Very good point. Which is why I think that it sometime’s harder for someone to teach something if they’re very naturally good at things. Some of the best teachers I’ve had or seen where people who found it tough to learn themselves.
Having said that, this is partially psychological, as it’s more encouraging if the teacher can say that they had to work at this too: it means the ability/understanding seems achievable. Plenty of teachers pretend that they don’t think something is easy or obvious to them for that precise reason.
I think this also depends on the natural ability of the student, a teacher who is naturally very good at something is ideal for teaching students who are also naturally good at that thing. Of course, those students aren’t generally the ones who need teaching the most desperately.
Yes: assuming they’re naturally good in the same way. It’s perfectly possible for one person to be a natural linguist through an intuitive ‘hearing the language spoken’ approach, and another picking it up very easily through an ‘explicitly understanding the underlying grammar’ approach. Either teaching the other would be disaster if they didn’t constantly bear in mind that people learn in different ways.
Whereas a slow learner CAN still apply their own bad, slow way of learning to all and sundry (I’ve definitely seen it done), but I think is more likely to at least teach in a way that slowly but surely makes sense, and might have tried a wider range of tricks due to not picking it up so quickly.
I had had the exact same experience teaching, the faster I learned something, the harder it is to explain it to someone else. Maybe I should be teaching English instead of computer science...
Very good point. Which is why I think that it sometime’s harder for someone to teach something if they’re very naturally good at things. Some of the best teachers I’ve had or seen where people who found it tough to learn themselves.
Having said that, this is partially psychological, as it’s more encouraging if the teacher can say that they had to work at this too: it means the ability/understanding seems achievable. Plenty of teachers pretend that they don’t think something is easy or obvious to them for that precise reason.
I think this also depends on the natural ability of the student, a teacher who is naturally very good at something is ideal for teaching students who are also naturally good at that thing. Of course, those students aren’t generally the ones who need teaching the most desperately.
Yes: assuming they’re naturally good in the same way. It’s perfectly possible for one person to be a natural linguist through an intuitive ‘hearing the language spoken’ approach, and another picking it up very easily through an ‘explicitly understanding the underlying grammar’ approach. Either teaching the other would be disaster if they didn’t constantly bear in mind that people learn in different ways.
Whereas a slow learner CAN still apply their own bad, slow way of learning to all and sundry (I’ve definitely seen it done), but I think is more likely to at least teach in a way that slowly but surely makes sense, and might have tried a wider range of tricks due to not picking it up so quickly.
I had had the exact same experience teaching, the faster I learned something, the harder it is to explain it to someone else. Maybe I should be teaching English instead of computer science...