28 ms·

> "What I cannot teach, I do not understand" And the corollary to that, from 17th century French writer Nicolas Boileau: "Ce que l'on conçoit bien s'énonce cla

> "What I cannot teach, I do not understand" And the corollary to that, from 17th century French writer Nicolas Boileau: "Ce que l'on conçoit bien s'énonce clairement, et les mots pour le dire arrivent aisément." - What we understand well, we express clearly, and words to describe it flow easily.

fouronnes3 2y ago
I'm french and I have a great memory about that quote. In high school my litterature and physics teachers had a disagreement about it, although I believe they didn't know about each other's point of views. Only us the students did, as they each hand waved great insights about the world with this quote. One was arguing, much like you, about the profound truth there is to it. The other was quick to explain that they perfectly conceived how to ride a bicycle, but like most of us couldn't possibly teach it at a blackboard. I leave it to you to guess which was which :)
- Brian_K_White 2y ago
  I would say that if you can't explain on a blackboard how to ride a bicycle, then that simply means you do not understand how to ride a bicycle. You can do a thing without understanding it. I would guess very few bike riders really understand what all makes the act work even though they all can perform the act. Maybe no one can learn how to ride a bike purely from a blackboard but that is a seperat issue about physicality. But the quote is really about understanding, and the forces and effects that go into the act of riding a bike are both understandable and explicable. Anyone who understands them can describe them on a blackboard. So the quote holds water even in the case of riding a bike. I would say anyway. Maybe there are other examples and bike riding just wasn't the best example to invalidate the quote.
- jonahx 2y ago
  Literature professor = bike argument? That's were I put my money, but I could see it going either way. This can devolve into a definitional argument, but I actually think it's fair to say we don't understand how we ride a bike. We have many abilities and fluencies we don't understand, or only partially understand, in the sense that we can't break them down into pieces easily and transmit the information. That perspective feels more accurate to me than saying I understand how I ride a bike because I can ride a bike, though in common usage the phrase "I understand how to ride a bike" would be perfectly acceptable. The subtle distinction between the phrase "knows how to" and "understands" hints at the difference here.
  - gsf_emergency_2 2y ago
    Looks like here's an opportunity for a language to express the riding of bikes Headstart (modelling the non-riding of bikes): http://ruina.tam.cornell.edu/research/topics/bicycle_mechanics/JBike6_web_folder/ http://ruina.tam.cornell.edu/research/topics/bicycle_mechani...
  - somat 2y ago
    We(by which I mean a person who knows how to ride a bike) do understand how to ride a bike. The problem in communicating that is a riding a bike is a skilled act. that is you cant get good at riding a bike by reading about it, and it is very hard to describe a well trained skill, it boils down to "practice a lot" which makes nobody happy.
    - adastra22 2y ago
      One of the reasons you can’t get good at riding a bike by reading about it is that we literally don’t understand the mechanics of bike riding. It’s a currently unsolved problem in physics. Google it if you do t believe me! So I get what you’re saying, but it is maybe not the optimal example.
      - moi2388 2y ago
        It’s not. Google harder.
      - rcxdude 2y ago
        It's not unsolved per se, just a complex topic that resists simple explanations. (see also: what causes lift in an airfoil)
        adastra22 2y ago
        Sibling comment to yours points to a relatively recent (this century) article with a mostly complete theoretical model for bike self-stability. There are other theories though, some more or less developed than others. It turns out to be a fiendishly hard control-theory problem, and at least one aspect is chaotic. Which theory is correct has not, to my knowledge, been definitively determined by experiment. Until it is, I think it is fair to say that it is unsolved. Unlike lift, which is very well understood but often poorly explained.
- gosub100 2y ago
  That's a great rebuttal. But if the actual claim is "I cannot teach..." It is still consistent. No one is claiming to teach you how to ride a bike or be in a relationship or know when to leave a party. "I cannot teach what I cannot understand" is not the inverse: "I can teach everything I understand".
- stahorn 2y ago
  I took up social dancing in my 20s, including salsa and Argentinian tango. I think that it is a very good way to experience the difference between being very good at something and being able to teach. I've been on courses with some people that are clearly exceptionally good at dancing but are a bit lacking when it comes to teaching. Then I've had the pleasure of having teachers that, while still very good at dancing, would not win the high level competitions. When it comes to teaching though, they are just wonderful to be around. They are exceptionally good at spotting what you are doing wrong and giving you an explanation of how to fix it. Not only that, but they make you feel good about learning. One concrete memory I have is from a cuban salsa dancer trying to teach me, a poor northern European, how to move like a cuban. His frustration was very noticeable and not making it easier for me! Then an example of the other type of teach, is the crazy Australian tango dancer that not only had fantastically fun and simple workshops, but also spotted and explained simple fixes. When I was struggling with a move, he told me to rotate my foot, which I did, and I stopped struggling. When us attendees in the class talked about some high level move being complicated, he said that it is not at all complicated, and showed us how it's simpler than it appears.
  - yarekt 2y ago
    Great insight, it actually aligns with the conversation above: Yes, teaching is its own skill regardless of the subject matter, but to teach you really have to understand the subject matter really well, and isn’t at all related to “doing it well” in some cases. For example, in film, being a great director requires a deep insight about acting, so they can explain what’s needed from a performance to an actor. A director may know what they need despite being unable to perform it themselves.
  - vacuity 2y ago
    I think teaching requires not only that you understand how to do something, but also what someone else's incomplete understanding is. You need to address the root cause as to why the other person's understanding is so lacking, like your examle with the tango dancer, instead of pointing out that a move is wrong and not giving the tools to prevent it. There may be many paths to reaching similar understandings, and a teacher needs to be able to tame this sprawling diversity. That's one reason why we don't just get blog posts or films that are exceedingly short, because if everyone could just understand a dry delivery of the core points instead of needing to think through multiple examples and reasons, we wouldn't be so pressed about teaching.
endoblast 2y ago
Where it gets complicated is that one can know how to do something without being able to explain it to oneself let alone teach it to others.
- toomanyrichies 2y ago
  I'm a native English speaker who, a lifetime ago, moved to Shanghai to teach English to adults. One of my biggest struggles when I first started was explaining to students not just what the correct English should be in a given situation, but why that was the correct English. This had a profound effect on my view of expertise and experts in general.
  - yencabulator 2y ago
    As an ESL speaker living among native speakers, my take: No human language has "the correct [expression]". What is best suited is the thing that's often used, or an interesting but understandable twist on it that will be familiar to the audience, and grammar should be viewed as descriptive not prescriptive. Grammar is just some OCD person's attempt to write down a simplification of reality, nothing more. The best way to learn written English is by reading English books[1]; the best way to learn spoken English is to interact with native speakers, a lot. Build familiarity without ever trying to justify "why that was the correct [expression]". It'll just feel right when it's right, because it fits the statistical pattern your brain has picked up. Grammar is to language like ballistics is to throwing & catching a ball. [1]: For someone with a basic grasp of the language but not enough exposure yet, Young Adult content is often easiest to read. I read most of the Sherlock Holmes stories, some James Bond novels, and a lot of Heinlein growing up.
  - pmarreck 2y ago
    So forgive the pedantry but what was your takeaway?
    - toomanyrichies 2y ago
      One of the big takeaways was not to over-value the knowledge I had gained learning English via immersion in an English-speaking culture, and conversely not to under-value that of the local teachers, who had gained their knowledge in the classroom. It's a cliche at this point to say that "street smarts > book smarts", at least in my culture. My teaching job taught me that there are situations where neither type of knowledge by itself is sufficient, and that both types have their place. For example, as I mentioned I frequently ran into situations where I could tell whether a student's sentences were correct or not, but I struggled to explain why. One example from early in my teaching career was when students would place their adjectives out-of-order, for example "The German, red, old, large car..." instead of "The large, old, red, German car...". I intuitively knew that the former is incorrect and the latter is correct, but when students would ask me why, I struggled to articulate a reason. But the local teachers on staff (i.e. native Chinese speakers) would chime in with "The order of adjectives in English is opinion, size, age, shape, color, origin, material, and purpose." They (the local teachers) still made mistakes in their English, but they had mostly memorized the rules from classroom study, and could recite them better than I could. Which was helpful to both us as native speakers (who wanted to give the students concrete answers to their questions) and to the students (who wanted rules to govern future scenarios they might encounter). I was admittedly a bit cocky coming into that job, thinking I was qualified simply because I was a native speaker. I quickly learned that teaching a subject is a skill unto itself. It requires abilities like gauging levels of understanding by asking comprehension questions, and tailoring the subject matter to those comprehension levels, so as not to either talk down to the student or talk over their head.
cyberax 2y ago
One my personal trick: imagine that you are magically transported into the 19-th century (or earlier). Can you teach the subject to a well-known scientist of that era? E.g. if you want to explain radioactivity to somebody from 1860-s, how would you do that? Or for math, how would you explain calculus to Archimedes?
- gus_massa 2y ago
  Radioactivity in 1860: In 1860 Lavoisier and Dalton have already published their work and died, so they know chemistry and atoms. Napier is much older, so they will understand exponential decay. It looks easy to explain. I'm worry about getting some samples. Let's go to Poland and dig in random sites? Before the time travel I need a few days to study in Wikipedia where I should go and what mineral to look for. I can try to guess how to purify it because I went to a high school with and specialization in Chemistry. (Let's dissolve everything with Nitric Acid, and then use Sodium Carbonate to precipitate Calcium and then Sodium Sulfide to precipitate all heavy metals including Uranium. I'm not sure if it works.) Anyway, one extra day to study this will be helpful. To show the radioactivity I guess I can use a photographic plate. Luckily, it look like they already have some. (I was going to use Silver Nitrate and hope the best, but the chances of success are better if some of them already know what they are doing.) Add another day of preparation just in case. Also, as an application, I'd try to irradiate food. 1860 is just in time for Pasteurization. Can I get enough radiation??? Is it safe??? --- Calculus to Archimedes: That's easy. Archimedes was using Calculus 2000 years before it was cool. The guy calculated the area of a parable slicing it in small parts. Also the volume of a sphere slicing it in small parts. (And then the surface of a sphere with a trick.) I taught Calculus in the first year of the university, and also in more advanced courses and also in high school. (It will be necessary to start explaining formulas or a translation of formulas to geometric figures. Also, the idea that a formula is related to a graphic in paper is hard, so it will take some time.) I guess I can enter the time machine on the spot.
- BobaFloutist 2y ago
  Those both seem much easier to me than what I usually struggle with: Transported back to a pre-industrial time, is any of my technological knowledge or understanding even remotely useful? Like, sure, germ theory is great I guess, but I have no idea how I'd begin to explain the internal combustion engine (which I'm fairly sure requires pretty advanced metallurgy) let alone something as esoteric as solar panels. Hell, how do you generate electricity? I could mumble something about waterwheels, a coil of wires, and a large magnet, but I have no idea how you'd begin to go about sourcing a large magnet. Industrial-scale mining of Africa/Australia, maybe? Like, I know a lot, and I could explain a good amount about how a lot of this works conceptually, but I couldn't even begin to explain how to actually engineer it. As far as I'm concerned, solar panels come from factories.
FilosofumRex 2y ago
He was a life long teacher so if he believed teaching is understanding, he'd have said so. Making or building is a much deeper level of understanding in real life than teaching would ever be, ergo - those who can't do, teach.
- szundi 2y ago
  [dead]
lloeki 2y ago
> What I cannot teach, I do not understand > What we understand well, we express clearly, and words to describe it flow easily. And the other side of the coin to both is a powerful trick to really nail a topic you feel like you have gaps on: get the basics and teach it / explain it to someone; you then have to explain it clearly thus have to fill all the gaps.

fouronnes3 2y ago

I'm french and I have a great memory about that quote. In high school my litterature and physics teachers had a disagreement about it, although I believe they didn't know about each other's point of views. Only us the students did, as they each hand waved great insights about the world with this quote. One was arguing, much like you, about the profound truth there is to it. The other was quick to explain that they perfectly conceived how to ride a bicycle, but like most of us couldn't possibly teach it at a blackboard. I leave it to you to guess which was which :)

Brian_K_White 2y ago
I would say that if you can't explain on a blackboard how to ride a bicycle, then that simply means you do not understand how to ride a bicycle. You can do a thing without understanding it. I would guess very few bike riders really understand what all makes the act work even though they all can perform the act. Maybe no one can learn how to ride a bike purely from a blackboard but that is a seperat issue about physicality. But the quote is really about understanding, and the forces and effects that go into the act of riding a bike are both understandable and explicable. Anyone who understands them can describe them on a blackboard. So the quote holds water even in the case of riding a bike. I would say anyway. Maybe there are other examples and bike riding just wasn't the best example to invalidate the quote.
jonahx 2y ago
Literature professor = bike argument? That's were I put my money, but I could see it going either way. This can devolve into a definitional argument, but I actually think it's fair to say we don't understand how we ride a bike. We have many abilities and fluencies we don't understand, or only partially understand, in the sense that we can't break them down into pieces easily and transmit the information. That perspective feels more accurate to me than saying I understand how I ride a bike because I can ride a bike, though in common usage the phrase "I understand how to ride a bike" would be perfectly acceptable. The subtle distinction between the phrase "knows how to" and "understands" hints at the difference here.
- gsf_emergency_2 2y ago
  Looks like here's an opportunity for a language to express the riding of bikes Headstart (modelling the non-riding of bikes): http://ruina.tam.cornell.edu/research/topics/bicycle_mechanics/JBike6_web_folder/ http://ruina.tam.cornell.edu/research/topics/bicycle_mechani...
- somat 2y ago
  We(by which I mean a person who knows how to ride a bike) do understand how to ride a bike. The problem in communicating that is a riding a bike is a skilled act. that is you cant get good at riding a bike by reading about it, and it is very hard to describe a well trained skill, it boils down to "practice a lot" which makes nobody happy.
  - adastra22 2y ago
    One of the reasons you can’t get good at riding a bike by reading about it is that we literally don’t understand the mechanics of bike riding. It’s a currently unsolved problem in physics. Google it if you do t believe me! So I get what you’re saying, but it is maybe not the optimal example.
    - moi2388 2y ago
      It’s not. Google harder.
    - rcxdude 2y ago
      It's not unsolved per se, just a complex topic that resists simple explanations. (see also: what causes lift in an airfoil)
      - adastra22 2y ago
        Sibling comment to yours points to a relatively recent (this century) article with a mostly complete theoretical model for bike self-stability. There are other theories though, some more or less developed than others. It turns out to be a fiendishly hard control-theory problem, and at least one aspect is chaotic. Which theory is correct has not, to my knowledge, been definitively determined by experiment. Until it is, I think it is fair to say that it is unsolved. Unlike lift, which is very well understood but often poorly explained.
gosub100 2y ago
That's a great rebuttal. But if the actual claim is "I cannot teach..." It is still consistent. No one is claiming to teach you how to ride a bike or be in a relationship or know when to leave a party. "I cannot teach what I cannot understand" is not the inverse: "I can teach everything I understand".
stahorn 2y ago
I took up social dancing in my 20s, including salsa and Argentinian tango. I think that it is a very good way to experience the difference between being very good at something and being able to teach. I've been on courses with some people that are clearly exceptionally good at dancing but are a bit lacking when it comes to teaching. Then I've had the pleasure of having teachers that, while still very good at dancing, would not win the high level competitions. When it comes to teaching though, they are just wonderful to be around. They are exceptionally good at spotting what you are doing wrong and giving you an explanation of how to fix it. Not only that, but they make you feel good about learning. One concrete memory I have is from a cuban salsa dancer trying to teach me, a poor northern European, how to move like a cuban. His frustration was very noticeable and not making it easier for me! Then an example of the other type of teach, is the crazy Australian tango dancer that not only had fantastically fun and simple workshops, but also spotted and explained simple fixes. When I was struggling with a move, he told me to rotate my foot, which I did, and I stopped struggling. When us attendees in the class talked about some high level move being complicated, he said that it is not at all complicated, and showed us how it's simpler than it appears.
- yarekt 2y ago
  Great insight, it actually aligns with the conversation above: Yes, teaching is its own skill regardless of the subject matter, but to teach you really have to understand the subject matter really well, and isn’t at all related to “doing it well” in some cases. For example, in film, being a great director requires a deep insight about acting, so they can explain what’s needed from a performance to an actor. A director may know what they need despite being unable to perform it themselves.
- vacuity 2y ago
  I think teaching requires not only that you understand how to do something, but also what someone else's incomplete understanding is. You need to address the root cause as to why the other person's understanding is so lacking, like your examle with the tango dancer, instead of pointing out that a move is wrong and not giving the tools to prevent it. There may be many paths to reaching similar understandings, and a teacher needs to be able to tame this sprawling diversity. That's one reason why we don't just get blog posts or films that are exceedingly short, because if everyone could just understand a dry delivery of the core points instead of needing to think through multiple examples and reasons, we wouldn't be so pressed about teaching.

endoblast 2y ago

Where it gets complicated is that one can know how to do something without being able to explain it to oneself let alone teach it to others.

toomanyrichies 2y ago
I'm a native English speaker who, a lifetime ago, moved to Shanghai to teach English to adults. One of my biggest struggles when I first started was explaining to students not just what the correct English should be in a given situation, but why that was the correct English. This had a profound effect on my view of expertise and experts in general.
- yencabulator 2y ago
  As an ESL speaker living among native speakers, my take: No human language has "the correct [expression]". What is best suited is the thing that's often used, or an interesting but understandable twist on it that will be familiar to the audience, and grammar should be viewed as descriptive not prescriptive. Grammar is just some OCD person's attempt to write down a simplification of reality, nothing more. The best way to learn written English is by reading English books[1]; the best way to learn spoken English is to interact with native speakers, a lot. Build familiarity without ever trying to justify "why that was the correct [expression]". It'll just feel right when it's right, because it fits the statistical pattern your brain has picked up. Grammar is to language like ballistics is to throwing & catching a ball. [1]: For someone with a basic grasp of the language but not enough exposure yet, Young Adult content is often easiest to read. I read most of the Sherlock Holmes stories, some James Bond novels, and a lot of Heinlein growing up.
- pmarreck 2y ago
  So forgive the pedantry but what was your takeaway?
  - toomanyrichies 2y ago
    One of the big takeaways was not to over-value the knowledge I had gained learning English via immersion in an English-speaking culture, and conversely not to under-value that of the local teachers, who had gained their knowledge in the classroom. It's a cliche at this point to say that "street smarts > book smarts", at least in my culture. My teaching job taught me that there are situations where neither type of knowledge by itself is sufficient, and that both types have their place. For example, as I mentioned I frequently ran into situations where I could tell whether a student's sentences were correct or not, but I struggled to explain why. One example from early in my teaching career was when students would place their adjectives out-of-order, for example "The German, red, old, large car..." instead of "The large, old, red, German car...". I intuitively knew that the former is incorrect and the latter is correct, but when students would ask me why, I struggled to articulate a reason. But the local teachers on staff (i.e. native Chinese speakers) would chime in with "The order of adjectives in English is opinion, size, age, shape, color, origin, material, and purpose." They (the local teachers) still made mistakes in their English, but they had mostly memorized the rules from classroom study, and could recite them better than I could. Which was helpful to both us as native speakers (who wanted to give the students concrete answers to their questions) and to the students (who wanted rules to govern future scenarios they might encounter). I was admittedly a bit cocky coming into that job, thinking I was qualified simply because I was a native speaker. I quickly learned that teaching a subject is a skill unto itself. It requires abilities like gauging levels of understanding by asking comprehension questions, and tailoring the subject matter to those comprehension levels, so as not to either talk down to the student or talk over their head.

cyberax 2y ago

One my personal trick: imagine that you are magically transported into the 19-th century (or earlier). Can you teach the subject to a well-known scientist of that era? E.g. if you want to explain radioactivity to somebody from 1860-s, how would you do that? Or for math, how would you explain calculus to Archimedes?

gus_massa 2y ago
Radioactivity in 1860: In 1860 Lavoisier and Dalton have already published their work and died, so they know chemistry and atoms. Napier is much older, so they will understand exponential decay. It looks easy to explain. I'm worry about getting some samples. Let's go to Poland and dig in random sites? Before the time travel I need a few days to study in Wikipedia where I should go and what mineral to look for. I can try to guess how to purify it because I went to a high school with and specialization in Chemistry. (Let's dissolve everything with Nitric Acid, and then use Sodium Carbonate to precipitate Calcium and then Sodium Sulfide to precipitate all heavy metals including Uranium. I'm not sure if it works.) Anyway, one extra day to study this will be helpful. To show the radioactivity I guess I can use a photographic plate. Luckily, it look like they already have some. (I was going to use Silver Nitrate and hope the best, but the chances of success are better if some of them already know what they are doing.) Add another day of preparation just in case. Also, as an application, I'd try to irradiate food. 1860 is just in time for Pasteurization. Can I get enough radiation??? Is it safe??? --- Calculus to Archimedes: That's easy. Archimedes was using Calculus 2000 years before it was cool. The guy calculated the area of a parable slicing it in small parts. Also the volume of a sphere slicing it in small parts. (And then the surface of a sphere with a trick.) I taught Calculus in the first year of the university, and also in more advanced courses and also in high school. (It will be necessary to start explaining formulas or a translation of formulas to geometric figures. Also, the idea that a formula is related to a graphic in paper is hard, so it will take some time.) I guess I can enter the time machine on the spot.
BobaFloutist 2y ago
Those both seem much easier to me than what I usually struggle with: Transported back to a pre-industrial time, is any of my technological knowledge or understanding even remotely useful? Like, sure, germ theory is great I guess, but I have no idea how I'd begin to explain the internal combustion engine (which I'm fairly sure requires pretty advanced metallurgy) let alone something as esoteric as solar panels. Hell, how do you generate electricity? I could mumble something about waterwheels, a coil of wires, and a large magnet, but I have no idea how you'd begin to go about sourcing a large magnet. Industrial-scale mining of Africa/Australia, maybe? Like, I know a lot, and I could explain a good amount about how a lot of this works conceptually, but I couldn't even begin to explain how to actually engineer it. As far as I'm concerned, solar panels come from factories.

FilosofumRex 2y ago

He was a life long teacher so if he believed teaching is understanding, he'd have said so. Making or building is a much deeper level of understanding in real life than teaching would ever be, ergo - those who can't do, teach.

szundi 2y ago
[dead]

lloeki 2y ago

> What I cannot teach, I do not understand > What we understand well, we express clearly, and words to describe it flow easily. And the other side of the coin to both is a powerful trick to really nail a topic you feel like you have gaps on: get the basics and teach it / explain it to someone; you then have to explain it clearly thus have to fill all the gaps.