I found recently, trying to teach some older people very elementary computer skills, that so much of the “vocabulary” of using a mouse or touchpad, and normal Windows controls, had long since become second nature for me. It was quite challenging for me to break things down to the absolute basics, for people who had never used a computer, or actually any kind of keyboard for that matter, before.
Not an unreasonable position - and one I’ve advocated on occasion (usually to bolster my position 
).
To further advocate for said demonic conversationalist, I’d propose that some of the “art” comes in when we don’t really have formal ways to explain something (“Stare at this stereograph until you see a 3-D projection appear. Don’t see it? Stare at it some more, I guess…”). Alternatively, when we do something that works despite what the science tells us (many growth conditions in biology; more than a few reaction schemes in chemistry) we call it art - because that sounds better than saying “our science is imperfect, here”.
The same is largely true in medicine - with the added problem of n=1 for almost all non-trivial examples.
Sometimes in order to teach the basics of a field you need to explain things that are wrong, or at least overly-simplified compared to the reality you understand. You’re not giving the full story, but you don’t have time and the students don’t have the mental space for you to unpack it further. That can be really tricky.
In my field (safety) there are some things that are considered “basic” but which are also quite controversial. I find it difficult explaining them without wanting to also explain why they aren’t established fact.
I imagine physical scientists would have similar difficulties. My memory of physics and chemistry in school was each year learning that the previous year was an oversimplified model, to the point where it was actively wrong when presented as fact. The material would be much easier to teach with a straight face if you believed it to be true.
William studied hitting intensively to the point where people thought he was uninterested in any other aspect of the game. I think the difference is that he couldn’t relate to lesser beings, where people like Musial could.
I think it was in the Ken Burns documentary about baseball that Mickey Mantle told about sitting next to Williams in the dugout at an all-star game, and Williams was asking him lots of questions and giving advice. Mantle said he tried to follow Williams’ instructions for the next couple of weeks and ended up in a terrible slump.
Interestingly, DiMaggio wasn’t analytical about hitting. He said he just went up there and did it and was irritated by people wanting to know how. Another person I wouldn’t want as a coach. I suspect Musial’s affable personality had a lot to do with his ability to communicate technique to others. If there’s one thing DiMaggio wasn’t, it was affable.
I think I could even teach elementary arithmetic. I understand it at a deep level (well, it is not very deep but whatever it is, I understand it) and I think I could teach it. I was prepared to help my kids, but only one of them ever asked me and it was when he was taking a college course in linear algebra and came on a problem he couldn’t see how to do. I solved it, first in a sophisticated way that was clearly not the one wanted and then reduced it to an elementary solution. But that was the only time.
Are you asking about me personally? Or a hypothetical teacher?
The ability to teach is a highly specific skillset, some people have it and some don’t, regardless of the level of knownedge about the subject.
Lies-to-children. Or, if you’re feeling erudite, Wittgenstein’s ladder…
I have a hard time knowing when I’m over-simplifying things or talking over someone’s head. I’m an immunologist, with both undergrad and grad students in the lab. Their educational backgrounds are thus quite varied. I think the biggest obstacle is the complex nomenclature used in science that makes things sound extremely confusing until you get the lingo down. For example, I was recently trying to explain the significance of a mutation in a peptidoglycan glycosyltransferase to someone and then realized she had no idea what peptidoglycan is. Once I explained it was an essential building block for cell walls, everything else fell into place.
For me as well. Teaching third graders about place value, or decoding words, involves skills I forgot I had learned. Sure, you know the rule about silent e, but do you remember the rule about when a vowel is long or short in a multisyllabic word? Sure, you know how to borrow and carry, but can you explain to a kid how to count backwards by tens from any given number across a multiple of 100 (that is, 223, 213, 203, ____)? Your first answer to these questions, if you’re like me, would only work for kids who also find orthography/subtraction easy; how would you explain them to a kid whose understanding of place value is shaky?
It’s taken me much longer to figure out how to teach these things than how to teach, for example, handwriting, since my own handwriting has been such a struggle; I’ve spent much more time thinking about the latter.
True. One obvious example is telling children that the moon revolves around the earth. That’s what it looks like, but technically both worlds orbit each other around a center that is located somewhere underneath the earth, but not exactly at the direct center of the core.
I’ve also faced this situation on the job - sometimes one needs to simplify technical matters for management and gloss over aspects that are theoretically true but are irrelevant for the business issue at hand. E.g. saying that a software application “can’t be updated” to perform a new requirement when the reality is that it could, but the cost to do so would be so high that no sane manager would risk it.
This! (+19googleplex)
And I gotta say it irritates me when my colleague says “teachers are just people who couldn’t get real jobs” and “teachers can’t even teach” because he’s generalizing from his own experience with poor teachers. Yeah, there are people who go into teaching because they love nurturing & working with kids but have no teaching ability*. Some of that is learned, and some of that really is an innate talent, and there’s a whole bundle of skills/talents/abilities/techniques needed to do it at all – and even more required to do it well.*
I picked up martial arts quickly and easily and learned from my instructor how to teach with analogies and demonstrations and I’ve become a pretty good teacher myself. That transferred to other activities like rock-climbing and baseball (and I was too uncoordinated to play Little League when I was that young).
I also picked up guitar-playing quickly and easily but*, when my stepdaughter asked me to teach her, I discovered I couldn’t explain the stuff I could just feel and *know *were right. (Why do you wiggle your left hand like that? I dunno, it just sounds better. Like this? No, that’s a bend.) So I’d say certain teaching skills don’t always serve all subjects.
–G!
*I suspect the same could be said about the skill/talent/ability to be a really effective assassin or specialized military operative. I find it a bit depressing that our budget-makers seem to value those skillsets above teaching skillsets.
I’m not a teacher, so take my opinion with that in mind, but I don’t think one can know things too well to teach them. I believe it was Einstein who said that if one cannot explain it simply, one doesn’t know it well enough. Now, certainly, when I was working on my PhD, and people wanted to know about my research topic, I couldn’t get into the nitty gritty and expect anyone that wasn’t well versed in the field to understand, but I could always communicate the basic ideas across in a way that they seemed to understand and appreciate.
That said, there are some situations where they just come so naturally that I’m kind of caught off guard when I realize other people don’t understand them. If that’s the case, it may take me a little while to come to a point where I realize where they’re not understanding it, but I still generally find I can explain it. Really, the things I tend to have the most difficulty with are just when I have a misunderstanding of someone else’s knowledge about the subject. That is, if I think someone else knows more about it than they do and I start explaining stuff over their heads, then I’ll make it worse, or if I underestimate, they may more or less zone out before I catch up to where they are.
In essence, it seems to me that teaching is a skill in and of itself. It involves and ability to understand the student, where his knowledge is, particularly where it ends, and how he best grasps new concepts so as to make sure you’re always building on something he already understands and then expanding on those concepts.
There seems to be a balancing act going on in the brain that the better you are at doing something, the more difficult it is for you to explain the same thing. When you are really good, you are at the level of unconscious competence, which means that you actually don’t realise most of the things that make you so good. You then either need to analyse stringently what you’re doing or have someone on the outside model exactly what you’re doing, in order to be able to teach it.
I work in an electronics lab. When we hired a couple new engineers fresh out of college, I was told by my supervisor I should “mentor” them.
I told him I would not do that.
It is my belief that most things can’t really be “taught.” I believe the best way to learn skills is to teach yourself.
Whenever the young engineers encountered a technical problem or challenge on a project, the first thing they would do is come to my (or someone else’s) office and ask, “What do I do?” I told them, “Asking me to solve your problem is the *last *thing should do. When you encounter a problem, you should first try to solve the problem yourself. Google it, look it your school textbooks, go to the library - whatever. Try to figure it out yourself. If you’re still stumped, then try asking someone.”
They didn’t like that answer. Apparently they were raised by people who solved all their problems for them.
I want to go back to this thread and give an example.
We took some Boy Scouts down the the courthouse to help them with the “Law” merit badge. We met a very top federal lawyer who gave a short speech to the boys on bankruptcy law. Well he seemed very smart but he used terms like assets, creditor, debtor, and lots of other terms even I had trouble understanding.
I later caught up with him and discussed this and he admitted he was used to just talking to law students or fellow lawyers. Not 12 year olds.
But that’s not a case of someone who knows it too well to teach it. It’s an example of someone with limited teaching skills, who didn’t adapt his presentation to his audience.
Right.
Knowing content is only step 1, and it’s the easiest step there is. Teaching in any context is a specialized skillset. Teaching to young people is an even more specialized one.
It’s not a matter of knowing the material “too well” to teach it. It’s just a matter of knowing how to teach. Intimate knowledge of a subject will not prevent a good teacher from getting the material across.
While I will not try to disabuse you of your firmly held belief on this, as I fundamentally agree that one should develop the skill of resourcefulness in finding their own answers and solution - I will say you are missing the point that in these situations “you” are simply another handy resource for them solving the problem themselves, just like Google, or textbooks. If the answer they are seeking is something that you know and could provide it within seconds, then why not share? I am suspecting that when you were starting you asked questions of those around you?
I might or might not be good at teaching certain subjects, but my 'expertise" has nothing to do with it.
I was able to teach my son the ABCs even though I read sophisitcated literature. I was able to teach him the basic multiplication tables, even though I know much higher level math. I know a lot about world history, but can still tell him all the basic stories he’ll learn about in 5th grade social studies. I can argue theology, but don’t really have a problem teaching Sunday School classes for little kids.
I’m not always an ideal teacher, but I’ve never found myself yelling “This is SIMPLE! Whate are you, an IDIOT that you can’t understand this???”
Or that their working experience to date was more hourly in nature. Certainly in my job, knowing how to do something yourself is valuable, but if after half an hour, you haven’t figured it out, get help! That’s valuable man-hours you’re spending trying to re-solve a solved equation, as it were.