He was startled by how easy he found it all now, and ascribed this to the fact that nobody was making him do it: “education must be chiefly self-education, during or after school, or it will never approach completion at all.” On this point, no one who teaches math can really disagree. I wish my explanations at the blackboard were so magisterially clear and my path through the material so efficient and direct that students could walk out of their fifty-minute hour with me in a condition of complete mastery. Not so. Education, as Ross understood, is self-education. Our job as teachers is, yes,
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