
Teaching is Selling - narpaldhillon
http://lizthedeveloper.com/teaching-is-selling
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pekk
This seems like a good way to teach about a product or tool (as you promote
its use, or in other words, sell it). I can see such advice being useful on
today's HN, which is full of people who need to sell tech.

But really, teaching is not selling. The objectives are different. There may
be some overlaps of technique, but it's easy to overstate that. It is
correspondingly easy to take this advice much too far.

For example, teaching which bundles exhortations and moral value judgements
might help to improve recall, but it might also be misleading or intensely
annoying, and might encourage teachers to suppress facts that don't match the
intended emotion or message.

When you're teaching, it's just unethical not to strive for some degree of
objectivity and encouragement of critical thinking. I won't remark on what the
ethics are for salesmen because that battle is unwinnable, but surely we can
agree that teachers have certain professional obligations.

~~~
benbreen
I have to agree. The distinction between "teaching" and "imparting information
to achieve x goal" seems to be getting lost here. Teaching to me involves a
give and take of some kind, some form of productive conversation or line of
questioning rather than just inserting data into brains in a linear fashion.

I did find the unapologetically mechanistic perspective here interesting
though, since I just got done teaching St. Augustine ("City of God") to a
class of very bright students at an Ivy League university. They hated it and I
couldn't figure out why at first. To me its a treasure trove of fun minutiae
about weird Roman deities, a deep meditation on why empires rise and fall, and
an example of one of the greatest rhetoricians in history at the height of his
powers. To them it was boring - even more boring than Aristotle's Nichomachean
Ethics which I personally find dry as dust.

The reason, it became apparent, was that St. Augustine was doing something
similar to what this blog post outlines - following a didactic line of
argument intended to dissuade potential disagreements rather than provoke
them. (I personally don't see Augustine that way, but they did - in the words
of a student, "it felt like a lecture and not a conversation.") Or, perhaps,
they thought Augustine was selling his ideology rather than teaching it?

~~~
6stringmerc
Slick write-up, and I especially appreciate your personal story and context to
mull over. I studied Curriculum Design as my advanced degree program, have
worked 5+ retail/sales/customer service jobs, and also done formal classroom
instruction. I like that distinction you put forward, because it captures what
I, well, disliked about sales as a profession.

I love imparting knowledge, telling stories, and holding a person's interest -
that is a transaction in and of itself. It's the end goal. What I had to do in
sales was get to the very end of the discussion and then "ask for the sale"
which always felt like a disservice to the relationship / exchange. As in, if
I did well educating somebody that they needed to buy the movie _Heat_ to test
out their audio system, I shouldn't have to say, "So, are you going to
purchase this today?" because they'll have already made the decision
themselves. Sales is hard like that, and I can appreciate good sales
techniques in both the soft and hard approaches.

...as to your story, it really reminded me of a write-up over at the AV Club
on the second installment of the _Atlas Shrugged_ independent movies. The film
beats the audience over the head with dialog that only serves to advance the
philosophy (or what have you) of the story, meaning it's really preachy and
not very entertaining. I think there's a difference in audience expectations
depending on subject matter, e.g. it's more acceptable to learn STEM material
from a heavy handed teacher, but with personal belief systems/notions,
lecturing creates push-back in many cases.

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nekopa
She could probably improve her method by adding some stuff from Gagne's Nine
Steps of Instruction[0]

Most of what she's doing I would say is not so much sales stuff, but hitting
on important educational theory. For example: She starts with the idea of
getting them interested in the topic, by choosing something they've
encountered, and then telling an amusing anecdote. (That would be Gagne's step
1 and 2) She then goes on to presenting the new info, but it would be stronger
if she did Gagne's step 3 - Ask for prior knowledge. That really cements the
audience's trust in you and the topic when some co-participants share their
similar amusing anecdotes. I have done this even in large conference settings,
and I have always found at least one person brave enough to share their
experiences...

Add in a few more of the steps and you really do get effective learning.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_M._Gagn%C3%A9#Nine_step...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_M._Gagn%C3%A9#Nine_steps_of_instruction)

~~~
acbart
It boggles my mind that I don't see more material about Instructional Design
and the work done by Gagne in education discussions. These are extremely
powerful theories with deep practical application, well-known in some
disciplines. But CS Education heavily underutilizes them.

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stillsut
> this year in the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics points out that
> recreational math can be used to awaken mathematics-related “joy,”
> “satisfaction,” “excitement” and “curiosity” in students, ... In contrast,
> the Common Core in the United States does not explicitly mention this
> emotional side of the subject, regarding mathematics only as a tool. [0]

[0]: [http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/12/opinion/the-importance-
of-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/12/opinion/the-importance-of-
recreational-math.html)

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homonculus1
I think it makes more sense to say that selling includes an element of
teaching.

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lvspiff
This "teacher" notes this method works at conferences, but this is where all
the attendees want your product. What happens in the classroom where there are
those that couldn't care less about your product, you, or the subject you are
trying to keep them engaged on? As another poster mentioned - she is hitting
on some of Gagne's points but if she were to include the others she would be
at instruction which is...teaching. Thus I could use any other profession and
say something like "Engineering is teaching" and the fact that I gather
materials is somehow going to translate into why every teacher should also be
an engineer.

The good/best teachers are not just salespeople, but also engineers, chemists,
historians, philosophers, lawyers, and all sorts of other professions wrapped
into one person teaching about a subject that not any one of those single
professions covers.

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p0larboy
This article is really useful. When i'm writing my web dev related articles,
I'm always thinking what's the best way to allow my readers to digest my
points better

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crabasa
I prefer to think that really great selling is teaching, not the other way
around.

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djhn
This is the almost the same idea as "Sell the why, not the what".

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anti-shill
as a former teacher, I can tell you that good teachers are all about people
skills...in fact, a deep knowledge of the curriculum might actually make one a
worse teacher and not a better one...The more time you spend acquiring any
sort of knowledge other than people skills knowledge is going to hurt you.

