What the Best College Teachers Do

When Ralph Lynn graduated from college in 1932, decked out in a variety of academic honors, he began doing other people’s laundry to survive the depression. Ten years later, he acquired a correspondence-course teaching certificate and taught high school history classes for six months before entering the army in late 1942. He spent most ofWorld War II in London looking at other people’s dirty laundry—censoring soldiers’ letters to keep them from revealing too much about troop movements to the folks back home— and reading history. When he came home in 1945, he asked his alma mater, Baylor University, to let him teach. Later, he went north to the University ofWisconsin to acquire a Ph.D. in European history. In 1953 he returned to Texas, where he taught for the next twentyone years.