What Makes a Good Teacher?

These stories often feature exaggerated elements of rebellion, autodidact mastery, subversive hacking, heroic confrontations with villainous teachers and schoolyard bullies, genius non-neurotypical personal innovations and breakthroughs, and powerful experiences outside formal learning. These stories often sound like self-serving tales told by midd... See more

While my current studies have no live teachers in the loop, each time I sit down to study something seriously, I’m reminded of how much I’m practicing behaviors first learned under the watchful eye of good teachers. We tend to remember the exceptionally charismatic (which is not the same thing as good ), and exceptionally terrible teachers, but muc... See more

I’m in 3 weekly study groups (on governance systems, robotics, and distributed computing) with friends, run a serious book club that takes on fairly weighty reads, and am working slowly through a few courses (two electrical engineering courses from MIT Open Courseware). On the practical front, I haven’t done this much hands-on hacking, building, an... See more