Margaret A. Miller editorializes in Change magazine:

When I started teaching, neither I nor any of my professors or colleagues knew anything about learning—indeed, we didn't even know how much we didn't know about it. If we thought about it at all, we presumed that it was what should be happening automatically on the other end of the log on which we perched, professing. And when the loop was completed via essays or problem sets or other assignments, we were shocked and amazed at how wrong students got what we had said perfectly clearly. Was there some mysterious static in the air that prevented the air waves emanating from our mouths from reaching them? Or were the students just dumb, lazy, poorly prepared, inattentive, or all of the above?

The essay begins with this quote:

A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.
-Mark Twain

I'm made hopeful by what I see as the increasing tendency of faculty to accept at least some responsibility for classroom learning and for finding ways to get students to do something with what they're teaching, if only to press a clicker.