What Makes a Good Teacher?

The timeless question of education beneath the urgent crises of 2025

The Contraptions Book club March pick is Ibn Khaldun: An Intellectual Biopgraphy, by Robert Irwin. We will discuss this the week of April 28th.

I’ve been thinking a lot in the last few months about a timeless question: What makes a good teacher?

It’s been on my mind because I’m currently trying to bootstrap an education track for the hitherto research-focused Summer of Protocols program I run, to incept the subject of protocols into university curricula. A tough sort of challenge at any time — every young idea, good or bad, wants to make it into syllabuses after all, and catch the young ‘uns as early as possible — but particularly tough in 2025.

The best university system in the world, which has set the standard worldwide for nearly a century, is under assault by people who appear to harbor a curiously visceral hatred for all formal education. A hatred that seems to extend way beyond specific complaints about things like DEI programs. As a product of this system who is largely happy with what I got out of the experience, I naturally have… opinions.

What happens to the American university system 2025-28 will likely determine what happens to higher education worldwide for the next half-century.

First, a quick boost: Applications for the curriculum development grants program close tomorrow (April 1), so if you know any talented college-level teachers or professors, or exceptional independent course creators, who might be interested in teaching the brave new subject of protocols, in these troubled times, point them to the program.

Like I said, it’s a tough environment for higher education, but this is precisely why it’s interesting to try and do something at the level of the foundational, millennia-old mission of the university — preserving existing knowledge, and integrating emerging knowledge into learning and teaching. It’s the ability to do this in tough times, rather than in easy times, that is perhaps the essence of education as an institutionalized domain. That’s when you learn who is truly committed to education as a calling, rather than as a sinecure or a Trojan horse for political agendas.

Good answers to the question what makes a good teacher, may not immediately suggest ways to fight the battles that need fighting today, but they will show why those battles are worth fighting at all. And as Viktor Frankl noted (channeling Nietzsche), we can deal with almost any how if we have a good answer to why.

I asked the question on Substack Notes, and got a few responses (including mine, which I might elaborate on in a future post). I’m interested in more answers:

The reason I’m interested in this question is that it seems to me the right back-to-basics question to ask about the teaching profession. Which does on occasion rise to the level of the noble calling we tend to portray it as in good times.

These are, of course, not particularly good times. Teaching at all levels, and at all times, is a political and ideological battlefield, but in the US (and to a lesser extent, around the world), this is probably the most embattled the sector has been in living memory, trapped as it is between a rock and a hard place — technological disruption from AI and online/virtual media, and political attacks from the Trump regime.

The Student View

On a personal note, it’s surreal to watch this battle take shape at a time when I’m the most immersed in proper study since grad school a quarter century ago, inhabiting at age 50 a headspace that I last inhabited in 1999.

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, and laboratory tinkering (supported by a mish-mash of formal and informal educational material) since 1998, when I taught a laboratory course in grad school.

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 much of what we know about how to learn, how to study, comes from the quieter good teachers, many of whom we forget.

It also strikes me, reflecting on my own educational path — very conventional both on paper and in reality — that the modern public discourse around teaching and learning has been hijacked to a remarkable degree by charismatic public figures mythologizing their own supposedly maverick education stories.

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 middle-aged Ferris Bueller caricatures trying to process distorted memories of somewhat traumatic school years. But they don’t strike me as a particularly accurate view of schooling, either as I experienced it, or as I witnessed most of my peers experiencing it.

These discourses understate the extent to which actual maverick outliers are in fact quite rare, and actually quite well accommodated by at least good schools. They understate the extent to which formal education not only comprehends and accommodates natural patterns of rebellion, but even designs around it, and encourages students to cultivate personal mythologies of heroic unaided agency for their own good.

Take for instance, one of my own “maverick” memories, of the sort I might put into a startup application for Y Combinator (an institution that invites and thrives on educational self-mythologizing). As was generally the case in the late 80s, nerdy students like me generally understood and used computers much better than the teachers who were supposed to be teaching us. Our computer science teacher was a mediocre math teacher who had taken some sort of bad certificate course in programming and understood very little. It was obvious to me and several of my friends that we were much better than her at both math and computers.

I feel a bit bad for her now — an average middle-aged woman who did her best. But us self-satisfied, self-styled wannabe hackers, we laughed at her behind her back. And we found opportunities to sneak into the computer lab on weekends and evenings to learn more, and faster, than she knew or could teach.

But what all of us in that cohort forget is that the “sneaking” comprised going and asking the custodian of the lab keys (the American Jesuit priest who ran the Astronomy club) to let us in — which he genially did. Despite our run-ins with the teachers we were easily leaving behind, the school did recognize and support us, putting us on programming competition teams, structuring term projects to let us get creative, and so on. The teacher I am kinda maligning once sent me to the Vice Principal’s office for mouthing off (I got slapped a couple of times — it was a different era), but also put me on the programming quiz and contest teams. That my buddies and I knew more than her wasn’t exactly a revelation to her. She did her best to deal with it in a positive way. Only later did I realize that dealing compassionately and positively with young people smarter than yourself is a basic teaching skill.

I was probably somewhere in the middle of the maverick spectrum. Not as straight-and-narrow as the grades-oriented hard-working kids, and not as unruly and unmanageable as the true mischief-makers. Somewhere between Lisa and Bart Simpson. I was largely, but not entirely, a solo self-directed learner. I did well mostly as a side-effect of being actually interested in a nerdy rather than instrumental way in the curriculum subjects. When the teachers were good, I paid attention and benefited. When they weren’t, I mostly ignored them and got good grades anyway. I cruised along with no real effort until I got to college, and was usually somewhere in the top 3-5 in the class of around 40 odd students. I gleefully filled up my spare time with all the available extra-curricular activities (I was a member of six clubs I think, and president of the physics club — more Max Fischer from Rushmore than Ferris Bueller — and founded a magazine and a short-lived airplane club).

The bulk of my educational experiences were positive. Most teachers were at least passably good enough, and a handful were standout formative influences.

Of course, this was partly because I was fortunate enough to go to very good schools throughout. My grade school was a solid Jesuit school. My university experiences were at top public universities in India and the US.

This is of course not the median experience. The median school is probably much worse at every level. But the point is, the university system at its best is where we should be looking for answers to why it is worth defending.

The State of Play

The question what makes a good teacher is about looking for the why of institutionalized education. Many of those mounting the assaults on universities today have a particular hostile answer they hope to institutionalize — that the best teacher is no teacher.

Arrayed against them, regardless of what else they believe about how universities need to evolve or reform, is everybody who believes this is the wrong answer.

Now, any idiot can set up and run a university during eras when everybody loves universities, is eager for the experiences they provide, and is eager to throw money at them. But it takes true education visionaries to do it when universities come under assault, as they do reliably do every few decades. As we like to say in the crypto world, winter is the best time to buidl.

Like many observers, I genuinely don’t know if the formal education sector will survive the current assault in the long term. I suspect it will simply because universities are likely Lindy — they have existed for a long time in the past, so we can expect them to last a long time in the future.

The modern university as we know it is about a millennium old (Al Azhar university in Egypt is perhaps the oldest, with the University of Bologna in Italy being the oldest in Europe). If you loosen the definition of what constitutes a university and squint a bit, the institutional form goes back even further to Buddhist universities like Nalanda and Takshashila in Mauryan India. So the idea of education being a formalized, specialized, and scaled-up process in society (as opposed to being limited to informal learning within communities, or within systems like apprenticeship or private tutoring), is nearly 2500 years old. Possibly older — I suspect there was probably at least some formally institutionalized education in the Bronze Age too.

ChatGPT 4o prompt: buddhist cave painting style depiction of a teacher teaching students in a classroom

This is why I tend to raise an eyebrow over revolutionary proclamations that the university as an idea, embodied in particular sorts of built environment where teachers and learners gather to study, is about to die.

Powerful though the forces of technology and politics are, the impulse to formally preserve knowledge and learning processes is even stronger. I do think formal education has not just survived worse, it is has historically been the mechanism by which entire civilizations have maintained a continuous identity through the rise and fall of empires and religions. University-like institutions have survived where states and economies have collapsed, and religions have replaced each other wholesale through slaughter.

We talk a lot about the post-nation-state and post-capitalist eras, and the joke goes that it is easier to imagine the end of civilization than the end of capitalism, but I think that distinction goes to universities. It is easier to imagine almost any other pillar of modernity — markets, liberal-democratic states, judiciaries — ending, than universities. Universities are the cockroaches of the institutional landscape (in the best sense of that metaphor), able to survive the destruction of almost everything else.

Interestingly, the Tech Right that’s part of this assault is less interesting a force for its role in the technological disruption than its role on the political front. Elon Musk (like many among the tech wealthy) is famously a believer in unschooling, and his many kids are presumably growing up without exposure to formal education. And he has certainly managed to spin a particularly cinematic tale of his own supposedly maverick educational experiences.

I suppose as a relatively satisfied customer of around 30 years of formal education (from preschool through postdoc), it should come as no surprise that I believe in the fundamental power and value of the institution, whatever its contemporary problems. There is no shortage of such problems today, including the ones that constitute the casus belli of the current assault on them. But they strike me as ordinary problems calling for ordinary reform and evolution initiatives.

The ongoing assaults strike me as pure political vandalism with a thin veneer of convenient justification narratives. They have little to do with the stated causes (issues like DEI), and a lot to do with both personal resentments, and larger ideological wars.

Two Background Briefs

Since I’m currently experimenting a lot with AI-assisted writing in the optional Sloptraptions section of this newsletter, I thought it would be fun to turn AI-assisted attention to the issue. I co-wrote, with ChatGPT 4o, two short essays about education over the weekend.

In Knowledge Under Siege, I tried to work out a historically situated view of the current political battles in the US. Much to my surprise, it was ChatGPT that came with the core insight — that universities are being attacked not because they are in the way of a political agenda, but because they’re already being replaced and in danger of becoming irrelevant, making them valuable targets for symbolic assaults aimed at total destruction.

In Deep Teaching, I tried to work out a scheme for thinking about various ways in which AI-assisted teaching could work, using the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer from Diamond Age as the starting point. It turned into quite a solid frame (with several actually interesting insights being contributed by ChatGPT):

These briefs are stubs for further thinking for me. Whatever happens, the war over traditional universities is probably going to be existential for all societies that have historically believed in their value.

But even if universities as we know them vanish, the basic question at the heart of this essay likely never will.

Back to Basics

So let’s ask once again: What makes for a good teacher?

My brief delving sessions into the current battles around education have only reinforced my sense that going back to the basics is key to universities not just surviving the current onslaught in some form that recognizably retains their unique features, but doing so with a reinvigorated sense of mission.

That mission is teaching.

In the last half-century, it might seem like the research mission has overwhelmed the teaching mission, but this is not true. Even the modern research university — a brilliant American invention that vastly improved on its European ancestors — rests on the foundation of rock-solid teaching traditions. If the teaching traditions are undermined, everything built on top of it — from Nobel-winning discoveries and particle accelerators, to decades-old memories of pandemics and wars — collapses.

As an aside, I find it ironic that Elon Musk’s empire is largely built on intellectual and technological accomplishments of decades of university research, on topics ranging from battery chemistries to rocketry. Much of it the result of a mechanism that he has disingenuously sought to portray as an administrative grift (the indirect cost support model developed by Vannevar Bush’s OSD during WW2, which allowed the modern research university to emerge).

What’s more, I do think the teaching mission cannot be entirely reduced to rewilded children and young adults wandering by themselves in the wildernesses of technological modernity, Lord of the Flies style, beating advanced knowledge into each other with Hobbesian viciousness between bouts of blow-things-up experimentation in garages.

Institutionalized education is one of the most profound inventions of humanity. Many mammals teach their young to survive and thrive in the wild, showing them how to hunt or forage. It is only humans that create complex institutions to perpetuate and extend vast amounts of knowledge over centuries, and reliably discover and cultivate minds capable of carrying on the traditions, at scale. Universities are, arguably, the original large language models, biologically embodied.

You only have to talk to someone who has escaped an oppressive small town and landed in a college town, where they flourished, to understand this. Going from being surrounded by anti-intellectual family and community who neither understand nor appreciate your potential, and are perhaps even hostile to it, to an environment that encourages and nurtures it, is a profound experience.

Even those with supportive environments, like me (I went to a good Catholic school, and my parents indulged my every nerdy interest as best they could) find that a good college campus is a whole new level of the knowledge game.

And going from a good but relatively spartan Indian university (IIT Bombay) to richly resourced leading research universities in the US (University of Michigan, Cornell), was yet another level-up.

Much as I appreciate my family and friends, there is no way in hell I’d have been able to embark on the sort of educational journey I did without universities (there’s a great Hindi movie called Udaan, about kids escaping my hometown of Jamshedpur). No amount of creative unschooling, self-learning, and internet-fueled autodidactic adventuring would have been right for me.

It might well be enough for many other types of personalities to discover themselves and thrive, but for me — and I suspect the majority of humanity — the university system is the pump that systematically gets them to their natural level of cognitive development.

And despite all the effects of technology, fancy laboratory equipment, and increasingly sophisticated physical and virtual classroom environments, the key to what formal education does remains good teaching.

Teaching Teaching

If you haven’t taught in a formal setting yourself, you likely have no idea of what it takes or how hard it is. I spent 7 semesters as a graduate teaching assistant at Michigan (basic engineering courses like fluid mechanics, laboratory practices, linear algebra), and designed and taught an advanced graduate course at Cornell (I still have the notes; it was called “Design of Complex Engineering Systems”). That was 20 years ago. More recently, I developed and taught a few online courses, and do the occasional corporate workshop.

Teaching is genuinely hard. It’s not like giving talks at conferences. There’s a there there to teaching. Especially good teaching. I can whip up a good talk on any topic I’ve been thinking about in about an afternoon. A good from-scratch classroom lecture on the other hand (or workshop or other format), will take me several days.

I’m not particularly good at teaching, but not terrible either. Which means I had to learn to teach, by being taught to teach. My main dose of this meta-education came via a summer course on college teaching I took at U. Michigan in 2003, just before I graduated (and after I’d done 7 semesters of teaching).

At the time, the culture wars we are witnessing today were just getting started. I learned about Ernest Boyer’s Scholarship Reconsidered. We talked about Paulo Frere’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. We had our share of uncomfortable conversations about what is known now as “DEI,” where I usually found myself arguing against it, exploiting my brown-skin privileges to argue un-PC positions with the (mostly White) ideologues teaching the course. But it was all in a regular critical debate mode rather than in Muskian must-burn-and-salt-the-earth mode.

It is important to note that at least back then, in 2003, the political “meta” of the teaching-about-teaching was only a small fraction of what we talked about. Even the already highly politicized schools of education of the early 2000s did recognize that there were layers of basics they had to teach, below the political debates. Stuff about basic classroom techniques. About working whiteboards, grading, and designing homework exercises. About plain old voice-modulation, pacing, and chunking of material into bite-sized pieces. There was solid stuff about how to lecture or design small group activities, and not-so-solid stuff that’s been discredited since, like theories of “learning styles.” That’s how it goes. Like any kind of knowledge, pedagogical knowledge has its own constantly unfolding tale of epistemic creative destruction.

Pedagogy is a type of programming. A deep skill that has developed over millennia across the world. A skill you can’t just assume you can intuit and begin to practice effectively overnight, any more than you could just walk into Google with no computing background and start hacking away at code. Good intentions are not enough. Genuine concern for the learner’s needs is not enough. Mindful engagement is not enough. You need an aptitude for teaching, and learned and practiced skills.

That summer course earned me a “certificate in college teaching.” It feels like a real credential to me, not just some ideological indoctrination badge. I learned things about teaching, and it made me a better teacher. Sure, there was a politics to it that I mostly disagreed with, but not to the point where I questioned the very existence or value of the course, or the institution hosting it.

But what’s happened in the last decade — and which has supplied the convenient excuses for the current unbridled assault on all aspects of the university system — is that the political meta has threatened to eat the bread-and-butter of pedagogy as a skill and critical societal function. The balance is arguably way off today. Modern descendants of the course I took in 2003 likely do look primarily like political indoctrination, not the teaching of teaching skills.

A genuine case can and should be made for correcting that kind of ideological overreach. But in the meantime, it is important to acknowledge that scholars graduating in various disciplines with PhDs, ready to begin university teaching careers, are not idiots. Just because a committed ideological tribe has installed itself in their midst, and has been trying to indoctrinate them in certain ways, doesn’t mean they are mindless zombies who become easily infected with some imaginary “mind virus” that they then proceed to go around spreading. That strikes me as pure projection — the missionary zealots of Silicon Valley are far more vulnerable to mind viruses. It’s their greatest strength — being able to drink the Kool-Aid du jour and drive towards trillions of dollars worth of new wealth with a maniacal cultish energy. But it comes with a great weakness — processing everything as a holy war.

To the extent stuff like the threat of capture of universities by DEI programs is a problem, it is one that can be addressed surgically, without tearing down the entire host institutions.

But that’s not what’s happening right now. What’s happening looks increasingly like an assault designed to destroy the institution as a whole, and replace it with some mix of Lord of the Flies unschooling culture, and reactionary ethnonationalist institutionalism marching under the banner of “meritocracy.”

This is not abstract or theoretical for me. I spent a decade on a student visa, enjoying the academic freedoms now under threat. I was part of the era when landing in a US university was the dream for any smart person anywhere in the world. It is genuinely saddening to see the script flip, and the best of the world’s scholarly talent starting to look for the exits or shying away from the entrances. If I were graduating undergrad today in India, I would not be looking to head to the US (which some might see as no great loss, but my reaction is probably shared by much more talented and valuable people).

I assume, if you’re a reader of this newsletter, you loosely agree with me that rampant vandalism of universities, and what amounts to modern library-burning, is not a great idea. Neither is a future shaped by political ideologues who have captured it from the inside.

These are not good ideas for the same reason that letting either extreme pacifists on the outside or murderous psychopaths on the inside run militaries or police forces are not good ideas.

But if neither vandalism from the outside, nor ideological capture from the inside, points to a future worth having for the education system, what does?

I think the answer is one of those simple to state, but hard to implement ones: going back to the basics of good teaching.

Whatever your philosophy of teaching (from laissez-faire learner-directed, to classical sage-on-the-stage lecturing) and whatever your views on the use of technology in the process (whether you think computers should be banned from classrooms or that every student should have a Diamond Age style Primer), if you believe that teaching as a human activity can and does have a future, a necessary future, the search for that future must begin with asking once again the most basic question.

What makes a good teacher?

Like everybody else with a stake in the world of education, I have specific selfish objectives. But beyond the specific subject I’m trying to incept into educational curricula — the art and science of protocols — I am personally interested in this broader question. I hope our summer program goes beyond finding good answers to the question what’s a good way to teach protocols to shedding light on that more basic, timeless question, what makes a good teacher?

Even though other questions might seem more pressing, like what to do about AI, Trump, and Elon, I suspect good answers to those questions — ultimately shallower, even though more urgent — will rest on good answers to the big one.

What makes a good teacher?