When the intellect and affections are in harmony; when intellectual consciousness is calm and deep; inspiration will not be confounded with fancy.Margaret Fuller (1855/1845, 105) That harmony about which Margaret Fuller writes exists for sure, but it is elusive and rare. For many of us as college teachers, after years of intellectual training, we have been taught, largely unsuccessfully, to repress our affections-our emotions-in deference to our intellect-our thoughts. Yet still, that student in the back row with his hat on backward clearly playing games on his iPhone while I do everything I can to engage him, lights my fire. Emotions get the best of us all the time as teachers, and we have precious little preparation for dealing with them constructively.For a number of years, I worked on conceptualizing and researching college teaching as an educational helping relationship, and I found that the emotional life of the teacher was at the heart of this helping relationship. In my limited way, I pursued a clear-eyed description and understanding of the realities of the tens of thousands of human beings who each day engage in their work as teachers in colleges and universities. In addition, I wanted to identify the most effective college teaching perspectives and to articulate how a college teacher might work toward becoming more effective. In short, I was interested in the potential developmental path of professors-as-teachers and how to facilitate movement along that path. The outcome of this work was an empirically based developmental model of the professor-as-teacher and the identification of a new concept-a teaching perspective, called Systemocentrism, that lies beyond the dichotomous NEW DIRECTIONS FOR TEACHING AND LEARNING, no. 153, Spring 2018