I used to teach English as a second language. It was a mind trip.
I remember one of my students saying something like "I saw a brown big spider". I responded "No, it should be 'big brown spider'". He asked why. Not only did I not know the rule involved, I had never even imagined that anyone would ever say it the other way until that moment.
Such experiences were pretty much daily occurrences.
Now, if you had to explain why French only conjugates verbs in written rather than spoken form ...
For the same reason English spells write, right, Wright, and rite differently. They used to be pronounced differently, but aren't any more, and the spelling hasn't been updated to reflect that.
Oh, that, yes - I ascribe that more to the fact that written French just has a lot of letters you don't pronounce, or only pronounce in certain contexts, especially at the end of words (or h at the beginning).
But those letters still exist, even in spoken french: the verbs in "tu vois" and "il voit" sound the same ("vwa") in isolation, but with "arriver" behind them, they can sound like "tu vwazarriver" and "il vwatarriver".
Learning to walk again after my stroke was both frustrating and hysterically funny that way.
I mean: it's walking! How can I not know how to walk? But of course it's something I hadn't given any thought to in over three decades... my body knew how to walk, I didn't have to. And then it forgot... sort of... and I had to learn it again.
Physical and occupational therapists are really good at this -- or, well, good ones are. I figured out how to walk level on my own (with some very funny-in-retrospect failures, including once when I missed the floor altogether), but someone had to tell me how to climb a flight of stairs... I just couldn't quite figure out what to do with my knee. Most people were, like, "just step up!" My PT actually talked me through the process of bending and raising my knee, planting my foot on the stair, and then straightening it out to lift my other foot off the ground.
Heh, I learned to program when I was six, I don't happen to remember it being hard -- and I think I therefore pretty much suck at teaching programming.
I rock at explaining specific concepts to programmers -- libraries, techniques, tools -- but I cannot teach a non-programmer to program. "What do you mean? You just write functions! They accept arguments, and do stuff...ummm...it's like subroutines?"
Learned to program at five. If someone has the programming gear, five is a perfectly good time to teach them to program. Just show them some Python code (I was reading BASIC, bleah) and see if they can deduce the rules and try writing their own. If someone is meant to be a programmer then a programmer they shall be.
I would think the only hard prerequisites for programming would be knowing how to read and how to do arithmetic. Most people don't have arithmetic down by five.
I started with Java at eleven; unfortunately I had internalized from my environment that programming was a hard, miserable duty, and so I didn't get particularly far at that age. I wish there was a way to communicate to children "No, really, this is fun, not scary."
100k lines sounds like a lot, but it isn't, especially considering the reduced concept-density of both older languages and novice programmers. My first 100k lines were unpublishable.
I often had a similar experience in grade school; teachers would present a concept for the first time as if they were reviewing it.
So far as I could tell, the teachers were saying the words that allowed them to refresh their memory of how a technique worked, rather than words that would allow someone with no prior experience of the technique to give it a try. E.g., frequent flyers here on LW can say things to each other like "don't forget to test your ideas," or "update your probability estimates" and the words have meaning, because they are handles that we have all built and designed to pull on a whole cluster of related memories and skills. But if you said that to someone with little or no exposure to the modern Enlightenment, they wouldn't be able to follow along unless they could infer all of the intermediate steps from the skeletal verbal outline you're providing.
I've done some occasional tutoring and so on, and my pupils are usually impressed, but all I'm doing is listening to people to find out what they already know, and then explaining the next few steps, one step at a time. It helps me to have an outline or a diagram showing all of the steps that I want the student to be comfortable with, and then we can look at it together and decide what the student will learn next.
Even when I am unable to acknowledge that a subject is hard, I can at least acknowledge that it is made up of many parts, each of which is necessary for mastery, and then make an effort to teach each of those parts.
I think it's not just realizing that it's hard. It's realizing that it is potentially hard in a lot of different ways.
I recently learned how to swim after many failed attempts. I'm not any good, but I can do it, and the primary problem was that I was (am) afraid of the water rather than a lack of technique, and it was very frustrating because the wonderful woman teaching me could wrap her head around what it was that I found to be hard; she assumed at first I didn't know how, then when it was clear that I did know how she did work on my fears with me but she still basically tried repeatedly to get me to shut up and swim already.
The best trick I've found is to get kids to try things that, to them, seem scary and impossible, but which I know that no one can actually fail at. Example: stand on the side of the deep end with them, jump in holding their hand, and push them to the surface as soon as my feet hit the bottom. They're not underwater long enough to panic, and then I'm holding them up in the deep end, and I can praise them warmly for jumping into the deep end...and even if they didn't jump entirely voluntarily, they can't exactly say 'no I didn't jump'.
Just as a lot of people don't know that swimming is hard, they don't know that teaching is hard-- possibly harder in a sense, since at least you get immediate feedback if you're swimming badly.
I agree with this notion somewhat tangentially. I think that learning feels hard, but that too much is played up about it actually being hard. I think this is comparable to some of the historical remarks found in this post:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/pc/quantum_explanations/.
More often than not, in the circle of topics that I have experience with teaching and learning, syntax represents the first hurdle. I believe this is true in many domains of learning, even swimming. Learning the grammar rules associated with balance in a body of water and how to generate ...
When I read this, I remembered also being told to "move your arms and legs".
Seriously?
Seriously?
WTF WAS WRONG WITH THOSE PEOPLE oh never mind OP said it better.
I find myself in the opposite position, because math always came very easily to me, and yet I've had a lot of success tutoring it. I think, though, that that largely comes out of my interest in why it worked rather than how, and my ability to make connections that weren't explained to me.
I taught my daughter to swim after well over a year's worth of "professional" swim training had seemingly achieved very little.
The approach I used worked well. I tried to teach her one skill at a time - like the Montessori method.
Learning to swim is hard because you have to do several things at once or you start to drown.
So, contrary to dogma, I got her some flippers and a floating vest. Her first task was to work out how to move around. Because of the floating vest she did not have to worry about keeping afloat. Because of the flippers she foun...
I'm studying to be a (biology) teacher and learning to use the didactic method is big part of our training. In fact this entire partim (December until now) has dealt with giving clear instructions, asking the right questions, etc. We'd give classes to each other and then let the other students point out anything that isn't crystal clear. Whenever I study something I try to write it down as if I was explaining it to a six year old child. If I can't then there is still something I don't quite understand.
Very good point. Which is why I think that it sometime's harder for someone to teach something if they're very naturally good at things. Some of the best teachers I've had or seen where people who found it tough to learn themselves.
Having said that, this is partially psychological, as it's more encouraging if the teacher can say that they had to work at this too: it means the ability/understanding seems achievable. Plenty of teachers pretend that they don't think something is easy or obvious to them for that precise reason.
I don't know how I learned to swim. One day I couldn't stay afloat without a life jacket or other flotation device, and the next day I could.
I had a similar experience; one day I couldn't snap my fingers, the next I could. While I was in the former state, I noticed an interesting thing: every single time I had a conversation about my inability to snap with someone who could, it went like this:
Me: You know, I actually have never been able to snap my fingers.
Other person: Really? (snaps fingers)
Me: Why did you do that? I already know what it looks like when someone snaps their fingers.
Other person: ... You know, I'm not sure why I did it.
I still have no idea why everyone's first reaction was to snap their own fingers. Was it pride at having a skill someone else didn't? Was it an impulse to demonstrate it based on some low-level expectation that I might go "Ooooh, that's how to snap your fingers!" Were they just double-checking that they still knew how?
I still have no idea why everyone's first reaction was to snap their own fingers.
Important data:
1) Everyone did it. 2) Everyone claimed not to know why they did it (I am taking you at your word - that your dialog is representative)
Both of these point to something close to an involuntary reflex.
Recall the game, "Simon Says". That game is fun because it is hard (under the right conditions) to avoid doing what someone commands you to do. It takes concentration to hear the command and then not perform the action. One might have thought (and one would have been wrong) that someone playing "Simon Says" would hear the command, then decide whether it was in the right form, then follow it. Everyone wants to play it this way and thus win. But the nervous system has a strong tendency to short-circuit the path from hearing the command to performing the action. You try to consider the command carefully before performing the action, but you fail!
This suggests that the mental path from thought to action is only imperfectly under voluntary control. What it takes to suppress, or amplify, this path is presumably not simple.
This is the first Less Wrong post which I have read and really deeply agreed with. I haven't done much teaching, but I am used to teaching those who I am on equal footing with, my fellow students. Teaching people who don't have background knowledge, who might not feel comfortable saying 'I don't understand' is really hard.
From my inept experience learning to dance I can say it makes it much easier when the teacher recognises that it is hard for you, although easy for them. That little piece of recognition, even without the ability to modify your teaching style, makes learning easier.
As before...Teacher for 20+ years...dozens of different topics taught (~40K hours): Math (K-16), English (to Natives and Foreigners), Sports (Springboard Diving, Soccer, Basketball), Programming(C-->Java mostly).
The most interesting part of explanations is that the same explanation doesn't work for everyone. If you're going to be an effective teacher, you need 2+ backup explanations for when the first one doesn't work. Examples are frequently even better than explanations, and enough examples will get most folks a long ways.
My personal obsession in ed...
This is one of the reasons why I think AI algorithm development is going to appear to go nowhere until it is nearly done, and then change more in a matter of months than it has in decades before. Nobody really has a clue how to teach the English language, or how to walk, or how to create goals. Once we can get the problems humans are naturally good at solving with very little help out of the way, programming an AI to understand the scientific method, existential risks, and how to overcome its own biases is most likely going to seem easy in comparison.
The way I learned to swim was pretty interesting, I remember the moment pretty clearly because of the absolute shock of fear at the time -- but it was a rather interesting method. I don't remember if the teacher tried to teach me in the same failed way you're talking about here to being with -- but whether she did, or didn't, I couldn't swim. I was pretty young at the time, so the surrounding memories are a little hazy -- though the moment itself is quite clear.
So since I couldn't swim, and couldn't figure out how from explanations, the teacher had me pus...
I agree completely that naturals have a hard time being teachers. At least to anyone who isn't a natural.
I started practicing karate at 24, I also have cerebral palsy that effects my right side, and I never seriously perused any sports in my education. So as a white belt even moving around for an hour of class was hard. making my hands do what was asked of them was very hard.
One of my teachers was a natural, had spent so many years training that anything looked effortless. He would show you how to do something once, and fast. then would move onto variation...
I also have experiences with this kind of thing. In my spare time, I'm training kids at my local chess club. Showing them how a knight moves, what a fork is or why pinning a piece to the king is so strong, I realize to mainly use explanations that also helped me learing this when I was younger. Indeed, I notice how only few immediately understand it, so I try giving other explanations and that does indeed work.
It's surely some sort of projection bias as we assume the students' minds are similar to ours, but what makes this special is that you are in a posi...
Total Immersion was invented by a man who was an average swimmer until he became a swimming teacher, and had a better chance to study the aesthetic difference between excellent and average swimmers. This eventually led to exploring the physics of how to swim efficiently, which is important because minimizing drag is so crucial.
People call me an excellent teacher, and I've probably spent more time figuring out why people think I'm an excellent teacher than I have getting better at teaching. Some techniques I find universally applicable:
Teach yourself. Imagine yourself knowing everything you now know minus the thing that needs to be taught and everything that requires that knowledge as a prerequisite. Now picture trying to teach yourself. Humans are terrible at remembering when they learned something, how long it took them, what it felt like and where they had problems, etc. By
This post is very reminiscent of the book Mastery by George Leonard. He writes about the need to practice seemingly simple skills until they become natural. I got a lot out of the book; there were many sections on dealing with plateaus.
I love his breakdown of learning and teaching styles.
What I got out of the book was a realization that a good teacher will focus on the fundamentals, and will set realistic expectations.
I watch my coworkers teach their class, and it amazes me how often they tell their kids to swim, watch them, and say “that was bad. Do it again.” As if that comment is useful in any way. As if doing the same thing over and over again will ever produce different results.*
Actually, this "technique" is rather useful for training muscle memory. For example, it's how I learn to play songs on the piano: I keep doing it wrong until I can do it right.
A few weeks ago, while giving unofficial swimming lessons to an acquaintance about my age, I had an insight. It was that before you can teach something, you have to realize it’s hard.
I don’t think I noticed this before, because I thought it was obvious. Of course someone who doesn’t know how to swim isn’t going to learn perfect front crawl just by looking at yours. If I was told to watch someone else swimming a brand-new stroke that I’d never seen before, I could imitate it pretty easily, because to me it’s a trivial skill. But to someone who has nothing to refer to, it’s hard.
“You’re like the fifth person who’s tried to teach me how to swim,” my acquaintance said as I led her into the shallow end holding a foam noodle. “People just tell me to move my arms and legs, and they didn’t seem to understand why I couldn’t do it.”
There are, needless to say, a lot of different ways to move your arms and legs. Some of them resemble swimming. A subset of those actually work to keep someone’s head at the surface, and an even smaller subset of those are effective enough that they have names, like front crawl. To me, this is obvious, because I’ve watched hundreds of children in my classes flail and struggle in their front crawl, or lift their head to breathe, or turn their toes inwards in whip kick, and make the same mistakes persistently even when I corrected them, both verbally and by literally grabbing their arms/legs and moving them. I know it’s hard.
I went through this flailing/struggling phase too and have no memory of it whatsoever, having been three at the time. This is probably true of most good swimmers; the procedural memory is so embedded that it makes sense to say “move your arms and legs” because that's all you think about consciously; you forget how many other things you’re doing just to stay afloat. (Poor swimmers might have a different perspective, but they aren’t likely to use that perspective to try to teach other people how to swim.)
In order to bring a non-swimmer to the point of doing perfect front crawl, you have to teach them, one at a time, a long list of motor skills that have to be learned well enough to come naturally before you can move on. With adults, you can compress this process into a much shorter period than with restless, distractible, and lacking-fully-developed-motor-skills children, but you can’t omit it. You have to teach them how to float, and you can’t just tell them to float; you have to hold them up in the water and tell them, one at a time, which muscles to relax and which parts of their body position to change, and then you can let go. You have to teach them how to blow bubbles out their nose to avoid getting water in it. (I wonder how many people are eternally wary of jumping into the water or doing somersaults because no one told them this). You have to slowly shape their flutter-kick from a flailing mess into something that will actually move them somewhere. And then you can teach them front crawl, which comes with its own miles-long list of small details to fix and ways to fix them.
I watch my coworkers teach their class, and it amazes me how often they tell their kids to swim, watch them, and say “that was bad. Do it again.” As if that comment is useful in any way. As if doing the same thing over and over again will ever produce different results.*
I wonder how much this applies to other areas (teaching math in elementary school, for example?) How many teachers teach the same skills the same way, over and over, answering confused questions with exactly the same explanation they gave originally? Different minds work differently, just like different bodies work differently. You have to find the right metaphors, the right words to describe things that aren’t really conveyed by words. (“Kick your legs like a ballet dancer would” is a swimming metaphor I found recently that works quite well with some people and not at all with others.)
I would be interested to hear from other people who’ve either taught in other areas and found useful tricks or metaphors, or who’ve been taught in either good or ineffective ways.
*Note: Although I criticize it here, this is basically how I teach treading water. I hold children in water above their head, tell them to make scooping motions with their arms and legs, let go of them while maintaining eye contact, and immediately pick them up again the moment they start to go under. Two seconds becomes five seconds, becomes ten seconds, becomes a minute, and then I teach them fancy skills like eggbeater. But this is because treading water is a very basic, simple skill that I find really, really hard to explain verbally to four-year-olds.