As an arrogant 20-something year old, I disagree :P. An important distinction to make here is whether you're teaching someone to intuitively reason about somet

As an arrogant 20-something year old, I disagree :P. An important distinction to make here is whether you're teaching someone to intuitively reason about something or to logically calculate it precisely. I think as long as someone grasps the basics of high school math and has a decent working memory, they should be able to learn how to calculate anything precisely given that you break it down into simple steps. If you don't know how to do that, you have no clue what you're doing. Then there's intuitive reasoning. I think for most things, if you're familiar with a topic, you should be able to teach it in a way that makes sense. Of course there's exceptions -- some people are incredibly brilliant, but lack social awareness. I think that's the exception rather than the average case. But not all topics are so easily reduced. There's probably some exceptions. The strongest that comes to mind is quantum computing. As many times as you can explain things like superdense coding, there's still a sense of "magic". Where the results of the math seem unnatural. And you go back through each step and try to figure out where things went weird. But each step is a logical progression from the beginning. On that note, Michael Nielson's "Quantum Computing for the Determined" is one of the most well-taught courses I've found, and does a very good job of stepping the viewer through a very complicated topic. Michael Nielson clearly knows what he's doing :) http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/quantum-computing-for-the-determined/ http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/quantum-computing-for-the-det...