
Those Who Can Do, Can’t Teach - pseudolus
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/25/opinion/sunday/college-professors-experts-advice.html
======
fipple
You can see this phenomenon in American football where the pretty good
quarterbacks often become great coaches but the very best quarterbacks rarely
do. The pretty good ones got good by being very detailed students of the game,
memorizing thousands of plays and watching as much game film as possible...
the absolute elites like Joe Montana often just had the ability to see an open
receiver 30 yards away and throw the ball with 4 inch accuracy to the point
that he would have run to during the ball’s flight.

~~~
swinnipeg
Who are the great quarterbacks that have struggled at coaching?

My best guess is that the spoils of being a great quarterback are so great,
and the retirement job offers are so lucrative that they simply don't want to
take the steps required to learn to coach.

For example a pretty good QB turned great coach like Jim Harbaugh took a job
as an assistant coach Western Kentucky after he retired, and subsequently
moved up the coaching ladder. I struggle to see a great QB taking a road like
that when they have so many other options.

~~~
kthejoker2
For varying definitions of great ...

All 5 HOF QBs who coached in the NFL have losing records.

Norm van Brocklin, HOF QB who could never coach another HOF QB (Fran
Tarkenton)

Bart Starr

Otto Graham

Sammy Baugh

Bob Waterfield

But yeah basically as soon as broadcasting and endorsements became a post foot
all career option, all the top QBs went that route.

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nickjj
I don't think this is always true.

Some of the best books and courses I've taken were from people who are experts
at what they do. The keyword there is "are", not "were".

There's just an extra level of insight you can get from someone who is in the
trenches doing real work, rather than trying to learn from someone who never
really did the thing for real but happens to be an "armchair expert".

I think this is especially true for software development material and it's one
of the reasons why I continue to do freelance work while creating video
courses on the side. If I stopped consulting then I would become rusty in my
craft if all I did was come up with course material.

An example of this would be DHH's books. Would you rather learn business from
DHH (someone involved in a ridiculously successful business that operates
today), or a college professor who likely never ran a really successful
business but knows a ton of theory about it but also has 30 years of teaching
experience?

I would argue DHH's advice in his books would be more valuable, even if he
happens to be a less skilled teacher on paper.

~~~
thisisit
Pardon my ignorance but who is DHH?

~~~
js2
David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Ruby on Rails, cofounder of Basecamp.

[http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/](http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/)

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mjfern
Teaching like any learned skill requires significant commitment and practice.
Those who "do" like Einstein aren't prepared to carve out 1000s of hours from
their scientific research, where their passion lies, to learn and practice how
to teach well. I'm quite sure that if Einstein loved teaching as much as
research he would learn to be an outstanding teacher.

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rectang
The notion that there's a "do <-> teach" continuum is just silly. OK, Einstein
was great at "do" and lousy at "teach". How about Feynmann?

~~~
ur-whale
Feynmann was not exactly what you'd call "statistically representative".

~~~
rectang
Teaching requires a set of distinct skills which are different from
researching. Naturally not everyone is equally gifted or developed in all
areas.

One of the most valuable skills in life is the ability to adapt your mental
models and present ideas at an audience-appropriate level. It is useful in
teaching; it is also useful in leadership, sales, design...

As an exemplar, I submit Akamai CTO and MIT professor Tom Leighton.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3LMbpZIKhQ&list=PLB7540DEDD...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3LMbpZIKhQ&list=PLB7540DEDD482705B)

~~~
xc1002
This is all true, but learning to teach takes time and one has less time for
research.

Too much presenting moves one into extrovert mode where one has many "ideas",
but no proofs or execution.

I rarely see a top presenter actually doing anything.

Feynman really is an exception, and there are rumors that his classes were
_too_ good -- the students would think they understood everything, but
actually did not.

This is also what I experienced when reading his books (which are superbly
written).

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rzzzt
It is also hard to formalize and convey to someone else what one already
knows:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_knowledge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_knowledge)

~~~
rectang
The formulation I like is the "curse of knowledge".

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge)

But overcoming the "curse of knowledge" is exactly what makes for good
teachers, good designers, good communicators, and so on!

This idea that you better you are at "teach", the worse you are at "do" and
vice versa is A) a sharp dig at academia, and B) a result of the cognitive
dissonance we feel when someone is extraordinarily good at something valuable
but has underdeveloped teaching skills.

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ooajim
If it is indeed true, then Feynman is probably the biggest exception to it.

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thisisit
This topic is plenty debatable.

Many people I meet who are excellent at their jobs are lousy teachers. They
tend to have instinctive grasp of things which doesn't transition well in
teaching.

But people who are good but not great at their jobs tend to be the best
teachers. One of the reason is that these guys tend to have detailed notes and
learned through experience.

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dan-robertson
As the article mentioned Einstein as a teacher, I think it’s worth asking
about his writing too. I think his actual papers are very good at explaining
the theory and indeed better than many textbooks. I think a good way to start
learning eg special relativity is to get a copy (available online) of
Einstein’s first paper on special relativity and read it. The paper has to
explain it for people who have never really seen such a thing before.
Obviously a certain level of mathematical ability is required to understand
the paper and maybe this is more than required by a modern textbook. A modern
textbook may also explain things in a different way with eg 4-vectors and lots
of spacetime diagrams.

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nopinsight
Suppose that there are 1% of people in a field who are considered great at
doing and 2% who are great at teaching, then just from expectation without
additional knowledge the vast majority of great teachers won't be great at
doing.

Also, if the percentage of people who are great at both is higher than 0.02%
but lower than 1%, there is a positive correlation between teaching and doing,
but it is not a perfect correlation. I suspect this is the case.

Why? Both doing and teaching something well often require clear and systematic
thinking. However, there are also disparate skills required for each and only
those with time, inclinations, and opportunities to practice both skill sets
could become great at both.

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abhishekjha
I faced the consequences of this first hand. In the Abstract Algebra class we
were recommended a very standard book by one of the giants in the field and I
suffered the entire semester depending on that one book. I should have
switched a little too early. I learnt it the hard way and advise anybody to
look for alternative resources or more explanations once you start seeing a
lot of text such as "and the rest is left as an exercise for the reader"
without much explanation irrespective of the field you are in and regardless
of the big name attached to a source. At times an obscure blog is able to
explain a difficult concept much more easily.

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igammarays
Now that I think about it, the _worst_ CS teachers I've had were the ones who
taught part-time while working in respected positions in industry, or had a
strong industry resume behind them.

Previously I had wondered why some of my best CS professors in university
didn't go for a private sector job where they could be earning 1.5-2x doing
programming instead of teaching it, but now I realize they would've been
mediocre programmers instead of great teachers.

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rurban
Nonsense. All the great teachers I had were also great practioners. I like to
see myself also there. Rhetoric is trainable.

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planetmcd
The irony that he cites Harvard Physics is the vanguard of rethinking how to
teach Physics, and possibly the root of this article come from Harvard
Physicist Eric Mazur:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIFL0K184kg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIFL0K184kg)

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brightball
They say the best teachers struggled with the subject.

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k__
Does this work the other way around?

People tell me I'm an excellent teacher, but I'd consider myself a mediocre
developer...

~~~
sametmax
Being a good dev requires long term commitments and delivering.

Teaching is a serie of small sessions, each connected but still, they have
their own close little finish line.

So if you are a procrastinator or have a hard time finishing, you may be a
good teacher and yet a mediocre dev

~~~
lerchmo
I actually would see teaching as the longer term project without the small
wins you can expect in programming.

~~~
sametmax
When you end a lesson, you win. Always. There are very few ways to lose at a
teaching moments if you are good at it.

I can code for several days before having something that will make someone
smile.

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Hendrikto
> My renowned astrophysics professor taught us how the universe seemed to be
> expanding, but never bothered to explain what it was expanding into (still
> waiting for someone to demystify that one).

Wow... and this person went to Harvard??

~~~
foo101
I want to know the answer too.

I always thought the universe is expanding to a larger universe. I never
thought that it could be expanding to something else.

~~~
fvdessen
the universe doesn’t expand into something bigger. It’s like multiplying the
set of the real numbers by two, the set doesn’t become bigger and its
boundaries do not change.

~~~
foo101
I think you or someone understands this subject should write a detailed
comment in this thread that explains this to software folks like us. I
appreciate the help.

