My best teachers were not the ones who knew all the answers, but those who were deeply excited by questions they couldn't answer.
Interpretation
Great teachers inspire curiosity and a love for learning rather than just providing answers.
This quote by Brian Greene emphasizes the importance of inquiry and the joy of exploration in education. It highlights that the most impactful educators are those who embrace the unknown and inspire their students to pursue their own questions, fostering a love for learning rather than simply transmitting knowledge.
In practice
In a lecture about the importance of innovation, a speaker could use this quote to emphasize the role of curiosity in learning.
All mathematics is is a language that is well tuned, finely honed, to describe patterns; be it patterns in a star, which has five points that are regularly arranged, be it patterns in numbers like 2, 4, 6, 8, 10 that follow very regular progression.
According to inflation, the more than 100 billion galaxies, sparkling throughout space like heavenly diamonds, are nothing but quantum mechanics writ large across the sky. To me, this realization is one of the greatest wonders of the modern scientific age.
So: if you buy the notion that reality consists of the things in your freeze-frame mental image right now, and if you agree that your now is no more valid than the now of someone located far away in space who can move freely, then reality encompasses all of the events in spacetime.
Black holes, we all know, are these regions where if an object falls in, it can't get out, but the puzzle that many struggled with over the decades is, what happens to the information that an object contains when it falls into a black hole. Is it simply lost?
Physicists are more like avant-garde composers, willing to bend traditional rules... Mathematicians are more like classical composers.
All you are is a bag of particles acting out the laws of physics. That to me is pretty clear.
We read to find ourselves, more fully and more strangely than otherwise we could hope to find.
September 11 We thought we'd outdistanced history Told our children it was nowhere near; Even when history struck Columbine, It didn't happen here. We took down the maps in the classroom, And when they were safely furled, We told the young what they wanted to hear, That they were immune from a menacing world. But history isn't a folded-up map, Or an unread textbook tome; Now we know history's a fireman's child Waiting at home alone.
Education is not filling the mind with a lot of facts. Perfecting the instrument and getting complete mastery of my own mind [is the ideal of education].
To be a well-favoured man is the gift of fortune; but to write and read comes by nature.
If, then, you wish to insure the interest of your pupils, there is only one way to do it; and that is to make certain that they have something in their minds to attend with, when you begin to talk. That something can consist in nothing but a previous lot of ideas already interesting in themselves, and of such a nature that the incoming novel objects which you present can dovetail into them and form with them some kind of a logically associated or systematic whole.
I think instead writers and publishers and readers need to go to the places where people are, and make the argument that there is great value to the quiet, contemplative process of reading a novel, that reading great books carefully offers pleasures and consolations that no iPad app ever can.
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