How People Who Don’t Know How to Teach Things Teach Things
I’ve always been very good with ideas and words. I know how to parse information from the first time I’m exposed to it. I could always “see” how thoughts formed concepts and connected in a logical structure, almost as though they were tangible constructs for me to manipulate by just thinking about them. I could learn what other people knew and explain it in simple, condensed terms even they had trouble using. I could also quickly spot when there were holes in the way someone else presented something, when their model for some aspect of how the world worked was incomplete. As you can imagine, this led to many heated arguments with teachers and reprimands for me as a child.
As a young adult, I began working in alternative education. No matter what subject or skill I was explaining, there was a consistent type of response from my students: “I learned more from you in just one lesson than I did in three months with my last teacher.” My strength lay in explaining and demonstrating what I knew so that others could quickly adopt a similar level of understanding.
My work in book production revolves around the base skill of organizing and articulating the knowledge of experts. I arrange the chaotic mass of their complex ideas. I specialize in the transfer of meaningful, often difficult ideas from one mind to many. I have a knack for working toward excruciatingly ordered detail.
The more experts I work with, the more surprised I become by how stilted they can be at explaining what they know. Teaching is its own skill. Most people don’t even realize they can’t do it very well until they endeavor to. Someday I’d like to write a book called Unconscious Expertise: Why People Who Are So Good at Something Can Be So Bad at Explaining It. Or maybe it will be called How People Who Don’t Know How to Teach Things Teach Things. It’s unfortunate that having a valuable perspective doesn’t necessarily confer the ability to communicate it well to others. I feel it is incumbent upon me to do what I can to help others develop this and related abilities.
I’ve realized that there is a certain point of expertise where conclusions become postulates in the mind that holds them. A postulate shows up in your head as a fully formed idea that makes automatic, unconscious, and intuitive sense to you. You forget that it took a long process to arrive there while you were still learning how everything worked. That’s why not everyone knows the same things by default, and things obvious to other experts might completely elude you. But once you start accepting something as true, you are biased toward expecting others to do the same. You cannot pass on what you know in any medium until you can reverse-engineer and verbalize your unique knowledge.
It’s why I stop listening to any “guru” who tells me I’m guaranteed to, at first, suck at anything new I attempt and that sucking a million times is the only way to get any good. The point of listening to an expert is for them to explain the principles they’ve learned through their own “sucking a million times” trial-and-error process that will enable me to minimize the amount of suckage required. I'm already qualified to suck on my own. They’re supposed to be putting the ideas in my head that will allow me not to. Expressing experience as words should expedite my path toward non-suckage.
Among the popular books that fall under the vast “how to do a thing” genre, it seems the majority almost always share a critical flaw. Too often, I read such a book written by a so-called "expert,” only to get to the end and realize that I probably could have written virtually the same book with the information I had when I started reading it. There will almost always be a chapter, a section, or a mantra repeated throughout the text that could be summarized as “Just start doing the thing.” In other words, the author is expertly advising you to just copy how other people doing the thing do the thing. Then, you too will be doing the thing.
If you’re lucky, their advice might be as specific as to “just do the thing the way I happened to find success doing the thing.” If it worked for them, it must mean that it’s going to work exactly the same for all other people under all possible conditions. Right?
These people often learn just by acting or imitating what they see. They assess it in a limited way that applies to their specific strengths and situation. This means they can’t generalize the information to see how it would apply to other people and situations. They cannot think in principle or articulate their thoughts aloud.
It’s not necessarily due to laziness. Some of these people are extremely proactive and hardworking. It’s just that their brains don’t function like teachers’ brains do. Some people are the opposite: hyper-analytical, assessing every thought that enters the mind in excruciating detail, seeking out its hidden epistemology and logical structure. They are much better at generalizing and rearranging information. These are the people who can explain anything to you (and often will without being asked to).
Very often, even if someone is good at explaining part of how something works, there might be a bunch of foundational background information that’s required before the explanation they’re giving holds any water. They have to unpack their unspoken premises: their own postulates. A good teacher is someone who doesn’t take knowledge for granted. They are not just someone who understands how something works. They’re not even just somebody good at verbalizing. They have to be aware of everything required to be verbalized. They have to be able to figure out what they’ve overlooked in their own paradigm and instruction.
Imagine that the primary advice in a bestselling book about how to be successful on YouTube amounts to: “Well, just start making YouTube videos and see what works.” How many unspoken premises are contained in that instruction? The author is expecting you to know what they mean by “making a YouTube video” (which is very generic instruction, if you think about it). How many possible outcomes could qualify as a YouTube video?
In such cases, the author actually means something much more specific, but they fail to articulate it. They already have their own cultural understanding of and detailed expectations for what a good YouTube video is. They probably watch YouTube videos all day when they’re not busy making and marketing them. They probably study what’s hot and trending in their free time. They have channels and genres to use as internal references for how it works. And because they are so accustomed to all that, they don’t think they need to explain it to you. “Well, obviously, a good YouTube video is like these things that I and everyone’s mother watches all day long.” No further instruction required.
Want to play the bagpipes? Just start playing like the best bagpipers you know. Copy how you see them bagpiping. Rinse and repeat until it works for you, and scale it from there. Gee, what a great idea. Why didn’t I think of that?