If I speak of the students last it is not merely because they were the crucial persons with whom I spent my time, as must be true in any college; it is also because no way exists of describing what really goes on in a classroom once the door is closed. What goes on is a kind of secret between him who stands and those who sit. I knew this from the first; it was my secret even more than it was theirs. They had their own responses which I could hear or see them make: they raised their hands, they talked, they shook their heads, they laughed, they looked bored; and special approval or disapproval they expressed -- the custom is now obsolete -- by stamping or shuffling their feet on the floor. But even then I could believe that if anything of true moment was happening in their minds there was no immediate way for them to show it, any more than I could show, except by talking in the maturest way I could, and following any new idea as far as it would take me, how much our conversations interested me and how much I learned from them.
Mark Van Doren, My Columbia: Reminiscences of University Life, ed. Ashbel Green (New York: Columbia University, 2005), 110.
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