New Curricula for a New Way of Teaching 105 got a week to talk about what his work was about. The goal was to try to convince students to sign up for a special research seminar with that faculty member the following quarter. My champion at Stanford was a psychiatrist named Kenneth Col- by. He invited me to share his week and thus we would be a team for which students could sign up the following quarter. I listened to his talks to the students. He was very funny but rather light on content, in my opinion. I wasn’t impressed. But, after I spoke, he said something to me I never forgot. He said: If you try to say everything that you know in an hour, either of two things is true. Either you can do it and therefore you must not know very much, or else you can’t do it and you will talk way too fast trying to fit it all in and you will be generally incomprehensible. I listened to what he had to say, but I wasn’t sure he was right. At the first meeting of our jointly run seminar, we discovered that we had won the student jackpot. While other faculty had gotten four or five sign-ups, we had gotten 25. I was very proud of myself until the students went around the table to say who they were and why they had signed up. Not a single one of them had signed up because of any- thing I had said. They had been mesmerized by Colby. Then I reheard in my head what Colby had told me the previ- ous quarter. He had entertained them—not overwhelmed them. They thought he would be interesting and fun and they wanted to work with him. While I had looked down on his lighthearted presentation style, it turned out he knew what he was doing. So, what did I learn and how did my thinking change? Thinking, as I said earlier, looks like this: Make a prediction Prediction fails Make a generalization Explain your generalization Make a new prediction What was my prediction? I had predicted that speaking quickly with a great deal of brilliant content would woo the incoming students. This was simpl