I think this is generally true, but there are counterexamples---I'm sure many of us here remember some of our own teachers that bucked this trend. Speaking for

I think this is generally true, but there are counterexamples---I'm sure many of us here remember some of our own teachers that bucked this trend. Speaking for myself, I do try my best to foster the creative ones; they can be kind of a pain in the ass sometimes but they keep me on my toes and exert a net positive influence on the class by hitting ideas from an unexpected angle (i.e. one unexpected by me and therefore one that the other students wouldn't have otherwise been presented with). That benefits everyone. I do have to rein them in sometimes, though, e.g. "when I give you a spec you really have to implement that function, not something else that does something similar, however much more awesome that other thing is". Because sometimes you really do have to just implement the spec.