Every once in a while, a student will ask a question that I don’t know the answer to.

My response? “I don’t know. But I’ll find out.”

And most of the time, I could’ve probably answered with uncertainty and come up with something that sounds okay, and think they may not have known I was unsure, or worse, didn’t know.

When I’m in student mode in class, and I ask a question and the answerer doesn’t know, I can sometimes tell. And when I figure out that they were making something up, I lose a little bit of respect for them.

If you’re a phony, it’s often more obvious than you think.