Teaching is Selling

This is the almost the same idea as "Sell the why, not the what".

This seems like a good way to teach about a product or tool (as you promote its use, or in other words, sell it). I can see such advice being useful on today's HN, which is full of people who need to sell tech.

But really, teaching is not selling. The objectives are different. There may be some overlaps of technique, but it's easy to overstate that. It is correspondingly easy to take this advice much too far.

For example, teaching which bundles exhortations and moral value judgements might help to improve recall, but it might also be misleading or intensely annoying, and might encourage teachers to suppress facts that don't match the intended emotion or message.

When you're teaching, it's just unethical not to strive for some degree of objectivity and encouragement of critical thinking. I won't remark on what the ethics are for salesmen because that battle is unwinnable, but surely we can agree that teachers have certain professional obligations.

I have to agree. The distinction between "teaching" and "imparting information to achieve x goal" seems to be getting lost here. Teaching to me involves a give and take of some kind, some form of productive conversation or line of questioning rather than just inserting data into brains in a linear fashion.

I did find the unapologetically mechanistic perspective here interesting though, since I just got done teaching St. Augustine ("City of God") to a class of very bright students at an Ivy League university. They hated it and I couldn't figure out why at first. To me its a treasure trove of fun minutiae about weird Roman deities, a deep meditation on why empires rise and fall, and an example of one of the greatest rhetoricians in history at the height of his powers. To them it was boring - even more boring than Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics which I personally find dry as dust.

The reason, it became apparent, was that St. Augustine was doing something similar to what this blog post outlines - following a didactic line of argument intended to dissuade potential disagreements rather than provoke them. (I personally don't see Augustine that way, but they did - in the words of a student, "it felt like a lecture and not a conversation.") Or, perhaps, they thought Augustine was selling his ideology rather than teaching it?

This "teacher" notes this method works at conferences, but this is where all the attendees want your product. What happens in the classroom where there are those that couldn't care less about your product, you, or the subject you are trying to keep them engaged on? As another poster mentioned - she is hitting on some of Gagne's points but if she were to include the others she would be at instruction which is...teaching. Thus I could use any other profession and say something like "Engineering is teaching" and the fact that I gather materials is somehow going to translate into why every teacher should also be an engineer.

The good/best teachers are not just salespeople, but also engineers, chemists, historians, philosophers, lawyers, and all sorts of other professions wrapped into one person teaching about a subject that not any one of those single professions covers.

as a former teacher, I can tell you that good teachers are all about people skills...in fact, a deep knowledge of the curriculum might actually make one a worse teacher and not a better one...The more time you spend acquiring any sort of knowledge other than people skills knowledge is going to hurt you.