24 Teaching Minds want to become teachers but the faculty are focusing on their graduate students. They don’t teach the teachers. They do it, but it is not their focus. The average professor of education here understands that he is supposed to teach teachers to teach but he gets evaluated on his research not on the quality of teachers who come out. It is a research university. How many dollars do you bring in? How much do you publish? Where would quality of teacher training fit in that model? So, again, what exactly is effective teaching? Let’s look at two of the lon- ger versions of what my former Ph.D. students and former employees wrote to me when I asked about good teaching. These stories each need some context in order to be understood, and then I will comment. The first story is from a Ph.D, student of mine who then continued to work with me for 30 more years. You were collecting key things teachers needed to know to do story curricula properly. Your contribution was “know when to lie to students.” That triggered all kinds of discussion, pro and con, leading eventually to a longer, more explicit statement about knowing when to oversimplify, etc. Reflecting on it later, I realized that “know when to lie to students” was the right way to say it. The rephrased version was too reasonable. It didn’t trigger any emotional reaction and re- evaluation. “Know when to lie” is a lie, but that’s the point. Why is this story important? I placed it here because it reflects an important belief that I hold about teaching. At the moment to which he is referring, we were writing, as a group, a set of guidelines on how to teach Socratically using the online curricula we were building for high schools. We were, in essence, writing an instruction manual for teachers on how to teach in a new way. When I supervise very smart people who know perfectly well how to do things, I deliberately pro- voke them. I believe that my job is to make them think. There is no better way to