I knew a surgeon who did that.
Feelings.
You can teach someone to act like they are feeling a certain way.
But you can’t teach them to feel a certain a way.
I don’t believe wisdom can be taught but it can be learned through mistakes.
Interesting - but yeah, I can see how that’s teachable, but even then, I suspect you can’t teach excellence, only how to get properly started.
Throwing a rock in the sense of pitching it directly at something, some people just don’t seem to get at all, and as I say, I’m not sure it can be taught, only learned.
This. Perfect pitch is the required element, and it’s an innate ability that is difficult or impossible to learn/teach.
In high school and college, players in a section were ranked primarily by their ability to sight-read, i.e. to play a piece of music correctly the first time they laid eyes on new sheet music. I sucked at this.
OTOH, I could hear a piece of music and play it back to you, no problem at all. Fellow students were baffled by my regular playing of TV show theme songs and other familiar pieces without any sheet music. A friend who struggling to transcribe a piano solo was amazed by my ability to write down the sequence of notes for him. Also, composing a short ditty for a Boy Scouts music merit badge was no problem at all.
Mimic dialects…well.
Sure, there are these things called ‘dialect coaches’ in Hollywood that teach actors the rudiments of how to speak with a Jamaican, Irish, Scottish, South African, etc. accent. But one can see wildly differing results on film where some actors, even with extensive coaching, simply can’t do it anywhere near as well as some others who in some cases have had no coaching whatsoever.
I see this a lot. A notable case is Invictus, in which Matt Damon does a credible accent of a white South-African, and Morgan Freeman does a terrible impression of Nelson Mandela’s Xhosa accent.
I’ll take issue with both parts. Not only can they be taught, they are routinely taught. If you major in music you’ll take classes that teach sight singing and ear training, where you learn to recognize intervals, and later on chords by sound. It was pretty common for the people who seemed to have a natural “gift” to be surpassed by those thought it was impossible at first but worked harder.
One of my obsession with my hobby of building bows and arrows is breaking down the supposedly intangible aspects of building that supposedly can’t be taught. In this particular instance most all of them can be taught. Now when it comes to creative writing, I don’t believe that can be taught or that anyone can even learn it. If someone has the aptitude they can increase their knowledge on rules and things but the actual writing seems more intuitive. I am finding this out the hard way.
Did it last night and it went well. People who look like a newborn giraffe on their first slide can make huge progress over just an hour or two. I’ve had lots of people say that they didn’t think they’d get it, but are just amazed that they can slide the rock the full length of the ice. I love that part.
I’ll be a Level 1 instructor pretty soon; literally certified at teaching people to throw rocks.
But I do see what you mean, too.
How do you teach a dolphin to toss a volleyball, let alone a frisbee, with good aim?
I have no idea if that’s teachable, but our dolphins somehow learned to toss volleyballs with good aim. And yes, frisbees too.
Interesting observation though: They could also catch volleyballs, and I spent many hours playing catch with them with a volleyball. But I never, not once, ever saw them even try to catch a frisbee.
But apparently you can teach a dolphin to twirl a frisbee on its snout. One of our trainers, just for fun, showed one of the dolphins that, and the dolphin learned it nearly immediately, and spent the rest of the night (and all night for the next few weeks) twirling a frisbee. Within a day, the other dolphin started doing it too. Then they quickly picked up the habit of putting the smaller frisbee inside the larger frisbee and twirling them both.
I tend to bake using my sense of smell as my mother did. She used to always say that this is something that can’t be taught and I tend to disagree with that. Our noses are very sensitive to the smoke and the color of the food being cooked reflects this. We also tend to easily remember what color produced what smell. I started showing this to my girlfriend and she picked it up pretty quickly. Very often the phrase if you don’t know it well enough to explain it you don’t know it well enough could apply to this and many other things.
There seems to be a lot of people giving examples about themselves or others having a natural aptitude for something but then falsely assuming it can’t be taught. There is very very little, if anything, that can’t be taught. Just don’t expect identical results for all who try to learn. Of course a person with a lot of pre-disposition for a given skill will out-perform others, and those with the opposite mental wiring will always struggle; it doesn’t mean the subject can’t be taught.
A very important part of learning something is how good of a teacher you have. And there are a lot of lousy teachers out there. In my experience, people who have a natural aptitude for a subject or skill make the worst teachers… specifically because they have no idea how they themselves learned or presently do the task - it just comes naturally. Of course those people, whether they end up as teachers or mentors, can’t properly communicate the process to others who in turn can’t learn because of poor instruction… then both parties come to the conclusion that the subject just can’t be taught.
I had 2 different university professors, both PhDs in chemistry. One of them worked at a smaller university known for hiring excellent teachers and much less focused on getting big research grants. That guy could break down the subject and make any chemical equation make sense, and even explained how to think about the reactions creatively by a clear breakdown of what was happening and what was relevant. Even students who hated chemistry couldn’t help learning a lot of doing very well under this teacher.
The other teacher had one of the most anti-social and unprofessional attitudes I’ve ever encountered, and was pretty much the worst teacher I ever had. His subject (organic chemistry) just came easy to him; he’d just shake his head at students questions and blow them off because he thought the subject was easy. He couldn’t teach to save his life… but then again he didn’t need to because he was good at getting big grants and the reason he was there was to do high-end research (teaching a couple classes on the side was just an annoying condition of the job). Close to half the people in any of his classes failed; he didn’t care.
I think one would be hard-pressed to find a subject that actually can’t be taught with:
[ul]
[li]A proper understanding of how the subject/skill works[/li][li]A good understanding of how to teach those concepts or skills[/li][li]A good perception of how the particular student learns and whether they are getting it.[/li][/ul]
A lot of skills simply aren’t important enough in society for people to put the effort in to really figure them out and train others to become competent in them. Important skills like leadership can definitely be taught; any big organization will have a department and courses set up to do just that (my organization has several). That there are some exceptional people who don’t need special training and can pick things up themselves doesn’t mean others can’t learn those same things. There are born naturals in any field, but not enough to fill the demand for a lot of tasks society finds important, and the other 95% of musicians, athletes, leaders, etc have learned those skills with practice and determination.
Play sports. You either have it or you don’t. I played baseball in college and everyone had played football in HS. Several were members of the (NCAA Champ) hockey team. You could take them golfing or to a ping pong table and they’d figure it out. I’ve played with fat guys who could hit a ball while falling out of bed and others built like Adonis who couldn’t catch a ball if you threw it underhanded from three feet away.
No, I disagree. What you are noticing are simply individual differences in natural aptitude for certain sports, not the inability of the skills to be taught and learned by the population in general. We teach millions of kids how to play different sports every day in gym class and they learn just fine. 99.999% of them will never be top-tier athletes but that’s not the question.
Having taught several children to throw I must disagree with you.
In my case, first I taught myself how to throw left-handed by breaking down all the steps.
Then I was able to take people who “threw like a girl” and explain what they were doing wrong and what they needed to do to.
Aim and strength came from practice – but the basic technique can be taught as a series of steps involving the correct motion of the shoulder and elbow.
The same concept applies to baseballs.
In my youth, I could catch a baseball in various depths of center field and throw an absolute DART {one foot + or -} above home plate…
Whether or not the runner was out depended on too many variables to list here…
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Then this may explain my poor grammar ! I didn’t get my first hearing aid until I was 8 years old ! My dad also had poor grammar , he was born in Russia around 1892 and came here as a young boy .
Having empathy can’t be taught . That too bad b/c there is one person that could really use it !