On The Mastery Of Teaching

http://www.skorks.com/2010/04/on-the-mastery-of-teaching/

by instantramen • 16 years ago

15 7 16 years ago

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.

johkra• 16 years ago

I agree. Sometimes, I deliberately set myself the task to be able to explain something when attending a lecture - I make different notes and I believe I understand things better. (pkrumins is probably on the right path.)

Interesting enough, I believe just knowing how to teach makes learning easier. I've learned some (Romance) languages and taught my own mother tongue in tandems. Although there are significant differences, I feel that I could learn better with my experiences from teaching.

balding_n_tired2• 16 years ago

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

HappySushiCo2• 16 years ago

Ain't that the truth :)

btilly• 16 years ago

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.

samratjp• 16 years ago

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...)

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.

balding_n_tired2• 16 years ago

The NY Times magazine for March 7 had a piece on this: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/magazine/07Teachers-t.html...

On The Mastery Of Teaching

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