Ten Secrets to Academic Success | Make for Yourself a Teacher – Acquire a Friend

Others in the series:

#1: Remember Why You’re Going to College

#2: Give Yourself the College Orientation You Deserve

#3: Great Debates About Great Books Yield Deep Knowledge, Sharp Minds and Constructive Citizens

The Jewish sages wisely advised: “Make for yourself a rav, meaning a teacher – and acquire a friend.” As I argued in the third installment, great books are great. But learning about them, talking about them, going beyond them, in deep, rollicking conversations with great teachers and good friends is sublime.

Alongside vivid memories of reading life-changing books, I fondly recall leaving lectures or office hours dazzled by professors, chatting excitedly with my roommates, far past midnight, and the thrill of sitting down with an acquaintance – a fellow student – and walking away a few hours later with a new, forever-friend – and learning partner.

“Aseh” – make for yourself — a teacher, advises not to be passive in choosing teachers. It’s especially true today. Beware propagandists or performance artists, who make the classroom all about them not you.  Seek out teachers who still believe in old-fashioned education, who want to help you launch your own educational journey, rather than amusing you cheaply or giving you marching orders to follow them blindly.  

Beware propagandists or performance artists, who make the classroom all about them not you.  Seek out teachers who still believe in old-fashioned education, who want to help you launch your own educational journey, rather than amusing you cheaply or giving you marching orders to follow them blindly. 

Sadly, too much education today is what the philosopher Martin Buber characterized as I-it.  An I-it relationship is my connection to my chair. I sit in it. It may be comfortable. But the interaction is functional, static. 

“It” can sometimes be the curriculum, when teachers woodenly transmit a body of knowledge, some facts or techniques, for students to master. Sadly, sometimes the I-it describes professors’ approaching their students as objects, vessels to be filled with information, or putty to be molded to think, believe, act, in certain ways.

An I-thou relationship, by contrast, is mutual, dynamic, mysterious, deliciously unchartered. Buber understood that “All real living is meeting.”  We thrive by constantly ping-ponging off one another and with the world. “Through the ‘Thou’ a person becomes ‘I,’” Buber taught, as unscripted, authentic, profound, interactions open new vistas for both.  

As a student, I felt blessed when teachers invested in us. As personal and life-transforming as it was, I was humble enough to realize it wasn’t because I was special. Still, I could feel there was nowhere else that teacher wanted to be than in that classroom, with all of us, at that moment. And top teachers prove the old saw that “teachers who love teaching, teach students to love learning.”  Steve Copeland, an inspiring educator at my summer camp, Tel Yehudah, taught me: great teachers know they can’t cover everything, they uncover enough so students feel inspired to pursue more.

That insight clarifies an ongoing educational tension Albert Einstein addressed by saying “It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.” You assign enough material to build foundations but not too much to suffocate. And a classroom without joy is like a car without fuel – both sputter.

As a professor, I have felt equally jazzed when a back-and-forth with students sharpened my understanding of my material, or filled my soul from the satisfaction of bonding across the generations – surmounting other potential obstacles to genuine rapport and mutual learning. 

I always started McGill University’s U.S. history survey course by playing Billy Joel’s 1989 music video “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” with no introduction. This clever word dump evokes dozens of historical events since the 1950s, illustrated by a colorful montage, with Joel shouting “JFK – blown away, what else do I have to say?”

I would wander the room, watching 150 faces. Some were totally in it, excited to have a cool prof. Others revealed just the beginnings of a smirk or an eye-roll, fearing prof was pandering. 

When it finished, I would say: “I know that Billy Joel thought he was being profound. And that Columbia’s record executives were so proud, they created curricula guides around this song. But… this… is … NOT… HISTORY.” 

I denounced the song for shirking responsibility — “we didn’t start” equals “don’t blame me!” –and for reducing history to a mishmash of images and punchlines. Then, I exclaimed, “when we learn that JFK was indeed ‘blown away’ – we will have a lot more to say!”

If finding great teachers requires a form of shopping, bonding with great friends is more like bargaining. It must be reciprocal, kinetic, based on sharing and both sides opening up, then expanding. Some might call me stuck in the past because I speak regularly to friends I made when I was 15 and because some of my college roommates and I frequently email back and forth. I call it LUCKY. 

I won the friends lottery when I joined the Young Judaea youth movement in my teens and again when I imposed myself on a Quincy House rooming group as a Harvard transfer student. I can still remember specific conversations – ok, ranting, raging, rollicking arguments – we had, that sharpened my understanding of particular issues, of the world, of myself.  

“Two are better than one,” Ecclesiastes advises, “for if they fall, one will lift up the other.” The Surgeon General has warned about America’s loneliness epidemic – especially among the young — connected to its mental distress epidemic – especially among the young. And I long ago warned my kids that “friends” on Facebook and that funny TV show were not their real friends. 

College roommates often bond so intensely because the students are living independently for the first time. The healthiest among us recognize that we humans are a social species – we need community, interaction, friends-for-life. So we “acquire” friends, not just to sharpen our minds through debate but to expand our souls through risk, trust, openness, curiosity, commitment, interdependence, reliability – and fun. 

Martin Buber was born in Austria in 1878, raised in Ukraine, and lived in Jerusalem from 1938 until his death in 1965. He grasped the power of friendship too. He wrote: “All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.” 

Indeed, when you make for yourself a great teacher, when you acquire a friend, each of you gets a passport to great adventures: the itinerary remains unknown – and up to the two of you, together.

Gil Troy, a senior fellow in Zionist thought at the Jewish People Policy Institute, is an American presidential historian. His latest books, “To Resist the Academic Intifada: Letters to My Students on Defending the Zionist Dream,” “The Essential Guide to October 7th and its Aftermath,” and, most recently, “The Essential Guide to Zionism, Anti-Zionism, Antisemitism, and Jew-hatred,” were just published.