Ah, okay. I am not really disagreeing with you here, just thinking about how specifically the comparison might be unfair. For example, if you tutored someone but never taught at classroom, you might overestimate how much your tutoring skills would translate to the classroom environment. From my short experience, teaching in classroom if often less about transmitting information and more about maintaining order (but without maintaining order, transmission of information becomes impossible). So even test-teaching in a classroom where the regular teacher is present, is not a realistic experience.
Another objection: You compare “smart people” with “most people… like highschool teachers”, so like IQ 150 vs IQ 110. In physics or math, the average physicist or mathematician is probably also IQ 150. Numbers made up of course, but the idea is that the average high-school teacher is a dramatically different level of intelligence than the average physicist. So is this about pedagogy vs physics, or about smart people being able to outperform the mostly average ones despite lack of education?
If instead you compared “smart people” against “smart people who also happen to be teachers”, then of course the former outperforming the latter is unlikely. Though I believe the former would not stay too far behind. And the important knowledge the latter have could probably be transferred to the former in a few weeks (as opposed to the years at university). You couldn’t compress physics or math that much.
The IQ objection is a really good one that hasn’t occurred to me at all. Although I’d have estimated less than half as large of a difference.
On maintaining order, it’s worth pointing out that insofar as this is the relative strength of the highschool teacher, it probably doesn’t have much to do with what the teacher learned from the literature.
From my short experience, teaching in classroom if often less about transmitting information and more about maintaining order (but without maintaining order, transmission of information becomes impossible).
While this is true, reading the existing literature on pedagogy might be as helpful for maintaining order as reading the computer science literature for typing fast.
I did mean both. Comparing just tutoring to just regular school would be pretty unfair.
Ah, okay. I am not really disagreeing with you here, just thinking about how specifically the comparison might be unfair. For example, if you tutored someone but never taught at classroom, you might overestimate how much your tutoring skills would translate to the classroom environment. From my short experience, teaching in classroom if often less about transmitting information and more about maintaining order (but without maintaining order, transmission of information becomes impossible). So even test-teaching in a classroom where the regular teacher is present, is not a realistic experience.
Another objection: You compare “smart people” with “most people… like highschool teachers”, so like IQ 150 vs IQ 110. In physics or math, the average physicist or mathematician is probably also IQ 150. Numbers made up of course, but the idea is that the average high-school teacher is a dramatically different level of intelligence than the average physicist. So is this about pedagogy vs physics, or about smart people being able to outperform the mostly average ones despite lack of education?
If instead you compared “smart people” against “smart people who also happen to be teachers”, then of course the former outperforming the latter is unlikely. Though I believe the former would not stay too far behind. And the important knowledge the latter have could probably be transferred to the former in a few weeks (as opposed to the years at university). You couldn’t compress physics or math that much.
The IQ objection is a really good one that hasn’t occurred to me at all. Although I’d have estimated less than half as large of a difference.
On maintaining order, it’s worth pointing out that insofar as this is the relative strength of the highschool teacher, it probably doesn’t have much to do with what the teacher learned from the literature.
While this is true, reading the existing literature on pedagogy might be as helpful for maintaining order as reading the computer science literature for typing fast.