Tom had exactly this experience when he became a professor. His first semester, teaching his first class ever, he spent a huge amount of time perfecting his lectures—more than ten hours of preparation for every hour of class. His second semester, teaching a different class, he wasn’t able to put in as much time, and worried that it would be a disaster. But a strange thing happened: the students liked the second class. In fact, they liked it more than the first one. Those extra hours, it turned out, had been spent nailing down nitty-gritty details that only confused the students, and wound up
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