| 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. |