The book group had been meeting every other Tuesday for several weeks, and many good ideas about the campus came up for discussion along the way. But I sat up and took note when a colleague said this:

• Students love it when faculty 'own up' to not knowing something. (R. duC)

I connected this sentence immediately to another thought I had been carrying around for a few weeks, something spoken by a teacher to a group of students:

• I don't know how you will apply this [thing we are studying] in your life. (Source lost)

Seen together, the two sentences help teachers remember why students aspire to be the center of their own learning. It's respectful for us to help them do so, and important, too, since they become the users of the knowledge that is passed down and reshaped for new times and invented wholesale along the way. And between the respect and the potency of knowledge that they get to work with, students become energized as learners. You remember whenever you've witnessed such a thing in your own school.

Too often, however, we behave as though we know down deep that we must eventually pass along the cultural heritage, the tools and habits of mind and bodies of information that is our common property, but we don't want to let it quite out of our hands just yet:

• No, you can have this stuff later. You know, it's the good stuff, so we can't let you try it out just yet. While you're waiting, could you memorize this other stuff here for a quiz? [Source]