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
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u/Relative_Implement_7 22h ago
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.
He was so cool I miss that fucker every day.