Deresiewicz began teaching and was unhappy with how his classes were going. He felt that he wasn't provoking his students to learn the way a professor he venerated had done for him. That professor asked his students deceptively simple questions like what it meant to identify with a protagonist and forced them to realize how little they knew about some subjects. When 锘緿eresiewicz read 'Northanger Abbey' about Catherine Morland who first learns various bad lessons in how to behave in society from siblings John and Isabella Thorpe, he was struck by the friend Catherine makes later, Henry Tilney. Henry made Catherine come to realizations she wouldn't have otherwise by forcing her to reexamine her preconceived ideas, much like Deresiewicz's professor. "That's when I realized.... what I was doing wrong as a teacher," Deresiewicz wrote. "What made my professor such a great teacher was not that he was brilliant, or that he had read everything 鈥� though he was, and he had 鈥� but that he forced us to think for ourselves, just as Henry did to Catherine."
