Class Correspondence

I did not have the pleasure of knowing Frans personally, but we did have mutual friends and colleagues. As a young professor I taught a section of Animal Cognition at Penn State and for the course we read “Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are”. My students loved the book and had many interesting and inciteful questions that I believed were best answered by Frans himself. I split my students into groups and we wrote a letter to him as a class. To our delight this began a back and forth correspondence between Frans and my class over the course of the semester. My students were overjoyed that he took the time to respond in such a thoughtful manner and treated their questions with serious attention. It made them feel important and validated as young thinkers to have such a well-respected person in the field take them seriously. I am forever grateful for his help in creating such a meaningful experience for my students and it is truly one of my most cherished memories as an educator.