I believe teaching is a somewhat specialized profession, or at least a very separate skill from knowing the subject. I am just getting into teaching now, at a c

I believe teaching is a somewhat specialized profession, or at least a very separate skill from knowing the subject. I am just getting into teaching now, at a college level, and finding it is a completely different beast than everything else, even though I know the subject very well. I mean, we've all had teachers that sucked, or professors who cared more about research than teaching; it's not something that people can 'just do'. > none of them had any special skills Great teachers make it look easy. What you don't see is the preparation and the previous iterations of their ideas. It's like acting - good actors make it look like an easy profession. But try "acting naturally" in front of a camera sometime. For most people, even walking becomes awkward. Or programming. Behind most great programmers is a trail of terrible code that they have written over the years. >They were just passionate. It doesn't help that when you delve into it, all this 'specialized knowledge' about how to learn turns out to be junk science: cf. 'learning styles' or 'three cueing', which destroyed the ability of millions of kids to actually read. There are quite a few people who can read, even at a high level. But how do you teach it, and teach it in a scalable way? It's not as easy as you think. Also, what field doesn't have fashion and missteps? Doesn't HN regularly complain about how various programming paradigms and languages were terrible ideas? What makes you think that anyone can do something complex by going from zero to the best implementation in one iteration?