Well said, Lisa Blank! Building on your metaphor: students certainly need core ingredients to cook, and it is appropriate for teachers to supply those ingredients before expecting their aspiring chefs to turn on the stove. But to simply hand over the ingredients without any sense of where they come from or how they interconnect is to stifle the chef’s imagination. At best, they’ll blindly follow a recipe. But they’ll never create a meal that will surprise or delight you, which is the higher purpose of cooking. Nor will they be able to adapt their skills when the ingredients change unexpectedly.

I’m losing the thread of my own extended metpahor so will stop here.