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One the smartest people I know employed this technique when he was in grad school and working as a TA for a subject he didn't know. "How did you manage to teac
by ntropic_thundr 4y ago
One the smartest people I know employed this technique when he was in grad school and working as a TA for a subject he didn't know.
"How did you manage to teach something you didn't know" I asked.
"It actually wasn't that hard, I just made sure to always be 2 weeks ahead of what the students were learning. It actually made for a good forcing function to learn the content well." i recall him saying.
After reading this article, I wonder if he was born with gifted intelligence and intuitively employed this method, or if he BECOME so smart by employing this method...
- dSebastien 4y agoThanks for sharing this story. He was probably gifted, and made good use of his gift by applying this approach, leading to wonderful results!
- iammjm 4y agowhat does "gifted" even mean?
- EricE 4y agoI find "gifted" is usually a derisive term for "hard worker" :p
- hyperpallium2 4y agoAll the extraordinarily intelligent people I've known worked unbelievably hard.
- jfengel 4y agoHuh. Most of the smartest people I know are really pretty lazy. They'll put a lot of effort into something they care about, but they're usually aware of the effort-to-reward ratio. The hardest workers I know are the ones of ordinary intelligence. They have jobs that require more hours for less money, and often have families to take care of as well. I don't think of anybody in my circle of acquaintances who's genuinely dumb, so I can't vouch for what happens once intelligence really dips far below average. Still, my anecdotal experience is that the really smart people are only kind of ordinarily diligent.
- spaetzleesser 4y ago" I just made sure to always be 2 weeks ahead of what the students were learning" I feel teachers who use that technique can't provide much depth in their teaching. The best teachers I had were way ahead of what they were teaching and knew the topic in and out.
- ntropic_thundr 4y agoI completely agree for full time professors/teachers. But given the scenario is being the TA (ie a PhD student tasked with supporting a professor's class, often 1 of many TAs) then I don't think we can expect him to be way ahead of every topic in the class.
- ChadNauseam 4y agoI totally agree, but maybe it’s best to have some of both. A professor who knows the subject inside and out and a TA who’s two weeks ahead. When I was first learning to code, it took some effort for me to understand what a function did, particularly the concept of returning an expression, or what happens if you write `foo() + bar()`. (In what order are `foo` and `bar` called?) Now of course those concepts are trivial. But it’s easy to forget their initial difficulty when teaching, so I might be liable to just breeze through functions and leave most students behind. A freshly-learned TA would remember what was hard and be able to tell students the intuition-pumps that helped them, while directing more advanced questions to the professor. For example, a TA might know to explicitly say that every time you call a function, it remembers where it was called so it can `return` there at the end of the function’s execution. Then if a student wants more detail about that, they can ask the professor who can explain how a function call is invisibly being converted to code that allocates a new stack frame and sets the execution pointer.
- hyperpallium2 4y agoFurther to your point, a lecturer who has long understood something can find it hard to understand how someone could misunderstand it - the kinds of misunderstandings they night have. aside/ school teachers are different, they learn typical misunderstandings with experience.