One of my colleagues once came back from his classroom asking: "Did you hear a loud explosion in the classroom?" Seeing the shock on my face, he chuckled: "It's the students' minds being blown away!"

Irish poet William Butler Yeats said "education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire" and for a teacher it ought to be deeply satisfying to set students' minds ablaze.

But becoming such an educational arsonist requires one to care about one's students, and to have a deep understanding of human psychology to help students learn with focus, purpose, confidence, and satisfaction.