My wife is a teacher who at this point in her career has the luxury of doing all her teaching in one-on-one video conferences. She says it’s much easier to tailor the material to the needs of her students this way.
Indeed. To that end…
A plea I have for this board is that folks ask more follow-up questions. When I write a long reply to a post, I’m generally making a wild-ass starting guess as to the suitable level of detail, and it is unlikely that I get it right. There’s just too much possible range in level of background knowledge. Even if only 5% of the initial reply lands, that’s fine. Some iterative discussion (even needing to back way up) is a thousand times more enjoyable than just taking a single random shot hoping that it finds purchase.
So, at least for my part, if I take the time to write a long answer to something, that’s my opening salvo and my implicit contract to iterate. If the discussion were live, some back and forth at the start would get us on the same page, but doing that first is sort of weird in open forum, so consider any lengthy technical post from me to be an initial fishing for what level is best for the OP (or anyone else involved).
I am actually a big believer in the concept of “If you understand it well, you can explain it to anyone”, with success being defined as making some substantive advancement in a person’s understanding. But, this absolutely requires iteration and lots of back-and-forth questioning. It can’t happen as a hole-in-one shot!
Does the analogy from Sean Carrol (Post #14) I mentioned make any sense to you? He seems to be saying the higgs field has negative energy in the vacuum state which is why you have to put in 125Gev to create a higgs boson. All the other fields have zero energy in the vacuum state so you just put in a little energy (100’s of keV) and “poof” you have a photon, electron, whatever. And if the higgs field has negative energy in the vacuum state, isn’t THAT dark matter/energy?
Since this is a little different from the original thread’s topics, I’ve started a new thread here with your questions copied over. I haven’t replied there yet, but I plan to.
Excellent point. This type of forum is better suited to answer factual questions than explain the how and why of concepts in a small space.
One does need to “understand it well” in the first place; as you note it’s the “to anyone” that lands you in a swamp, since you need to to understand them as well, a much more difficult task in this setting.
Back in the ‘90s and early 2000s, I taught chemistry and physics for seven years at a military prep school. I was a very good teacher (IMHO), being recognized as “science instructor of the year” twice and “instructor of the year” once.
There were other teachers who were more “expert” than me, including one with a Ph.D. in chemistry. But I think I was a better teacher than he was because I could clearly recall the “aha” moment when I had learned the material myself. And I had a knack for clearly and enthusiastically explaining that “aha” moment to my students. In other words, I could much more easily put myself in my students’ shoes and understand where they were coming from.
This is one area I would have liked to have worked on if I’d stayed in teaching. In my seven years of teaching (five years teaching chemistry, and two years teaching physics), I generally had just one good way to explain things (usually the way I learned it or that made the most sense to me). Although I do recall having several analogies for some of the more esoteric topics.
Regarding the overall topic here in this thread, every time I see the thread title I’m reminded of a joke “theory” I used to make when discussing the difference between laws and theories.
For example, Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation only describes what happens. It doesn’t explain why objects with mass attract each other gravitationally.
Theories, like Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, attempt to explain why massive objects attract each other gravitationally.
I also pointed out that one was not better than the other, and theories don’t necessarily turn into laws. They are trying to do two different things: laws describe observed behavior, and theories attempt to explain the observation.
So my joke theory for why gravity works the way does is because the Earth sucks. 
(Not sure if I could get away with that now.)
Given the winds generated by the rotation of the planet, you could even say that the Earth both sucks and blows.