Teaching. You don’t only need to be well versed in the subject matter. You have to be able to effectively explain that information based on the specific audience in front of you
I had a friend who could teach anything effortlessly, even if he is just learning the subject himself. When he'd get stressed out his coping mechanism was to start teaching me something, anything, could just be about some random thing he saw on tiktok. He was a weird dude with no other friends and a self described "gray man aura" but holy hell could he teach. I asked him once why he was so good at it and he said it was (don't remember his exact words) because he knew it was his responsibility as the teacher to teach the student, that all the student has to do is WANT to learn, and the burden is in no way on the student to be good at being teachable. It was a responsibility thing for him. He did also stop mid one lesson-rant and look at me dead and say "I think I might be autistic" so, lol. He was in his 50s at the time.
I discovered I was like this in undergrad. So I went to grad school with the aim of becoming a university professor. After becoming one, I was horrified to find out that the majority of university professors are horrible horrible teachers. Last year, we had an open position to which we interviewed more than 10 applicants, all very highly qualified from a scientific point of view, but not a single one of them could even be considered an "okay" teacher.
Turns out being a good teacher is really a rare talent.
I sat with a bunch of TA's and dept professors to do in-classroom interviews for 4 potential profs once. Had to give a lecture on any topic then answer our questions. 1hr total.
One lectured, but was mostly reading off slides. One was very enthusiastic about the topic, but it was a PhD level topic, but he explained none of the background and everyone was confused. One just talked about himself and his career for 40 minutes.
Last guy actually put together a lecture on a topic, explained it well, had back and forth with us asking questions about it, etc. He did an amazing job, blew everyone else out of the water, not even a contest. We were asked for our feedback and every single TA said he was their favorite.
He did not get the job because his research resume, while impressive, was not as impressive as the other candidate's.
The tens of thousands that they pay pales in comparison to the millions that a professor brings in through government grants for research. That's why they prioritize it. Doesn't make it right, but that's the way it is.
That's the Socratic method I use when tutoring... If you ask students questions and get them to process it differently than they would if one were just teaching "at" them they retain it so much better
Good engineering and science programs that have worked with their college of education/instructional designers approach instruction through phenomena based or problem based learning. It helps center the questions from the Socratic method around a specific context that learners can keep returning to. The reason you don't see it universally at all colleges is because it requires more effort on the part of the professors and TAs, a lot of professors and researchers don't like teaching, and many professors have normalized bad learning environments (it worked for them).
Academics tend to be really good at the learning and researching part of the role. The teaching, supervising, and managing people parts aren't what most got into that line of work for, and it shows.
If you consider that many school teacher have a degree or diploma in teaching, and then see that most college and university lecturers have degrees/dimplomas in their field only, you understand the difference between the two.
Teachers learn how to teach. University lecturers just need to know their fields well enough, and it is assumed the students will do the heavy lifting when it comes to understanding. And then every now and again you get a gem of a lecturer who can really impart his or her knowledge well despite having no formal teacher training.
It's the result of fucked up incentives. The school needs research grants and that's how a professor guarantees their own job security. Students need degrees in the modern job market (among numerous other qualifications, unfortunately) so they have to suck it up when the professor sucks.
Advanced labs that benefit only the very best students will raise the school's ranking but bad teachers will still screw up the lives of hundreds of students who would otherwise have succeeded with better mentors.
People get into research because they have a passion for the subject matter, and not for the teaching part. Unfortunately, universities require you to teach students as part of being able to do research. They really ought to give professors a short course on teaching before they force them to teach.
I don't think a short course would resolve the issue. If you have no passion and aptitude for teaching, that's kind if just it. Teaching requires a very high EQ
It’s an entirely different skillset and I don’t know why we expect people with a deep knowledge of something to inherently be able to explain it well to others.
I used to TA classes when I was a grad student. One week, I swapped classes with another grad student, since they had a schedule conflict. When I got back to my regular class the next week, one of the people in the class threatened to kick my ass if I ever let the other guy take over my class ever again. Apparently he was just that bad.
Less of an issue for university professors, but it doesn't help they make teaching as hard as humanly possible in grade school. "You're supposed to magically be a great teacher, while little Billy the fucking psycho is raising hell and distracting everyone the whole time, and you can only really do something about it when they assault you or a student, and even then we're going to be like 'why did you let it escalate to this point."
Unrelated but how did you find progressing through a PhD with all the research. I would love to become a college professor but I have no passion for research, just the teaching part.
It was a tough 5 years to be honest, research is not easy and full of frustrations and the pay is very bad, but I have a passion for learning so I was enjoying my time learning new stuff.
That’s honestly my main criteria for choosing where to go to school; do they hire teachers or researchers? It sucks to be stuck in a course with a researcher who has no idea how to teach because you end up forking over thousands of dollars to teach yourself the material from the text book…
You fork the thousands to receive the stamped piece of paper that says you have a degree, most of the learning you have to do it yourself anyway. Treat having a good teacher as a bonus.
To amplify on u/sinceseventeneleven’s comment: It’s not a rare talent. It’s an untrained skill. It is untrained because the incentive to train it is not as strong as the incentive to train other skills. With the possible exception of Richard Feynman (and his methods of notation and conceptualization for quantum electrodynamics), no one has gotten a Nobel Prize or Fields Medal for devising a method to teach a subject well.
As a teacher, I can tell you that everyone should have teacher friends. We all just want to teach. I can't tell you how many people I have spent hours with teaching how to throw darts or play poker. Every person on the planet is good at some random thing, but teachers get pleasure from helping others learn too.
I was like this with some subjects that came easier to me at uni. I got most of my friend group through programming classes with a whiteboard at home. Not autistic though, but ADHD.
I've been told that I'm good at teaching, but to me it just seems like basic empathy: if I say x, how will the person listening interpret it? What will saying x make them think or feel? What does this topic look like from their perspective, and how is it different from my perspective of the topic?
All teaching is is just putting yourself in someone else's shoes and seeing how they're thinking and feeling about a topic instead of focusing on how you're viewing the topic. Growing up, I was shocked to learn that it's not as common a skill as I thought it was when I was a child.
Most of my classes had the full year labs and lectures up to see from the day before classes started. I worked my ass off to get ahead of the school year and whenever I'd get stuck I'd start teaching my classmates, my father or the anime figurines on my computer desk at home. It truly helped me understand it better and became a very useful adapted life skill.
I got many free meals or beers from colleagues to help them with projects and labs even though I said it helped me understand the subject better. It was helping me as much as it helped them.
The way you learn to teach stuff better, for me at least, is to change the subject matter into something else. My one buddy was, like me, very into the Fire Emblem franchise and I would change the project matter to be concepts of that opposed to the words in our class.
Holy shit......... I've never realized until reading this comment that my coping mechanism for stress is to teach someone something! Usually relating to the topic I'm stressed about.
My wife probably knows more about my coworkers' jobs than most of them know at this point, because every time I'm stressed about something going on at work, I teach my wife all about the topic of stress...
My wife has no formal training or certification in cyber security, but I'm pretty sure she could configure most of a security solution from scratch at this point. As well as troubleshooting issues with log ingestion or network connectivity lmao
This is a good one. It is a skill that is not innate and sometimes cannot be learned based on the person's personality. I've done a lot of teaching and training in my life for work and school and I have never seen myself as a teacher or have those characteristics...no rather I just don't like teaching or training people. But I've done it so much I know what the best approach is and have some patience. As much as I dislike it at work, it has helped prepare me for raising and teaching children.
Putting aside false modesty, and without getting into my resume, I’m fairly comfortable saying that there aren’t many people aside from high-level PhD/EdD’s who could teach me something about, well, teaching. (And even many of those doctors might be comparatively light on practical experience.)
I don’t say this to toot my own horn, just to set the stage for saying that while I agree with most of what you say here, I’d push back one one thing - the idea that someone can’t be an innate teacher. The right combination of intelligence and, most importantly, empathy can indeed create natural teaching gifts. Of course this doesn’t say anything about subject-area knowledge, but someone with a natural ability quickly get their own heads around new concepts coupled with a natural ability to connect and communicate with others can indeed display innate teaching abilities.
In other words, natural-born teachers exist as surely as natural-born leaders do, even if a lot of those people never end up finding their way to becoming a teacher themselves.
There are teachers who work hard for years to get good at it, and I love watching them practice their art.
There are teachers who are more naturally gifted at it than others, and I love watching them practice their art.
There are people who have a true passion teaching, and I love watching them practice their art.
But to see someone in whom all 3 combine? That is an exceedingly rare, and seeing them practice their art is something that never leaves you, no matter the subject matter they’re presenting.
Richard Feynman may be the closest to a celebrity-level example that I can think of, if anyone wanted to check out what I’m talking about here. Although even he lacks some of the technical nuance that comes only with studying pedagogy itself as a part of the expertise that I’ve seen in a rare few professional educators in my time.
True masters need only stay one tiny step ahead of the learner in whatever domain they’re teaching in order to flawlessly guide that learner through their education. They can absorb and decode complex topics, internally translate them into universal language for ubiquitous consumption, asses where a given learner or learners are at in their existing understanding of the topic, and determine what modes and methodology will best reach those students, all with better fluidity, clarity, and speed than most of us could if we were given triple the time and resources.
Going even further, true master educators are also masters at learning, and in many cases, the master educator doesn’t even need to stay ahead, and can achieve all of this merely by learning alongside the student, guiding the learner in keeping up as the master learns the material themselves in real-time. It’s so fun watching this happen, as the learner often doesn’t even realize that they’re being guided along at much more fluid pacing and levels of knowledge assimilation than they’d achieve if they were working alongside a standard “study buddy”.
I like to think that I’m pretty damn good at it myself, but when I encounter these select few, I’m reminded how wide the gulf is between say, the average starting NCAA player and someone starting on the Chicago Bulls. No matter what we do, some of us will just never be as good as the Michael Jordans of our respective fields.
No matter what we do, some of us will just never be as good as the Michael Jordans of our respective fields.
People in all the positivity subreddits need to learn:
"It's never too late to start, but there are some goals that are unattainable and you need to be okay with that."
As someone who recently made the jump from industry to educator in a technical field - thank you. The jump from specific niche engineering knowledge to pedagogy and taxonomy of knowledge and... It's a big jump, but this is encouraging.
Of course! Biggest tip I give to any educators that I help teach is, "learn to learn, and learn to listen". If you can effectively teach yourself something, and you can grasp where a learner is coming from and what their stumbling blocks might be, then you can teach literally anything, given time.
I'm sorry I didn't read the entire comment while I am currently commenting because I wanted to say YES YOU ARE RIGHT, I dunno what I meant by it saying it's not innate. I think it was more accurate to say that it is not an innate skill for me or I think that it is generally not an innate skill most people have compared to someone who truly is a natural born leader.
I totally misspoke and only meant it in the context of the title of the post. So thank you for clearing that up you are correct.
You have patience, the most important trait for teaching. I work nowhere near education, but I am handed a group of people every time I'm at a new venue and have to teach them how to assemble my gear. The skill level of who I'm given is all over the place so I have to teach the same range of skills quickly, repeatedly. The ONLY way to keep everyone calm and focused is to show patience with every hiccup in the process. Tell everyone questions are good, that repeated questions are NOT embarrassing, and back that up no matter how simple or truly fucking stupid the question is by answering it the nicest you can every time. I feel like the most important part about teaching people at any level is remembering this class (every time you teach someone a new thing, that's a class) isn't their life. Just because you've done something repeatedly doesn't mean other people even have an inkling of what you're talking about. Find the most important basic parts of what you're trying to pass on, and hammer on those. It's very hard to stick to, but people are increasingly more receptive to instruction with every time you show them patience! Prove you're a friend and people will learn whatever you want them to. Granted, I'm talking about assembling things with latches, screws, and plugging wires together, but complexity only makes the patience more important. Whatever you're teaching, show patience and people will be much, much more receptive.
I hope others read this comment too because you nailed my experience exactly. I did a lot of training and teaching at work starting in my early 20s. I was young, smart, dedicated, and knew it. All the staff I trained were older than me and I would get irritated and sometimes would let it creep into my voice. When staff clearly weren't paying attention and then ask questions about what I just said, I would get irritated and point out "I just explained that to you". I would be irritated when I was done training them too. It was all one sided and I had very little patience in general in my personal life (not many people do unfortunately). Once I realized that and worked on it, it made a world of difference.
people are increasingly more receptive to instruction with every time you show them patience! Prove you're a friend and people will learn whatever you want them to.
This is gold right here. I'm going to really try to instill this into my kids, especially the last line. No one likes it when someone they see as a friend is short, irritable, or mean when they are being taught something.
As someone that never thought of myself as being a good teacher or expecting to somehow be good with kids (as in know how to interact with or entertain them), and now that it's literally like a survival skill, it's super awesome to have these skills.
To the point where like if youre dealing with a kid and they have any aptitude at all its pretty easy to gain their attention via curiosity and its your foot in the door to gaining their trust and building a relationship. It's a beautiful thing.
Yes. My father was a genius, legitimately, and the absolute worst at teaching me even the subjects he knew best when I was a kid. I volunteered for the migrant education program in my state as a tutor right after I graduated and learned that I was pretty damned good at breaking things down and explaining things in a way that made sense to kids. I never went into teaching as a career, but that skill stood me well with my own kids!
I once found out how bad of a teacher one of my colleagues is when I asked him to show me the basics of operating a lighting console for a soundstage(the controller that turns lights on and off for tv and film sets)
He proceeded to launch into “cue stacks” and profile parameter limits baked into light manufacturer firmwares. Color theories and managing file systems across several consoles.
I had to stop him and say “ dude, show me where the power button is first”
This. Just because someone is a subject matter expert doesn’t mean they can teach it. Also, sharing “stories” isn’t teaching. Anyone can tell a Great War story but what did that person learn to do differently from hearing it.
Usually the people who easily understand material right away make terrible teachers because they can't grasp how someone doesn't understand the material. To them, it's easy and makes sense and one explanation is enough for them to comprehend the subject material. When you are able to easily understand any content thrown at you, it's actually quite hard to find different ways to explain a concept to someone who doesn't understand right away. It's hard to see where the person gets lost or confused.
The best teachers are the ones who can find countless ways to explain a concept. They are able to take complex topics and explain them in a way that your average child could understand.
I don’t know how many professors I had in college that were experts in a particular field but terrible at teaching.
I had one professor who retired from los alamos national labs. They were obviously extremely well versed in chemistry. But she was one of the worst teachers I ever had. She was friendly and all, but she couldn’t explain anything in a way that a young adult could understand, and had no idea how to break something down into manageable parts.
"[John] von Neumann would carry on a conversation with my 3-year-old son, and the two of them would talk as equals, and I sometimes wondered if he used the same principle when he talked to the rest of us.”
As a Psychology specialist, it was only when I taught some sociology in my teacher training that I became much better at teaching Psych.
Alternative explanations, analogies, real world examples and break things down.
The amount of times people explain long processes in too few steps is crazy. Synaptic transmission is a topic lots of people get overwhelmed by, but each individual step is very straight-forward.
I can confirm as a teacher, the most challenging things to teach are when I don't even get how the student doesn't understand me in the first place. Many times I know damn well where the issue is, and it's more like a psychogical game to force the student to accept my teachings. I think current me is pretty great at emotional manipulation and winning mental power battles. I can also control my own anger like a tool, it takes a lot to put me truly off my game.
But there are few moments where I explain things in all the ways I can imagine and the student just doesn't get it. And it is not out of stubborness, that is a different beast. I myself am probably slightly neurodivergent, but boy is it blatant in my job how for example autism truly is a spectrum. Sometimes I just can't connect with student's logic or even understand it, because it is so strange and illogical for the situation. Some of those kids are intellectually disabled, and that probably is the reason I struggle so much. They just don't get me, and I don't get them, because the gap between our very thinking is so large. Our basic concepts of logic are different in the subject.
And sometimes those students get mad at me for not understanding them. On the outside I usually remain polite and cooperative, trying to prevent an argument or meltdown. On the inside I might think what the hell kind of logic that is supposed to be, or how the hell do you think minds work. Some autistic kids gets really mad when I can't read their minds. And ironically the way I as a teacher "read minds" is through prediction, observations and logical conclusions. That becomes really hard when someones behavior and very thought process differs from what you could consider normal or logical, even for a spes.ed student.
Sometimes it has to come from them, i.e. what do they currently understand. Obviously they wouldn't know what they don't know so getting them to explain their POV might be better.
I've encountered this as well. And I say "I'm really not sure how else to explain this". Exacerbated by english not being the student's first language. Happened recently, but I went home and thought about it and designed a new, more scaffolded approach, and they finally got it.
Though I will add, sometimes it's impossible to teach a tricky concept when the student will not give more than half their attention to you at any given time. I can't imagine how hard it is to learn anything when you only tune into the lesson every now and then.
Yep, I've met a lot of people that homeschooled over the years, and I've tried to keep an open mind about it. But the more homeschoolers I meet and the more my own kids are in school, the more closed my mind becomes about homeschooling.
I used to think that possibly a well educated adult could at least homeschool for elementary level. That is until my own children started elementary school and saw how skilled their teachers were at teaching them to read. Could I teach my kids to read. Probably. Would they learn it as well or as quickly as they did from their teachers? Absolutely not.
It's almost like people who study how to teach children are better at it than people who don't. Crazy.
Yeah, I've worked as a knowledge lead for a big training provider.
Really good teachers in a lot of subjects are just impossibly rare. It's one of those knowledge + capability + situation equations that can almost never resolve in the real world.
I took a job with a guy where he would have to train me. His training was terrible.
When i left he told me he'd realised he wasn't good at teaching. He said others had told him he wasn't before but he thought they just meant he didn't know what he was doing. He had a lot of skill but couldn't pass it on.
I work in kitchens and have had a couple coworkers/employees tell me I'm a good teacher. I maintain these instances as some of the highest compliments I've ever received.
I remember crying because my dad was trying to teach me math as a math graduate, and I just couldn't understand, and he started getting mad.
Well, there is a reason why he never kept going to become a teacher, he said the kids pissed him off.
Not even just teaching, but also classroom management as well.
I subbed for 5 years while trying to land a full-time teaching job. I never really got to master the content since the team I long-term subbed for the most would keep the same students for 7th and 8th grade. So I had to spread myself thin with content knowledge compared to if I got to repeat things the next year.
I especially struggled when I long-term subbed at the high school and had 5 preps of subjects I never taught before. I thought I was hiding it, but everyone could see how taxing it was on me.
My greatest strength is that I could always have the students motivated and run through hell for me. We were prepped in advance for every fire and tornado drill. There were no dumb questions and I would answer every curiosity which bred better discussions. The "bad" kids were never bad for me because I would give them a quick chat about how others look up to them and I need them to be leaders themselves.
The funny thing is this cycle repeated after I left teaching and started doing IT. Everyone else has better content knowledge than I do, but I'm just a "glue guy" motivator that keeps everything smooth.
Honestly, classroom management is 90% of the job. When I was teaching, new teachers could write beautiful lesson plans...set up a gorgeous classroom...have the best theories....and could not control the kids so they'd fail. Meanwhile a couple of us had more utilitarian rooms and were stricter with the kids but they loved the structure and rarely gave us any issues.
I think that's the secret to teaching (in a classroom setting anyway) and it's hard to teach. You kind of have to be born with it or be able to figure it out as you go.
Teacher here. Anytime I see a teacher who wants to be the adult that kids can relax around, I automatically know they will flame out quickly. Whether it’s because they get run out of town by the kids, or they realize that their passion for a particular subject doesn’t translate to kids.
The COVID era meant I didn't work for ~6 months. My unemployment ran out, so I started working for Geek Squad in the Best Buy large appliance warehouse near where I used to live. They expanded extremely quickly and added TV, PC, and audio equipment repair positions since our parent warehouse near Chicago was overloaded. I was selected since I built PCs as a hobby.
I did that for about three years and then an IT help desk position opened in my county. They liked my teaching background, and I found out later that pretty much all of my co-workers were either married to teachers or had a parent that was a teacher.
I now work for my city instead where my main job is to recommend hardware and software solutions, order them, and install them. So I accidentally fell into the perfect job for me.
I've long realized that many people just don't know how to think from the perspective of other people, so of course they are bad at explaining or understanding things.
As soon as it is something not like they'd think it or do it, it becomes incomprehensible to them.
I couldn’t agree with this more! Literally there’s teachers and then there’s wizard teachers. And they are not even close. Often the wizard teachers don’t understand how the other teachers don’t teach. I see it as the ability to reach the audience. My wizard teacher says to deliver everything (for high school and above) at a 14yo level as that’s the average person’s understanding.
I realized one day that the old line "Those who can't do, teach" is actually a wisdom. I grew up thinking it was a kind of put down until I realized that being able to teach is it's own skill set. There's a reason champions don't go on to be coaches and vice versa.
As someone in the learning and development profession I can relate. Creating good training the changes behavior and delivers results is incredibly difficult but when its done we'll it looks so easy.
I’ve always known I wasn’t meant to be a teacher and then I had kids and I realized i genuinely fucked because I have to teach them to not be shitty humans. There’s a lot of “I don’t know man, because it’s good manners to do such and such”. Also a lot of “just give me sec because I know why but I don’t know how to EXPLAIN why”. I’m essentially slowly teaching them patience for poor communications
As a teacher, the best advice I can give is that for many things related to behavior, it's not about choosing the right words. More importantly than saying the right thing is doing the right thing. Modeling and demonstrating is always more beneficial than just telling.
Also the other side of the coin: just because someone is a teacher doesn't mean that they'll make a good student when they have to learn from someone else...
I already know I'm terrible at teaching. Tried to help many friends in math and I just can't do it. It's really hard to teach something you intuitively know.
I did a master's degree in an Asian country and what passed for teaching was reading paragraphs of text off of powerpoint slides and sending the students home to do homework. Teacher couldn't explain concepts, told you to study harder. Lectures were worthless.
Yes, it's hard! I used to do coaching at one of my previous jobs, and although I thought I was pretty damn good at my job, there were somethings that were really difficult to explain, which made me realize I didn't understand those things well enough to properly ELIA5 them.
And those two aren't even the hard part. In fact, if you're talking K-12, they're frankly secondary skills at best, more likely considered optional things you'll pick up on the fly.
You'd better know how to manage a classroom of 15-40 kids if you want to be even halfway decent.
The best teachers have incredible emotional intelligence, are great at planning and managing their time, and are also great improvisors.
I've always had a knack for explaining complex things in "layman's terms" and other common sense approaches; funny thing is my wife is the professor and while I may be able to do that, there's so much more to teaching than making a subject relatable; I could never deal with the bullshit she does on the daily.
I think the biggest parts of being a good teacher are patience and empathy. You have to be able to take the time to see if they are understanding the information and know how to shift your delivery if they aren't.
I learned this in college. There's that old saying, "Those you can't do, teach." But I think for many professors, it's the opposite. They are amazing in their field - but they suck at teaching.
I think Carl Sagan had some line about the reason he was good at teaching was because the material did not come naturally to me.
A lot of experts have an intuitive sense for their subject, and have a hard time understanding why other people struggle with it. Great teachers on the other hand can be mediocre in the subject, but they know how to work through it.
One district I worked at, the head of HR thought that if you had your doctorate then that meant you would be a great teacher cause you were smart. But they had instances where those people with doctorates only lasted for a couple months. They couldn't handle it or just weren't good at it.
In fact, many people who are good at things and never struggled to learn them are bad at teaching, while people who struggled to pick things up tend to have actually found the pitfalls and are better at showing you how to avoid them.
I've had situations where someone was struggling with a concept, and I started to help them to understand it. Then someone else jumps in to "help" explain it faster.
my older brother and a good friend of mine are the worse at teaching, they show you something once and if you can't do it straight away same as they do they start yelling at you and insulting you.
100%. You can know and understand a subject really well, but be awful at explaining it to people who are just learning it.
I learned that personally when I spent time as a middle school math tutor. I’d always been good at math, and had gone all the way through college calculus. I’d even spent time helping my younger cousin with his high school algebra.
But when I had to teach a sixth grader fractions, I blanked. I realized I didn’t actually know how to properly teach something like fractions to someone who didn’t have the knowledge foundation to be able to intuitively learn it. It was really humbling for me to realize I didn’t understand basic math at a basic enough level to teach it to someone who had no idea what I was talking about.
Some hate the topic and won't try. Some are just bored of school or don't care. Some have tried in the past, failed, and have given up. Some may have interest but are more interested in their phone or computer or friends. And some just don't show up often.
Right. Or, you don't only need to understand the subject well, you still need to be able to remember what it was like to not understand.
For many experts, it becomes so second-nature to them that they literally can't explain it. They don't even always know what they are doing that makes it turn out so well. (They will often think they know, but they aren't always right).
I still think teaching someone else is one of the better ways to improve your own understanding as well.
There's lots of potential "gaps" in your own understanding that only show up when considered from a different angle. Like you might know how something works, but not always why it is that way.
Yep. I’m an engineer and my wife is the arts heavy person, but she was also a teacher for 15 years and it shows majorly if my kids need help with their homework. It became a problem when my daughter was going through geometry and pre-calc because while I knew how to do the things she did, I’m horrid at actually teaching it effectively. Meanwhile my wife hasn’t done math beyond multiplication for decades, but can teach stuff. She’s smart though so what usually ended up happening is I’d explain how to do something to her and then she’d teach the kids.
There is a reason not every pro athlete goes on to be a super successful coach that produces more pro athletes. There is also a reason some of the most successful coaches were barely mediocre when they played themselves. Being able to teach/coach something and being able to do that thing are two nearly independent skillsets.
And doubly so because certain people are good teachers for certain audiences -- some folks definitely span but teaching beginners takes a very different skill set to teaching folks who are well-into whatever the subject matter is
My husband isn’t a teacher by trade but he’s fantastic at teaching. He’s hella smart and anything he takes an interest in he goes in 100% so he’s extremely proficient in his areas of interest.
I typically find most people like that struggle to remember what it’s like to be a beginner and break things down, but my husband really has the knack for it.
He’s very patient and proud of others, which are great qualities for teaching. He’s really great :)
I've said this for ages. Universities are rife with Professors that are knolodgable but so few can teach. Subjects that are "harder" i feel also have far more leeway as people will just its difficult to undstand rather then the professor trying to figure out how to teach better. Add a lot of Professors are contractually obligated to teach in order to fund there research youve got a lot of professors who dont want to be there.
In my journey of learning a second language, I've really realised that being able to teach a language is an entirely separate skill to being fluent in that language. So many native speakers have no idea how to actually explain how their language works but assume they can teach it.
Years ago a whole of my old school friends were in the pub at xmas. Quite a few people had gone on to be teachers. They were nearly all teaching 15-18 year olds and they were boasting about their students grades which were all down to their teaching of course.
Then Lyn said "I teach primary age kids to read, write and basic maths". If I don't do my job properly you will never even see any of them in your classrooms.
You've never fully learned something until you've successfully taught it to someone. You find gaps in your knowledge whe you teach and people ask questions.
I’ve done technical training for military personnel for two different employers. I’m pretty good at it, and always got thanked by the personnel who took it because they actually learned something.
Then I got a manager who insisted that I setup the training “the military way” and it all went to shit. When I ran it, I knew the corpus of what I was to teach and the basic outline of the plan. I’d then run the course, weaving in relevant anecdotes, descriptions, and choosing my path based on questions from the class.
Forcing it into rigid 15 minute blocks did not work. After that manager, I transitioned to being a service engineer and have been much happier.
I have a friend who is really, really smart. He's a world-class expert on his subject matter, holds a Ph.D. from a world-famous institution.
I asked him if he ever considered teaching, and he said he was a TA as a grad student and once stepped in for a week when the professor was ill. That week cured him permanently of ever being a teacher.
Late to the party, but I've found that some of the best teachers are those who struggled, truly struggled, with the process of learning in the past. Either they had poor teachers when they were coming up, or they had to pound through the material the hard way, but that process of genuine struggle seems to be a common ingredient I've found.
I don't think I'm the greatest at what I do. I know I'm not. But I have been told by colleagues many years my senior that I am good at putting information across to people in a way that is easy to digest and incorporate into their own learning. I was a spec-ed kid that genuinely struggled all my life in school. I try to be what I rarely had growing up.
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u/Stinky-Camel 1d ago edited 21h ago
Teaching. You don’t only need to be well versed in the subject matter. You have to be able to effectively explain that information based on the specific audience in front of you