Before getting into anything digital, I'd like to tell two short stories about my fourth grade teacher, Baz.

Baz and I recently got together for lunch, after 14 years with no contact. He was 84 and I was 29. His big white beard still spilled out under his classic gray fedora, but now he was thin like his handwriting. Instead of towering over me as he once did, we now saw eye to eye.

I asked him what was the secret to being a great teacher, and he said, “Well, you’ve gotta bring yourself to class every day. Your whole self. Your problems, your opinions, your stories—all of it. When you’re a full person, your students see you as an equal, and they trust you like they trust each other.”

He told me about being a young playwright, living on Long Island with his new wife, Corinna. One day he came in from the garden while Corinna was making lunch, laid down on the table, looked up at the ceiling, and suddenly started to cry. He had been writing ambitious plays about big ideas, but the finished works always disappointed him. Leaning back with eyes wide open, he said, “I was trying to make the audience go ‘Wowww!’, but in fact I needed to make the audience go ‘Wowww...’”—this time he leaned forward and squinted, like he was straining to hear a secret.

“I was trying to impress the audience with smart answers to life’s big questions,” he said. “It was all hype. But then I realized I didn’t have the answers to life’s big questions, and instead of writing plays that pretended to, I had to write plays that simply asked the right questions. I had to bring the audience up on stage with me, include them in the answering.”