Sometimes the beginners are going to need a much longer attention span . . .
Ask HN: Why are expert practitioners often so bad at teaching beginners?
31–38 of 38 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why are expert practitioners often so bad at teaching beginners?
#32Sometimes the beginners are going to need a much longer attention span . . .
Other times it's the experts . . .
Re: Ask HN: Why are expert practitioners often so bad at teaching beginners?
#33This reminds me of an exercise in 5th grade: write detailed instructions to be followed _exactly_ to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. The teacher would then follow the instructions exactly and hilarity ensues, teaching something about expectations, assumptions, instructions, etc. "I didn't know I had to tell them to _open_ the bread bag!"
It is a reason why I like to teach by asking questions so I can learn where they have gaps and help them see their own gaps. "How does the teacher actually access the bread?" "oh, we have to open the bag first!"
Re: Ask HN: Why are expert practitioners often so bad at teaching beginners?
#34Sports is a good place to look for models since the hiring and firing of coaching staff is reported right alongside the other narratives during a season. It's rare for the best coaches to have been the elite practitioners of a sport. What's very common is for someone who struggled to even break into the elite league or had a very short career there goes on to work through the coaching ranks and become an elite coach.…
This is a really key point. While teaching is certainly a separate skill from doing, there is also the fact that the top performers in any given field may have never truly been novices in the way most beginners are. Think of Andy Bolton deadlifting 500 pounds on his first ever attempt. What is he supposed to tell someone about how to do it? He never struggled, never had anything to learn. It's why Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant were such terrible teammates. They just got frustrated that the game didn't come as easy to other players as it did to them and yelled at them for being shitty.
Re: Ask HN: Why are expert practitioners often so bad at teaching beginners?
#35Makes sense doesn't it though? When you learn everything you know without predefined structure, how easy is it to come up with one?
At the end of the day, self-taught like what they do - so if you really like what you do, you'll eventually figure out simply by spending time on the subject at hand...
e.g. Umberto Eco never replied to young authors who asked him "how can I publish my book?", simply because he did not had a good answer, he thought "same everyone publishes I suppose, you start small and then you go big and if the publisher thinks the book is good, they'll publish it"...
Re: Ask HN: Why are expert practitioners often so bad at teaching beginners?
#36I’ve never met a real expert who couldn’t teach. Sounds like you haven’t met real experts.
Re: Ask HN: Why are expert practitioners often so bad at teaching beginners?
#37I think teaching is a skill by itself. Effective teachers usually grasp the theory behind the learning process, while this is not necessarily true for expert practitioners. There is much more to this: knowing how to communicate effectively, how to keep learners engaged, adapting to your students etc. This means a person can effectively teach the basics without having deep technical expertise, it's simply not the most…
I agree. I have gone from working in tech to tech teacher.
One of the hurdles in teaching, over being the office tech wonder, is when the penny drops it's not all about you.
Re: Ask HN: Why are expert practitioners often so bad at teaching beginners?
#38i've had experiences with high level experts in personal situations...a friend of mine likes to call them "one-armed crabs". They've worked so hard on making 1 hand incredibly strong (their specialty) - that a lot of other things fall by the wayside.
Those may include hygeine, grooming, diet, social skills, sensitivity to faux pas, extreme ineptitude in unrelated skills to their specialty (these can get to absurd levels) and so on.
So it stands to reason perhaps that their ability to illuminate is next to impossible.
The road to understanding can be complex, filled with head banging on the wall...if you think to yourself what exactly made you go from "i dont get it", to "Eureka" - a lot of times there is no answer. Sometimes the synapses just do their thing. Now - previously mystic concept is intuitive, how do you go about translating that?