title: Why would you assign a variable to ""?
body: <p>so i'm in the middle of the Python course on the Treehouse website and question asks exactly this:</p>
  
  <p>Create a function named most_classes that takes a dictionary of teachers. Each key is a teacher's name and their value is a list of classes they've taught. most_classes should return the teacher with the most classes.</p>
  
  <p>Here I have posted the correct code below that I have found from a resource on the Treehouse forums and I have asked this same question but got no reply - So what exactly does assigning teacher = "" do? I am so confused</p>
  
  <pre><code> # The dictionary will be something like:
   # {'Jason Seifer': ['Ruby Foundations', 'Ruby on Rails Forms', 'Technology Foundations'],
   #  'Kenneth Love': ['Python Basics', 'Python Collections']}
  
   # Often, it's a good idea to hold onto a max_count variable.
   # Update it when you find a teacher with more classes than
   # the current count. Better hold onto the teacher name somewhere
   # too!
  
  def most_classes(my_dict):
      count = 0
      teacher = "" #this is where I am confused!
      for key in my_dict: 
          if(len(my_dict[key]) &gt; count):
              count = len(my_dict[key])
              teacher = key   
  
      return teacher
  </code></pre>