Excellence in teaching draws its strength from three different influences: fine teaching role models, a passion for your subject, and a superb teaching environment. To this end, I don't know that the phrase 'you're a born teacher' can be entirely true, although I believe that teaching *is* a vocation and as such, you must have an inherent love for your fellow human, and the courage to be an idealist, true to your beliefs, regardless of politics, current popular thinking or peer pressure.

I had three superb teachers when I was at university: each taught me something about communication, fired up my ideals, gave me new insights into the art of teaching, made me want to do as they had done. 'Self' should never enter the picture. Remembering my desire to pay those professors homage and to show gratitude for what I had been given, is something that keeps me humble -- an important element -- when a student tells me "when I'm a teacher, I want to be just like you!" I've been in those shoes, and so when I give myself to my students, I'm giving back what I received from those three exemplary teachers of my own youth.

You can't teach what you don't love. One way around this is to learn to love what you teach, and this can be a very rewarding experience, as it deepens your awareness of the world of ideas. But I am fortunate in that I am truly in love with my subject, the culture of the European Middle Ages (and in particular Anglo-Saxon England). It's a love affair that began when I broke my leg badly at the age of 15 and was told that I'd never walk again; one reads a lot while in a painful body cast and traction sling for months on end, and one of the books that I read was J.R.R. Tolkien's _The Lord of the Rings_, which exercised a unique pull on my consciousness for seven years.What I didn't know then was that Tolkien was one of the foremost Anglo-Saxonists of mid-century Oxford. When I walked into my first Old English class as a graduate student, I knew I'd come home, and I've never looked back. To this day, I get a real rush when my students work their way into the mindset of an Anglo-Saxon text, and thus can reach back over a millennium and touch the past. All of my research is currently centred on a study of Anglo-Saxon aesthetic sensibilities as we can see them through law, liturgy and literature of the period, and it's most exciting and fulfilling work.

Finally, I am fortunate to teach at a university which prizes small group instruction, and fosters the kind of one-to-one contacts where true learning can flourish. By each year's end, I know not only my students' names but frequently a good deal about their private lives, their favourite films, their tastes in clothing and their views on many subjects other than schoolwork! This is as it should be: communication that is free and open and loving is the circulatory system which carries the lifeblood of fine teaching, and Trent is unique in its dedication to this classroom ideology. It is only in small-group teaching that big ideas can begin; the trust and bond needed for intellectual growth are established when it's not a matter of 'prof and students' with a line of demarcation across the front of a lecture hall, but instead of an 'us' sitting around a table, talking. Trent has modelled itself from its inception on the tutorial system of the early European universities: consider the great minds who came from those centres! Consider the possibilities that can come from small tutorials in our own fine school here in Peterborough!