[Ntrails]

> Due to experience with teaching mathematics I know that it requires a lot of effort to convince a student that the reason 2x+3x is 5x is because of the distributive property

pffft. Put two skittles next to three skittles and ask what the resulting summation is in terms of skittles.

I'm being a bit glib, but the reality seems to be that many smart people think teaching is trivial, a simple case of knowledge transfer. If you understand it, surely you can teach it to someone else.

My personal experience at uni suggests that truly brilliant people who understand topics perfectly can be Not Good at instilling understanding in others. It's a different skill imo.

[syzarian]

Great example. It demonstrates you don’t know how to teach the subject. Your Skittles example won’t help with explaining how to add ax + bx. To generalize the concept of combining like terms we need to refer to the distributive property.