument, statistical modeling, laboratory procedure--that will enable them to move confidently within those traditions and to engage in independent research after a course is over. Meanwhile, a teacher can never know his influence or the lack thereof. Even when a student declares that a teachers has influenced him, it probably isn't so. More than likely the student has succumbed to platitudinous thinking. Instead of actually mulling the formative, he has slipped into the socially acceptable and socially trite, finding nonexistent cause and effect in the fool's gold of popular imagination. Here, Pickering talks about how teachers influence students learning.