At novice and intermediate competency levels you’re consciously considering what you’re doing as you plan it and do it. Conscious thought for most people is in the form of a semi-verbal “internal dialog” and is thus easier to verbalize to someone else. The downside of conscious thought is that you do it much more slowly and with much greater effort, but it’s easy to explain. For many subjects, once you’ve utterly mastered and internalized them, the way you think about them becomes largely intuitive, something you do in large part without conscious thought.
Ask HN: Why are expert practitioners often so bad at teaching beginners?
21–30 of 38 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why are expert practitioners often so bad at teaching beginners?
#22Learning is a state transition from not knowing something to knowing it. Teaching is assisting someone through that state transition. To effectively teach someone, you need an understanding of their current state as well as the trajectory of states they are capable of transitioning through.
An expert is someone who knows the final state very well, but for whom the initial states and state transitions are a distant memory.
Re: Ask HN: Why are expert practitioners often so bad at teaching beginners?
#23Easy - they've forgotten what it's like to not know
I wrote about this 15+ years ago: https://antipaucity.com/2006/05/06/the-good-the-bad-and-the-...
Re: Ask HN: Why are expert practitioners often so bad at teaching beginners?
#24Context is often missing. Or basically, the four quadrant. People often talk about the known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns, but most people forget the ( possibly most important one ), unknown knowns. And because the expert practitioner didn't even known they know ( something that they think is obvious but didn't know others have no idea ), it is hard for them to teach.
Unlike in Universities, where each student are given the same resources for them to read through and progress, most of the teaching in real world ( non-academic settings ) does not ofter the same path.
And without those foundational knowledge, a lot of discussions would be broken because the assumption of you knowing is untrue. For example, half of the software developers have absolutely zero idea how computer works. But they somehow think they do, as witness in the recent HN discussions. This makes teaching and discussions on a subject enormously difficult.
Edit: OH this is great. I just discovered there is a term for it in the comment below. The curse of knowledge. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge
Re: Ask HN: Why are expert practitioners often so bad at teaching beginners?
#25In my experience, it's the gap in understanding. To someone with 10+ years experience, certain motes of knowledge might be long-worn givens, where to a beginner it could be groundbreaking wisdom. Without proper introspection, it can be difficult to correctly identify "What doesn't a beginner in this field know?"
Re: Ask HN: Why are expert practitioners often so bad at teaching beginners?
#26I learned this teaching my own daughter.
Teaching is a hard skill. You start with an explanation that you think works. Then you have to adjust it based on how your subject responds. Do they get it? Part? Is it not clicking? And then step out of yourself and figure out what's another way to visualize or think about the problem.
A lot of it is not about being right, but being useful.
Ive applied this to things you wouldn't think is teaching, like helping a friend understand why her career path isn't working out for her and steps she can take to improve it. Took an hour to figure out the bad assumption in her mind and figuring out a way around it.
Re: Ask HN: Why are expert practitioners often so bad at teaching beginners?
#27Is it off-topic to simply say that expert-level explanations of some topics explained meaningfully may make for boring or out-of-reach lessons?
Is it useful to learn multiplication before addition? Or exponentiation before multiplication? Or tetration before exponentiation?
I mean there's arguments that if addition and multiplication both must be learned then maybe linear combination is a more useful end-state target for the lesson.
I'm not begging the question to refute your point. These are important questions, and I worry that society isn't seeking the answers, because as far as I know students still learn "times-tables" even though we have handheld computers capable of, from a photograph: reading, interpreting, and solving math problems from a description, so that those tasks are as contained as an arcane reference like integral lookup tables.
I see a world where students instead learn even finer machinery, such as logic, encapsulation, and organization rather than obsessing over whether they can rhythmically remember what 11x12 is for the rest of their lives.
Re: Ask HN: Why are expert practitioners often so bad at teaching beginners?
#28Sports 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.
I have always thought it's due to mid-tier players needing to really focus on every lesson they get, studying every drill, obsessing over every piece of advice they get. Elite players just absorb the drills and lessons into who they are and forget it was ever taught to them in the first place. When the learning comes hard the player will understand the complete process to come to understanding. They will also see the elite players around them apply the lesson and improve, so they know the lesson works. Being worse at doing the skill can ultimately make you better at teaching it because you are forced to understand the skill more deeply.
Being a replacement-level player doesn't automatically make you great coaching material though, that's where the filtering starts to find great teachers and communicators. As many others have commented, teaching is a skill unto itself, one not everyone has.
Re: Ask HN: Why are expert practitioners often so bad at teaching beginners?
#29The curse of competence - Once you’re unconsciously competent at a task then many / all sub tasks become “obvious”, since they’re all unconscious know they’re difficult to enumerate to a beginner.
Re: Ask HN: Why are expert practitioners often so bad at teaching beginners?
#30[deleted]