
On The Mastery Of Teaching - instantramen
http://www.skorks.com/2010/04/on-the-mastery-of-teaching/
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btilly
_From pre-school all the way to university, it just doesn't seem like the
people who teach are the best and brightest any more._

And when did the best ever do it?

When my mother was at Stanford in the 1950s they were into ability testing.
They found that the department with the lowest scores on a wide variety of
ability tests was education.

Every piece of evidence that I've seen since has supported this observation.
While there are some truly great teachers (one of whom died earlier this
month, Jaime Escalante), and many well-meaning and highly motivated ones, on
average teaching does not attract the best and the brightest. It never has,
and unless we really change the rules, it never will.

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samratjp
The best ones live on in time immemorial it seems - Feynman comes to mind.

I should also add Walter Lewin to the list for bringing teaching alive
([http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Physics/8-02Electricity-and-
Magnet...](http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Physics/8-02Electricity-and-
MagnetismSpring2002/CourseHome/))

I don't see why practitioners can't be good teachers really? I had the great
pleasure of chatting with Dr. Dennis Liotta (he made the breakthrough HIV drug
that more than 95% of HIV patients in the U.S use) the other day and boy can
that man teach. I walked out learning not just about chemistry, but also but
drug discovery, economics of scale in the developing world, ethical way of
making wealth, etc all the while he was teaching.

Perhaps, the better teachers excite, not educate. For the excitement itself is
the highest form of education.

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balding_n_tired
The NY Times magazine for March 7 had a piece on this:
[http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/magazine/07Teachers-t.html...](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/magazine/07Teachers-t.html?ref=magazine)

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HappySushiCo
Great points. I personally find that teaching software engineering
concepts/skills to others helps me shore up my own knowledge - in many cases,
it actually helps me learn more effectively than just teaching myself.

Also, I believe the key to being a good teacher is putting oneself in the
other person's shoes - which is, as the author mentions, essential to
explaining technical matters to nontechnical people.

~~~
balding_n_tired
The guy who taught my section of calculus years ago said that you don't really
know it till you teach it.

~~~
HappySushiCo
Ain't that the truth :)

