During my time studying for my bachelor’s degree, I had a few favorite lecturers. One of them was a very chill old guy who was teaching one of his last seminars before retirement. He had been with the university basically since it was built, and he loved to tell stories not only about his field of research (medieval English literature, history and language), but also about the university and how its students changed throughout the decades.

I remember than in one of the sessions he was a bit disappointed with us, because nobody really prepared for it very well. I felt so utterly sorry for him, that I talked to one of the other students and decided to arrange a collaborative presentation for the next session on The Canterbury Tales. I contacted a few of my fellow students, and we all agreed to do this presentation, teaming up in groups of 2 or 3 and each group taking one of the Tales to present. They sent me some slides, which I arranged into a mega-presentation and we agreed on how we would run the presentation.

In the next session, when the lecturer arrived he still seemed a bit demoralized from the previous session. I announced that “we have prepared something”, and thus we commenced to fill the next 90 minutes with each of the groups giving their part of the presentation on The Canterbury Tales. It went so well that I actually didn’t have time to present my part on The Nun’s Priest’s Tale, and we agreed to move that to the next week.

But the best thing was to see how baffled our lecturer was. He seemed to be full of utter disbelief and amazement at how we all pulled together to brighten his day (I believe it was actually also very close or on his retirement-birthday when we did this). I overheard him later talking to other lecturers, that “that’s just not possible” and expressing his disbelief how students could possibly just do something like this, unprompted, out of their own free will.

A couple of years later and after having taught seminars myself, I understood him much better, because 99% of students are indeed lazy, passive, and not interested at all in going beyond what they have to do to get their degree.

But I’m happy I got to contribute such a good memory to this lecturer’s last couple of months in his very long university career. At least I will always fondly remember this moment, and how much I enjoyed his seminars.