On teaching: Ignite or Dampen?

In my long teaching career, I'm sure there have been any number of times when I have probably said, or thought, that I would like to "ignite" a class, but lately I've been musing about the ramifications of that word. It means "to light a fire", and it suggests, to a teacher, a roomful of students whose thoughts and feelings have been aroused by the content of the lesson. Every teacher, I suppose, wants to have this happen in his or her classroom. It's what we sort of vaguely hope for day after day, year after year -- a classroom where excitement is constantly flaring up into bonfires. However, I wonder if we give much thought to the opposite process of dampening. I wonder if tamping down fires might be as important in the teaching process as igniting them. I guess my problem with "fires" in the classroom is that it's very hard to control them, just as it is in nature. As I write, there are wildfires raging across the Southwest, destroying everything in their paths, and there are countless teachers, I'm sure, who have somehow ignited classes to the point where feelings and ideas are flaring every which way, and neither students nor teachers are sure what, if anything, is being learned. It may be that, if I want to become a truly excellent teacher, I need to focus some attention on learning how to occasionally dampen the inner fires of my students, so they can burn in a harmless, productive, and even beautiful manner. Fires, after all, can be lovely and inspiring things in our lives -- carefully controlled hearth fires, for instance. Perhaps I can think of each of my classes as a room filled with the quietly glowing flames of my students' thoughts and feelings -- thoughts that have been carefully considered and expressed, and feelings that are not blazing wildly, but are instead burning healthily and beautifully, with the help of a little judicious dampening, now and then, on my part.