
Why Experts Make Bad Teachers - baptou12
https://medium.com/@cscalfani/why-experts-make-bad-teachers-ccaed2df029b#.75uxagozm
======
coreyp_1
Saying that all experts are bad teachers is like saying all <insert ethnic
group> are <insert stereotype>.

Good teachers are good teachers. If the good teacher is an expert, then they
are better than the good teacher who is not an expert, especially if they are
trying to teach a nuanced topic.

Does every teacher need to be an expert? Of course not. But plenty of non-
expert teachers will actually lead students astray by teaching them the wrong
model.

I've had plenty of "bad teachers" who were experts. I've also had plenty of
"bad teachers" who were not experts. I've had very few good teachers, period.
Bad teachers in lower-level topics are not noticed very much, but they are the
bane of undergraduates who are subjected to them often. Survivorship bias
might lead me to conclude that most experts are bad teachers, but the better
explanation is simply that teaching and being an expert in field X are
distinct abilities/skills, and that it is rare to find people who have
mastered both.

I aim to be an expert in my fields (currently 3 disparate ones in which I hold
degrees). I also aim to be a good teacher, which means that I take time to
figure out the best approach and experiences for teaching a particular topic.
I consider my expert status to be an advantage that complements my teaching
ability. Being an expert does not make me a bad teacher. Being a bad teacher
makes me a bad teacher.

~~~
avn2109
>> _" Saying that all experts are bad teachers is like saying all <insert
ethnic group> are <insert stereotype>."_

To be fair, the linked article makes exactly 0 claims about "all experts."
Instead, the claims pertain to "experts," which could be fairly interpreted as
"some experts" or even "a preponderance of experts."

If the article meant "all experts" it surely would have said so. Neither the
string "all experts" nor "every expert" appears in the linked article.

I know my objection seems pedantic but I see this happen _all the time_ ,
where someone makes a claim about e.g. "bicyclists do X" and then someone else
gleefully and sanctimoniously jumps in with an objection like "How can you
stereotype all cyclists like that, you are a terrible person!" When in fact
the original claim explicitly did not pertain to "all cyclists" but rather
merely to plural "cyclists." But now the claimer is super vilified as a
cyclist-hater.

~~~
sokoloff
I don't think "some experts" nor "plural cyclists" is the most reasonable
interpretation.

If I write "Black lives matter", it is not understood to mean that at least 2
lives matter (even though that's a perfectly valid, literal reading of the
phrase).

~~~
corysama
You are arguing from extremes on both sides. A blog post is not a math PhD
defense. Nor is it a formal systems proof. The words do not have one and only
one possible interpretation.

It is extremely common writing style to dedicate an article to "X does Y" when
trying to talk about an interesting tendency or correlation. Unfortunately, it
is also extremely common for people who work in formal systems to get an
allergic reaction and feel compelled to point out that "X does Y" is not
formally, literally, universally correct under all conceivable circumstances.
This leads to distracting arguments that waste huge amounts of time that could
have been spent discussing the interesting tendency/correlation and what to do
about it.

The proposed alternative is usually that the author should have peppered the
article with caveats, exceptions, disclaimers and preferably citations of
formally verified statistics. Again, this is not the Journal of Science. This
is an opinion piece. Watering down every statement with disclaimers would be a
distraction from the central point and would only serve to satisfy the
allergies of a few highly formal readers.

------
wccrawford
>Now imagine an expert who understands this model and tries to teach it to
you. Would they take you out in the world and let you encounter Binkles?
Probably not.

So it's not "experts" that are the problem, but "bad teachers". Trust me, not
taking the time to teach properly is not something unique to experts. Plenty
of non-experts fail to teach well, too. And plenty of experts teach well.

The best teachers are people who know the subject _and_ know how to teach.
Eliminating them from teaching simply because they know the subject will
eliminate the best teachers.

~~~
merpnderp
Yes this article is like "Experts have built all the abstractions which makes
them completely unaware of these abstractions, which is likely false. And even
more so if the expert has an advanced degree where they nearly always must
teach some classes.

~~~
sitkack
One factor, is that it really depends on how that person arrived at mastery
and their level of metacognition in the process. If anyone fails to grasp the
mindset of the person they are trying to explain a concept to, they will do a
poor job.

What do a I know? What concept am I trying to convey? What context does the
other person have? Based on their questioning what gaps do they have? How can
I fill in the links in that concept graph so that making a connection to that
new knowledge will fit in.

How does Feynman fit into the expert/teacher spectrum?

~~~
lawpoop
I agree. I call what I believe the critical factor in being a good teacher,
"sympathetic imagination"\-- the ability to imagine what the other person
perceives.

------
ep103
I understand the article, but the best teacher I ever had was an expert in his
field, and taught by the Socratic method. Only teacher I've ever had that had
enough knowledge of a topic that he could both truly answer any question we
asked via the method, _and_ answer in such a way as to direct the lesson. Miss
that guy.

~~~
iandanforth
Everyone who thinks they understand a topic should try to conduct a lecture
with this method. It's _so_ hard to not fall back on "because that's the way
it is" or make declarations of truth. The effort involved in getting your
audience to think though a subject often reveals how little careful thought
we've put in ourselves.

~~~
sitkack
I have often fallen into a trap where

    
    
      1. I really like a subject, I jive on it for awhile
      2. I try and teach it to people
      3. They immediately reach the bounds of my knowledge and I cannot answer their questions
    

To adequately teach a subject, the gap between the what you are teaching the
student and your own knowledge needs to be adequately large because concepts
will have "stringers" that exit that beginner sphere, loop around and re-
enter. You can't teach to the limits of your own knowledge.

~~~
Nadya
I've done this - but I also find for a limited group of subjects it's fine!

I know my music theory and I know how to play piano [0]. I gifted a close
friend a keyboard and taught her everything I knew about piano and music
theory. Within 3 months she was a better pianist than I was - and two years
later she was playing for the school choir and talent show. But that is a
subject in which "You learn the basics - and the rest comes with hours and
hours and hours of practice."

Another example is language (can be iffy if your pronunciation/grammar isn't
already near-fluent, even if your vocabulary or niche knowledge (eg: idioms)
isn't fluent). You can teach someone the pronunciation, some basic
grammar/vocabulary, and guide them towards becoming fluent themselves. A large
part is being able to guide people towards resources so that after you've
taught them all you know - they can teach themselves from there.

[0] Not very well, but just well enough to play this with only a few mistakes:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNajh166DBc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNajh166DBc)

~~~
sitkack
I think what you are describing is boot-strapping your peers. This is often
the case when there is a mix of advanced-beginners and total neophytes. Like
one student explaining IDE configuration, or how to debug a problem by looking
at log files. The teacher in this case often learns as much as the student.

~~~
Nadya
I guess that is one way to describe it! I bootstrap people to help them become
self-directed learners. I get them past the hardest part of learning something
new: not knowing where or how to start.

~~~
sitkack
I would never want to hamper the flow of information, or bootstrapping people
into a new subject. But bootstrapping is somewhat different than having the
deep knowledge that is required for really teaching a subject.

If the skill or area of knowledge lends itself to constructivism, then this
style of pedagogy is a perfect match.

Boots on!

------
LanceH
Perhaps someone can sort this into the fallacy in which it belongs.

Experts make bad teachers -- Most people make bad teachers -- easily explained
by teaching being a skill separate from other skills.

"Technical people make bad managers" is another one I see put into use all the
time.

~~~
iandanforth
The article is saying that having something explained to you by someone who's
abstractions are closer to your level will be, in the default case, better
than by someone who has more "advanced" abstractions. Additionally, great
teachers are ones that can match abstraction levels with their students and
slowly advance those abstractions as the student learns.

So, no it's not a fallacy, and yes the process of becoming an expert reduces
the likelihood that someone will be a good teacher (of non experts).

~~~
audleman
> and yes the process of becoming an expert reduces the likelihood that
> someone will be a good teacher (of non experts).

I agree, but would add that it loops around. Somebody with a very good grasp
of the abstractions at some point can go back and review all of the
intermediate ones. They can hold them simultaneously and help guide students
through them. That makes them excellent teachers.

~~~
LanceH
I've been thinking about this through the day and it really may depend on the
domain being taught.

A non expert may be able to teach a well defined skill step by step better
than someone else who performs those steps without thinking about them
anymore.

I've done too many years of math tutoring to know that the non experts in math
teaching math are not doing a consistently good job. A non expert in a complex
field has no way of teaching off script -- which is where a lot of students
will end up entirely by accident.

I see it all the time tutoring math. I'm helping students who wandered from
the one way that it was being taught. I help them get back some understanding
when they feel lost trying to execute algorithms to solve problems.

The article is very long on assertions and short on everything else. The final
argument against this in my experience is that experts blow away non experts
on fundamentals. Sports, math, science, writing, cooking, construction,
painting etc...

------
koolba
Teaching is a skill that is orthogonal to the subject being taught. Like
patience (closely related) and emotional intelligence (tangentially related),
you either have it or you don't.

Purely anecedata, but I don't know of anyone I'd consider a good teacher that
was taught to be such. It seems innate to them.

~~~
merpnderp
When that one teacher that everyone loves, but always seems exhausted, hears
your request for help, takes a long tired sigh, then turns on a smile and
spends the next 30 minutes walking you through the material....That's someone
who had to learn to be a great teacher. It obviously costs them a lot to
teach, yet teach they do.

------
Newtopian
There is one reason that can make it harder for "experts" to teach a subject
that others may teach better.

Best I can explain this is from a personnal story. I used to do rollerblade...
I mean a lot of it. It was my main mean of transportation ans I could do
easily 20-50km per day. Obviously after a year or two of this I got pretty
good and many of my friends would ask me to teach them how to do it. And I
did, relatively well, they got the hang of some subtelties of breaking and
turning.

However, I noticed that as time went on, I found it more difficult to teach
it. It got so natural for me that decomposing the movements in their atomic
parts was difficult.

I cound identify two factors that contributed to me going from a decent
teacher to a lousy one while at the same time I went from a decent
rollerblader to a pretty good one.

For one, the abstraction went from a concious one to a subcouncious one. I no
longer had to think about doing it right, I just did. Second I had not taught
anyone for a while, so I did not keep in touch with how I built these
abstractions in the first place. Both together contributed in me forgetting
how to build these abstractions.

To teach one does not have to be a foremost expert in a field but just ahead
of the target audience to be in control of the material they need to absorb.
The greater the difference in knowledge between the target audience and the
teacher the harder for the teacher to "bring down" his thaught processes to
their level. That is unless you 1 - were teaching the whole time between
getting from pretty good to expert. This way you've kept contact with the
different steps and breakdown you'va had to go through yourself while
learning. Here is probably where most have had their bad experience when an
expert tried to teach them but miserably failed at it. 2 - are a natural
pedagogue, in other words you are a genious at making things around you look
simple. I think Richard Feynmann would be an stellar example of this.

That being said, as a corrolary to point 2 above, there are people that are
just bad at teaching reagardless of any other factors.

------
whistlerbrk
I've had this notion for a while that the most qualified person to teach you
something is often a thoughtful person 1 or 2 levels above your current level
of understanding, not someone all the way at the top who can no longer relate
to your level of understanding.

All this said, being a truly good professional educator is a learned skill.

~~~
lordnacho
I second that. I remember having tutorials with professors that were highly
decorated. FRS and a whole list of acronyms after their names.

I always found it a struggle to ask them questions that helped my
understanding, because they were talking the expert language and I was talking
layman. Before you know how a transistor works, how do you know to use words
like "gate" in the way that explains how it works?

By contrast, the guy who was best at teaching was a phd student. He seemed to
know exactly where I would struggle, and he had a very simple manner of
explaining the next step.

------
franciscop
I disagree with the premise:

> "We’d all agree that to teach a subject, you must know the subject. So you’d
> think that experts would be the best teachers, but they’re not. The question
> is why?"

That is like saying that dogs are animals so you'd think all animals are dogs.

Moving past of it, I took a class on education which is probably the best
class I've ever taken in my life. First they made us create a 1 sentence
stating our goal for the teaching material we were going to create. Then we
created the content outline and then they made us ask ourselves how the
student would profit about each of them for the course objectives. We realized
how many of the things we added were abstractions we learned through the years
and totally unnecessary for a beginner in the subject.

To make the group assignment, we created a series of concrete tutorials where,
through concrete examples, we tried to add a specific (or more) new material
on each one while strengthening the previous learned lesson (each would build
on each other).

I am interested mainly in group learning (though I do some one-to-one), so
another important point is the speed of the learner due to previous
abstraction models. While on one-on-one you can tune up/down to the person,
with group learning the most you can do is to put them in knowledge groups or
try to automate it (which is quite hard). For instance, unless we are talking
about kids, most people know that you read top to bottom in English/most
languages and left to right, so explaining that about programming is not only
unnecessary but it makes your course boring. Then depending on the level you
can skip variables, or variable types.

~~~
rahimnathwani
Lessons don't need to be 1:1 to be tuned up/down to the learner. For example,
check out oppia.org, which has a range of lessons which students can take
themselves without supervision.

They learn by answering questions, and the flow changes depending on their
answers. Like an robot teacher using the socratic method.

------
sandworm101
The OP makes the false assumption that the goal of the teaching is to generate
other experts. That may be true of some courses at some schools, but I would
say that most teaching does not involve trying to turn a student into an
expert.

For instance, I am a lawyer. I am an expert in certain areas of law. I
teach/sell a lecture on intellectual property law, mostly to startups full of
young people who don't know IP from IP addresses. I have no intention of
turning them into IP experts let alone lawyers. That's not why they hire me.
My job is to give them a taste of some basic rules, to give them enough
knowledge so they can spot some red flags. And I'm there to answer specific
questions, to address those red flags. That;s most teaching. You want the
expert to relate a tiny piece of their knowledge, the focused bit you actually
need, so that you don't have to spend years at law school. Half of the task is
relating knowledge, the other half the selection of which knowledge to relate.
The expert then goes away to continue learning in their field, returning as
needed to keep you abreast of changes. The relationship remains asymmetrical.

------
heisenbit
"If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself."

This quote is attributed to both Feynman and Einstein. Both were very good in
breaking down complexity into chunks digestible by mere humans. Ironically the
author choose an Einstein image.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
Unexpectedly, it turns out to be pretty hard to explain _anything_ from the
adult world to a six year old.

It's not so hard to come up with some massively simplified analogies that can
give an adult the illusion they understand a topic they remain fundamentally
clueless about - pop science does this professionally.

It's something else entirely to teach specific professional domain competence
to the point where someone can work as an expert among other experts.

Oversimplification and popularisation do STEM no favours. It helps no one to
believe they understand string theory or climate change when they know barely
enough math to add two numbers together.

A more realistic understanding of how hard physics and engineering are would
mean more respect from the public, from law makers, and from other
professionals.

~~~
navbaker
>Oversimplification and popularisation do STEM no favours. It helps no one to
believe they understand string theory or climate change when they know barely
enough math to add two numbers together.

While I understand your general point, I think that oversimplification is
vital in order to convey the importance of scientific work to the (mostly)
non-scientists that often control the purse strings.

------
6stringmerc
Very odd article to me and not particularly fond of what it's reaching for as
a concept. I mean, I think the premise being promoted is debatable from an
Educational Research perspective, which I got familiar with in graduate
school.

Honestly I kind of bristle at the implication being done at the bottom of
basically letting a child/student/trainee wander through the forest of music
in the name of learning abstraction the hard way, because, you know, experts
aren't good teachers. With something like guitar, I'd argue anything _but_ and
expert makes a mediocre or even poor teacher because of the nature of the
objective.

It's not against the rules to reply a student's question with "I don't know
the exact answer to that, but I will get back to you" but I'd like to think
those are infrequent asides in an otherwise useful exchange where the
teacher/prof actually knows the ins and outs of things and can explain them
because they had to learn them too.

Then we start getting into issues of diversity in learning styles and the
conversation gets a lot more complex than what this piece asserts. Good food
for thought and a neat topic, but I'd pass on endorsing its conclusion(s) as
stated herein.

------
krosaen
I like this post, but perhaps it'd be more accurate to say that expertise is a
necessary but not sufficient condition to teach a subject? I do find that the
very best teachers have mastery of the material.

On a related note, when I posted this notebook about the sigmoid function to
HN

[http://karlrosaen.com/ml/notebooks/logistic-regression-
why-s...](http://karlrosaen.com/ml/notebooks/logistic-regression-why-sigmoid/)

it was upvoted to the front page (presumably by non-experts like me) but
derided in the comments by some experts, I think in part because it seemed so
obvious to not bare explaining. So I think a challenge of having expertise is
to remember what it's like to not understand something and take the beginner
on the journey somehow, as the article gets at. And from this perspective a
non-expert or aspiring expert can be in a sweet spot of just having learned
the material him/her self. But it can be dangerous if you end up with the
blind leading the blind.

~~~
thaumasiotes
Maybe this came up in the earlier comments, but... why are you calling w_0 +
w_1·x_1 + w_2·x_2 + ... + w_n·x_n a "linear combination" of the x values? It
isn't. (Nor is the constant term really a "weight".)

~~~
krosaen
How is is w1 _x1 + w2_ x2 +... wn*xn not a linear combination? Or is your
objection that, upon adding w0 it is no longer a linear combination of
x1,...xn? In that case would it be more accurate to say, "a linear combination
of xs plus a constant"?

~~~
thaumasiotes
Correct, the constant term makes the function nonlinear. A linear function
must necessarily satisfy f(0) = 0 (or, I guess, f(0) = infinity).

------
whack
The author makes some very good points, but seems to have missed the real
punchline. Instead of making this about experts-vs-non-experts, the real
lesson is the value of _pretesting_ and similar methods.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/07/magazine/why-flunking-
exam...](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/07/magazine/why-flunking-exams-is-
actually-a-good-thing.html)

The basic idea is simple. Instead of "telling people the answers", let them
bang their heads against the wall first, trying to solve a problem that they
have never studied before. Once they've realized that they don't know how to
solve the problem, then teach them how to do so. This way, because the
students have experienced the frustration of solving the problem themselves,
they'll truly appreciate whatever knowledge you provide that can help them
out.

------
arkj
There are experts who are bad at teaching but be assured all good teachers
will be good enough "experts".

------
einhverfr
I don't agree that experts are necessarily bad teachers. Some of the best
experts in physics have been those who were widely regarded as great teachers
(Feynman and Heisenberg being great examples).

However, I think there is something to the article as applied to the software
industry. Often times we have come to understand solely through abstractions
and abstractions are dangerous in this regard particularly when they don't
match reality.

A really good example of this was the effort to apply the OSI model of
abstractions to TCP/IP back around the turn of the century. Without an
understanding of what made the ITU OSI effort different from the DARPA TCP/IP
effort, at best one got an overly confusing and misleading understanding of
what was actually happening from a networking perspective.

I do a lot of teaching these days as I have changed from being a self-employed
consultant to being an employee at a Swedish consulting and training firm, and
I do a lot of thinking as to "what are the right abstractions to push in this
course?" In IT, that is a remarkably difficult question and one I answer
largely through my love of history. For example, when I talk about object-
orientation, I start with procedural programming, discuss why structural
programming largely replaced it, and then discuss the problems of having your
code contracts based on your data structures in C. From there I go to my main
abstraction: Object orientation is an effort to hide state changes behind
interfaces, to make the interface responsible for the state rather than the
outside routine responsible for it. (This also makes it easy to start
discussing functional programming.)

The danger of the expert is that the expert may become complacent about this
question but the best experts are those who have not. Feynman wrote about
insisting that he could explain his theories to his non-physicist relatives.
Heisenberg wrote a book on the history of philosophy and how this applies to
physics arguing the whole time that data does not imply theory.

If our experts aren't good teachers, that says more about what we want from
experts and about our industry than it does about expertise generally.

------
skybrian
This article would be stronger if it were just about the importance of
learning from concrete examples.

After all, education is all about taking shortcuts compared to figuring
everything out from first principles.

------
chatman
Richard Feynmann was one of the best teachers ever!

------
kristianc
>> Binkles have long plackerts and whipitat their snoblats when they get
excited

What I was most interested by was how much of this example you could
understand. A binkle is some kind of animal, a plackert is some kind of body
part, i'd imagine a whipitat is some kind of action, and I'd imagine a snoblat
is another kind of body part. Already I know more about binkles than I did.

You're also, however, a long way from a dog simply by describing a 'barking
thing'. There are things that bark that are not dogs, and there are somewhere,
dogs that do not bark. Wittgenstein demonstrated that there are an entire set
of items that you could call a table than share no common features whatsoever.

I'm a fan of the dialectic method for this reason: it encourages people to go
beyond the limits of their own knowledge by applying first principles to
things they don't understand. This tends to take you a lot further than "here,
learn this."

Further reading on this:

Wittgenstein: Blue and Brown Books
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_and_Brown_Books](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_and_Brown_Books))

Plato, Meno
([http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1643/1643-h/1643-h.htm](http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1643/1643-h/1643-h.htm))

------
clifanatic
Well, no, experts teach just fine, if they're good teachers. I agree with the
author's premise that "the only way to learn is the hard way", but there's not
reason to think that being an expert in a subject means that you've forgotten
the "path to learning". Experts still make better teachers because they
understand why things are the way they are and can answer questions that
somebody else might not even have thought of.

------
golemotron
There's another problem where a teacher makes a false generalization, maybe
due to lack of expertise, and attempts to teach by writing an article about
it.

------
lordnacho
I'm not sure the "hard way" is the only way that works.

If you look at a new field, you can often do some meta-learning that will help
you.

For instance, you can browse the introductory texts for common words. Words
that are uncommon in normal English (ie not "the" or unspecific verbs like
"do" or "have") will appear frequently. You'll quickly discover the subtopics
this way. For instance, you will find the word "inflation" in an econ text and
conclude it's something to be learned about.

The organization of the text is also a clue. You can scan headings and suppose
that whatever terms are there are considered important.

Once you've done a scan you have some priors that hopefully will put your
mind's model nearer to what the experts have, and you can start refining by
actually reading.

Basically, apply some ML-like ideas to what you're looking at (clustering,
correlations, and so on).

------
cirgue
Even though the article bungled the concept IMO, this is actually a pretty
well-documented phenomenon in psychology and economics:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge)

------
ColinDabritz
The article makes some good points, part of the problem I have with describing
"functions" is that there really is a LOT to unpack there, but after years of
software development the idea of a function with all its nuance is a single
idea, very compressed. To teach that you have to unpack it and take it slow.

I would also note that expertise in one field doesn't mean you have expertise
in another field. Many (or most) expert software engineers are not expert
educators. They are separate skills. It's beautiful to watch someone with both
skill sets work. I strive for understanding and expertise in both, and I hope
that it helps.

------
bbctol
I think this might be a post hoc explanation of an old fallacy. People become
teachers, and are promoted to a visible level, based on a combination of
teaching skill and expertise in the field. If someone was a bad teacher and
_not_ an expert, they'd be cut off. Thus, there are many teachers who are good
at teaching with low expertise, and many teachers who are top experts with
little teaching skill. I think there are also people who are top experts and
good teachers (I've been fortunate enough to meet some), but they're obviously
rare than the other two.

------
eastbayjake
I was a history major in college before joining Teach For America as a
chemistry and physics teacher. That pivot often surprises and confuses people
-- and is occasionally a reason they criticize TFA -- but I think it was done
deliberately and for good reason: as a history expert I would have relied much
more on my abstractions while teaching history than I did teaching
chemistry/physics I had to re-learn from my high school notes and my students'
textbook.

~~~
e2e8
But then the students might as well just read the textbook. I had in high
school, physics PhDs for physics and math and it was the best experience of my
educational life. The much deeper level of understanding they brought to bear
allowed them convey the material more clearly and also draw our attention to
deeper connections with more advanced topics.

~~~
eastbayjake
You should bear in mind that:

(1) At the high school level, for most students, a teacher's value-add is
diagnosing and remediating misunderstandings. It's odd that we expect high
school teachers to create curricula from scratch when it'd be better for a
highly-optimized lecture (e.g. celebrated teacher recording a video lecture)
to convey knowledge to lots of students and let teachers focus on the high-
touch, one-on-one work of figuring out what individual students are
misunderstanding and working with them to correct it.

(2) Teach For America works with students who are often far behind national
standards. My students in Mississippi had one year of science between 5th and
9th grade, so most of the nuance of a physics PhD would have been wasted on
remediating things like basic atomic structure. My anecdote is particular to a
very low-performing region.

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zeveb
This is why folks who complain about rote learning are on the wrong track. You
have to learn things by rote before you can internalise the abstractions.
Yeah, that means lots of boring scales before you can play a solo; it means
sitting in a classroom saying, 'amo, amas, amat' before you read Bellum
Gallicum; it means … whatever one does to first learn to program (it's
honestly so long ago now that I really can't remember what it was like).

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cannonpr
Why can't the article simply say that being a subject expert is required to
teach a topic to someone to an expert level, however you also need to be an
expert in teaching, in other helping someone build a model of the knowledge in
their mind. Both are required ?

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rimantas
As many already said: being an expert does not magically make you a good
teacher. But if you are an expert AND understang teaching you will be a great
teacher.

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forgottenpass
_We’d all agree that to teach a subject, you must know the subject. So you’d
think that experts would be the best teachers,_

No I wouldn't. Why would anyone think that? This article is built on a
foundation of affirming the consequent. (Sorta, there are enough fuzzy words
to weasel around making a logical assertion, but it boils down to "if there's
a lot of Q, then in that case surely there must be a lot of P")

If someone is going to write such bollocks, not only do I not trust their
article, I stopped reading because I fear it will only make me stupider.

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posterboy
Because few are experts in two things, the subject matter _and teaching_.

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purplelobster
Can anyone recommend a good book on teaching?

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perseusprime11
Some please define expert for me.

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known
Subjective versus Objective

