Excellent Sheep and What makes a Good Shepherd?

The other day, when we were going over some homework in class, I sort of pretended to not know how to solve one of the problems.  I was pretty believable because earlier that day I had gotten a bit stuck and, before I could even start brainstorming, a student bailed me out with a great suggestion.  I enjoyed that moment so much - I was looking to recreate it.

However, at least one student (and where's there's one expressing, there are at least a dozen thinking the same thing) expressed incredulousness that I would assign a problem I was not one hundred percent ready to lead them through.  Something really bothered me about that reaction but I couldn't quite put my finger on it.

Yesterday, I was skimming (seems to be all most nonfiction books merit these days for me) through a book I picked up at the library: "Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite..." by William Deresiewicz.  The premise of the book is old hat to me: our best and brightest seem to just be gaming the system and going through the motions of education in order to move onto the next stage in life (see my old post on educational mercenaries).  The author seems to be laying the blame primarily on those institutes of higher learning that the elite go to (fits the bill for many of my students so am I part of the problem?).  Although I reject his premise - I think the problem is cultural and not institutional (what messaging did your parents give you about education?)- I did find a gem of a reminder in there:  Good teaching is about leading and modeling a search for understanding rather than relaying information.

So, even if I do know how to do the problem - I think I'm going to feign ignorance up there on the board more often and hope someone steps up and tries to help me out!