I started teaching at the university level in '79 - that's 30 years ago. In that time I've received thousands of student evaluations through the institutional bubble forms. Sometimes the response I can discern from the forms helps me to make a course better the next time. Sometimes I can merely enjoy the positives. Sometimes I glance quickly and move on. I'm a huge supporter of students' response (I try to make it part of the course itself, to be sure--but that's another story) but not a fan of the bubble forms. Anyway, I got one recently for the fall '08 version of my modern & contemporary American poetry course (my favorite of those I teach), English 88, that positively stunned me. I like it. The comment says merely: "LOVE" (underscored three times) and to the right of that: "this class taught me how to read." Not literally, of course, but "to read" as in: really, really to read thoughtfully, well, freshly. Makes me happy and proud. That someone would associate love with learning truly to read and a college course. These are not normally three peas in the same pod.
"I teach horizontally, meaning that while I might begin with a fixed idea of what I'm going to teach that day, I let it drift rhizomatically way off topic, often pulling it back when it gets too far. I rely on non-fixed materials to teach this way; the whole world is at my fingertips. Should I go off on a tangent about John and Rauschenberg and their love relationship as expressed in Rauschenberg's bed, an image of that bed is always a click away. From there, we can head anywhere into the non-fixed universe, be it film, text or sound. And of course, that always takes us elsewhere. As Cage says, 'We are getting nowhere fast.'" 
that anyone has yet got the imaginative measure of that terrifying day six years ago. Certainly our Tolstoy has not crawled out of the rubble. The closest we have, Don DeLillo, succeeded as an essayist-journalist ("In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” Harper’s, December 2001) but, to my mind, failed as a novelist ("Falling Man"). One reason, perhaps, is that the remembered emotion was instantly buried under a pile of cultural junk.' - Tod Gitlin in his review of Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream (written for 
