A colleague of mine, Dr. Danny Anderson, recently wrote an essay in which he argued that he is a teacher, not an educator.

I wholeheartedly agree with him.

Call me teacher or professor, but please don’t use the term educator.

These days, educators are those who follow political trends like assessment and global initiatives.

As Danny says, the term “educator” stinks of the “professional machine.”

To me the term brings up images of box checkers and, frankly, politicians. I am neither a box checker nor a politician.

I teach students, and hopefully they are better for my efforts. I teach statistics and psychology. I used to teach mathematics and engineering.

I do not care, nor have I ever cared, about whether my students reach an arbitrary assessment benchmark. I do care about whether they are learning anything useful.

By useful, I don’t mean something that will get them a job. Every job requires skills, many of which are taught on the job. Nor do I mean that I am teaching them how to think.

Everyone thinks regardless of whether they go to college. My job is to teach them to think intelligently and for themselves.

Schools are eager to say they teach students to think. What they don’t say is that they want students to think certain things.

My students do not have to agree with me about matters not factual.

They do need to be able to explain to me why they think what they do, and their explanation had better make sense.

Learning requires a personal relationship between student and teacher. Teaching requires that the teacher, to some extent, get in the heads of the students.

We have to meet them where they are and then set high expectations. When teachers set their expectations where the students are, learning doesn’t happen.

You have to aim high while providing students guard rails so they don’t fall.

Dr. Anderson is correct when he says that teaching is an art.

One can have all the knowledge in the world but be a poor teacher.

When students find classes difficult, they often say the teachers are too smart to bring things down to their level. That’s completely wrong.

A good teacher, a smart teacher, can make difficult concepts approachable to a beginner, provided the learner is ready. Often, we sell students short and don’t address the hard topics.

As an art, teaching also does not have to rely on one modality. Today, teachers are required to use technology. PowerPoint slides rule supreme, and inserting video clips, cell phones, and every other technological gadget is considered great teaching.

But great teaching doesn’t have to use any of that.

Technology can supplement good teaching, but good teaching is not reliant on technology; too often technology is a substitute for good teaching.

It looks sharp and impressive, but good teaching starts with the teacher and the teacher’s relationship with students.

Again, teaching is an art, and I am a teacher.

Laura Lansing is a professor at Mount Aloysius College and the chairperson of its Institutional Review Board.