22 Teaching Minds and giving grades is certainly not a paradigm that any parent would use. You don’t grade your child on speaking ability; you help her speak better. If it takes longer to do that, then it does. Even the DMV doesn’t care about effective teaching. It doesn’t give grades, just licenses. Can you do it well? is the question the DMV is charged with answering. But can you do it well? isn’t a meaningful question in the top universities because there is typically nothing, other than research, that anyone is really being taught to do. This leaves us in a quandary when it comes to understanding what it means to teach well. Here is the Ivy League professor again: People need to learn to generalize the information that they are given. They need to learn how to think about content in order to see how that content may or may not be true for them. We do not do that here. Instead we teach that this is the way it is done. We have kids at mediocre universities who don’t know the facts and then we have kids at the good schools who know the facts but very few who know that those facts are not necessarily true. We need a different approach to knowledge than we currently have. By having students memorize the facts, it makes it seem as if the facts are truer than they actually are. We need to teach students to attack the facts and not to replace them with other facts. If facts are taught here in this way, and we are setting the standard, then we have a problem. Some faculty here actually do teach in this way, but it is not the main culture. Even the hard- core facts, like dates, are arguable. Students are not taught to use the information they have to question other information. If we are teaching something where there are no performance mea- sures, then effectiveness cannot be gauged. If the performance mea- surement is based on an exam, this likely would not reflect on the teacher’s ability at all. Some students do well on exams and others don’t, even though they