During a residency interview, I was asked what makes a good teacher. I've been thinking about that a lot lately and a recent read puts it into words better than I can. If I take my favorite quotes from #stopstealingdreams and mash them into an answer, this is what I’d get:

"It's vital we acknowledge that we can unteach bravery and creativity and initiative. There are really only two tools available to the educator. The easy one is fear. Fear is easy to awake, easy to maintain, but ultimately toxic. The other tool is passion.

A kid in love with dinosaurs or baseball or earth science is going to learn it on her own. She's going to push hard for ever more information, and better still, master the thinking behind it. Passion can overcome fear - the fear of losing, of failing, of being ridiculed.

If you're running an institution based on compliance and obedience, you don't reach for motivation as a tool. It feels soft, even liberal, to imagine that you have to sell people on making the effort to learn what's on the agenda.

The question then is: should we be teaching and encouraging and demanding passion (and then letting competence follow)?
In an open-book/open-note environment, the ability to synthesize complex ideas and to invent new concepts is far more useful than drill and practice.

But if we're trading hypotheses on a new scientific breakthrough, of course we have to be wrong before we can be right. If we're inventing a new business model or writing a new piece of music..., of course we have to be willing to be wrong.

If failure is not an option, then neither is success. The only source of innovation is the artist willing to be usefully wrong. A great use of the connection economy is to put together circles of people who challenge each other to be wronger and wronger still-until we find right.

As knowledge becomes networked, the smartest person in the room isn't the person standing at the front lecturing us, and isn't the collective wisdom of those in the room.

The smartest person in the room is the room itself: the network that joins the people and ideas in the room,and connects to those outside of it.”

Good teaching is encouraging passion, placing value in social connection, and cultivating the courage to be wrong.

Thank you @jackpenner for the phenomenal read.