178 Teaching Minds Rule #5: No homework unless that homework is to produce something. Now let’s have a look at mistake #6. Mistake #6: Thinking that because students have chosen to take your course, they have an interest in learning what you plan to teach them Professors who typically teach courses that students have chosen voluntarily to take generally are under the illusion that students have come to the course hoping to learn what they intend to teach. Noth- ing could be further from the truth. Unless you are teaching human sexuality or how to get a job, or abnormal psychology, you generally can expect that students have very little interest in the content you are about to share and a great interest in the grade you eventually are going to give them. The reason for this is simple enough. Professors are teaching a subject. Subject, in the university world, is a euphemism for profession. The profession of English professors is something other than teaching English—it is being a professional in some subspecialty in literature or some allied field. Similarly, a professor of psychology has an area of research within psychology that is his real profession. When a profes- sor teaches, he is teaching how things work in his profession and he is teaching the basics of being in that profession. The percentage of undergraduates in a class that actually want to enter the profession of the professors is very small. Most have no intention whatsoever of entering the profession of the professors. So, they recognize instantly that what they are learning is very unlikely to be of use to them in their later lives. Some take it seriously anyway and some don’t. But for the most part students really aren’t much interested in what a profes- sor is teaching. They don’t listen and they don’t do what you ask them to do. Why not? They may be lazy, but that isn’t the real reason. It may be true that they are taking four other classes, but that also isn’t the real rea- son. The real rea