A Teaching Idea from Thomas Friedman

From Ian Parker's profile of Friedman in the Nov. 10 issue of the New Yorker:

"Come empty, you leave empty," Friedman said to me one evening. "Come with a point of view, and you could come back with something original."

There seems to be a teaching idea here: have students come to class with something every day: an idea, a quotation from the reading, a response, no matter how brief; and they're more likely to be engaged in the class, and maybe even to come away from it with something new.