![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackLiv suggested a written version of a couple of rants I've often delivered, on how to explain things. I've little experience teaching, never formally, but when I can I really enjoy explaining things to people who are as intelligent as I am and really get them.
Here's a grab-bag of different thoughts.
Motivation
It's really easy to forget it may not be obvious why you're explaining something. Most people have some natural curiosity, or even if they don't care, are willing to follow your instructions. Sometimes this happens automatically, eg. "someone says how can I do X" or "why is X" (and explaining when you don't need to is often just clutter). If you ask yourself "do I need to explain why", it's usually obvious whether you do or not. But it's easy to forget to ask.
And, as with step two, explaining why doesn't just mean saying why, but confirming that they get it and are onboard with it. If they are, this is often over in less than a sentence each way! But sometimes it isn't.
For instance, I've seen people sucked into playing bridge, who did quite well following a bunch of guidelines from more experienced players, but made mistakes that showed they were built on no fundamental understanding. Eg. someone had learned that "you need 13 points or equivalent to open the bidding, 6 points or equivalent to respond". But they assumed that they should respond after their opponent opened the bidding.
That isn't just a matter of "they memorised the wrong thing". It's that whenever someone explained "opening the bidding" they didn't explain what it was FOR. I don't think that's an implementation detail, I think it's easier to understand bidding if you understand that you and your partner want to have a certain minimum total of high cards between you, and if you have almost none, you're in danger of bidding a contract and fail disastrously, but if you don't bid when you might have done, you're likely to miss out. But whoever explained opening the bidding didn't have time to explain this, and so the player didn't really get it.
I think it's usually beneficial for guidelines to exceed theoretical understanding a certain amount. You can get some momentum, and have why explained to you when you can fake it. In some games, some fields, it's fine if it's ALL following someone else's algorithm, that covers all cases and you can just take their word for it that they've proved it. But in bridge, and many other fields, you constantly have to adjust to slightly different situations, and memorising rules is like memorising the exact steps you take to work, rather than memorising the roads to take -- if someone leaves an obstacle in the way, you have NO idea how to improvise.
Likewise, it's easy to explain how to do calculus to someone who doesn't really understand at all why you might want to find the rate of change of a function at each point -- or even that that's what calculus is for. Indeed, the national curriculum practically mandates it. It might vary whether you need to start with real physical examples, or whether you can explain in terms of gradients of graphs. I think for many pieces of maths, if you understand the question well, that's enough, an abstract real-world question isn't necessarily more interesting. But (a) some maths has to be tied back to real-world problems for people to see what's useful about it and (b) I think it's easier to find examples where rates-of-change are interesting in real life that by asking apparently arbitrary questions like "what's the gradient of this graph at this point".
Getting each step
Relatedly, to get each step, it's not usually enough to say it, the person usually has to try it out a few different ways themself, until they've internalised it. And likely explored some of the edges and said, ok this is where it can be generalised, and where it can't. If not, they will feel like understood it, but probably not retain it.
Clarify what's most important, try to avoid overloading with detail, explain what's absolute and what's a generalisation, especially try to avoid lots of people shouting at once
When explaining something like bridge, it's easy to overwhelm someone. I personally find it important to clarify which things are fundamental building blocks, and which things are quick and dirty rules of thumb. And which things are rules you must follow, and which things are advice. And which guidelines are really fundamental, and which are applicable in one particular situation -- I've seen people paralysed with indecision, because they had hundreds of guidelines, but would have been better with the five most important ones, so they didn't randomly disobey the big picture to obey some special case someone ranted about once.
It's hard to see the downside of "oh, here's an interesting detail", but I find for many complicated things, doing them AT ALL is quite hard the first time. You don't want to wait too long before heading off habits which will become problems if they persist. But most people learn football by kicking it about a bit first, not be thrown into a regulated (if casual) game where they're given penalties every few minutes because they didn't understand some particular rule. Likewise, when teaching bridge, I would like to get people to the point of playing in order, understanding who won a hand and roughly how well it went, how to bid to a vaguely plausible contract, before interrupting them every three seconds with "that would be illegal in a club, but shall we pretend it didn't happen because this is casual?" They don't know what would be illegal in a club, they don't know what you're asking them, forcing them to run a gauntlet of "here's three hundred laws for experts you can't possibly know, but wing it and I'll interrupt you every time you get it wrong" is dispiriting for almost everyone. Teach the general outline first! Add everything else when they're ready for it.
Get people thirsty
I don't do this anywhere near as often as I should, but ideally, knowledge wouldn't be an expert trying to force it down someone's throat, it would be a learner who understands the goal, but is learning how to achieve them, who can see which decisions they need to improve, asking the expert for how.
If someone doesn't understand that there was a decision to be made, they probably can't understand your explanation of what they should have done. In order for knowledge to go in, there needs to be a gap to be filled, and it's often a lot easier to find a gap which is there (anything the beginner recognises they don't know) than try to argue them out of something they thought they were ok on.
I'll ideally hit a stride where someone is asking me things they're 70% certain of, so they're clearly moving in the right direction, but not embarrassed to ask for guidance. And the learning is led by them.
Recognise when you're reaching too far
I almost always reach too far and try to explain too much at once. If I'm explaining maths, often to someone who has a good maths background, but little current experience, I often try to explain something I mentioned in passing, but realise that each step itself requires a lot more practice that I'd expected, and the person I'm explaining to is probably going to tire their brain out before I get to the end. And I either need to give a higher-level overview, or explain a smaller chunk.
Being a co-pilot
This is almost the opposite of one of the pieces above. But for some things, I was pleasantly surprised to find how useful it was to for me and a complete bridge beginner to play as one player, and them to concentrate on following suit and learning how to do the legal things and obvious moves, and me to back them up with strategic decisions when they weren't sure, or when one nudge set the right direction for a hand. That there IS a lot of things you can learn by pattern matching, by saying "oh, in this situation usually happens". It's true in maths too -- you always have to be able to prove it, but you form intuitions that say "this SORT of thing can usually be simplified, lets try it" or "this sort of thing doesn't usually come up, I probably made a mistake earlier".
Here's a grab-bag of different thoughts.
Motivation
It's really easy to forget it may not be obvious why you're explaining something. Most people have some natural curiosity, or even if they don't care, are willing to follow your instructions. Sometimes this happens automatically, eg. "someone says how can I do X" or "why is X" (and explaining when you don't need to is often just clutter). If you ask yourself "do I need to explain why", it's usually obvious whether you do or not. But it's easy to forget to ask.
And, as with step two, explaining why doesn't just mean saying why, but confirming that they get it and are onboard with it. If they are, this is often over in less than a sentence each way! But sometimes it isn't.
For instance, I've seen people sucked into playing bridge, who did quite well following a bunch of guidelines from more experienced players, but made mistakes that showed they were built on no fundamental understanding. Eg. someone had learned that "you need 13 points or equivalent to open the bidding, 6 points or equivalent to respond". But they assumed that they should respond after their opponent opened the bidding.
That isn't just a matter of "they memorised the wrong thing". It's that whenever someone explained "opening the bidding" they didn't explain what it was FOR. I don't think that's an implementation detail, I think it's easier to understand bidding if you understand that you and your partner want to have a certain minimum total of high cards between you, and if you have almost none, you're in danger of bidding a contract and fail disastrously, but if you don't bid when you might have done, you're likely to miss out. But whoever explained opening the bidding didn't have time to explain this, and so the player didn't really get it.
I think it's usually beneficial for guidelines to exceed theoretical understanding a certain amount. You can get some momentum, and have why explained to you when you can fake it. In some games, some fields, it's fine if it's ALL following someone else's algorithm, that covers all cases and you can just take their word for it that they've proved it. But in bridge, and many other fields, you constantly have to adjust to slightly different situations, and memorising rules is like memorising the exact steps you take to work, rather than memorising the roads to take -- if someone leaves an obstacle in the way, you have NO idea how to improvise.
Likewise, it's easy to explain how to do calculus to someone who doesn't really understand at all why you might want to find the rate of change of a function at each point -- or even that that's what calculus is for. Indeed, the national curriculum practically mandates it. It might vary whether you need to start with real physical examples, or whether you can explain in terms of gradients of graphs. I think for many pieces of maths, if you understand the question well, that's enough, an abstract real-world question isn't necessarily more interesting. But (a) some maths has to be tied back to real-world problems for people to see what's useful about it and (b) I think it's easier to find examples where rates-of-change are interesting in real life that by asking apparently arbitrary questions like "what's the gradient of this graph at this point".
Getting each step
Relatedly, to get each step, it's not usually enough to say it, the person usually has to try it out a few different ways themself, until they've internalised it. And likely explored some of the edges and said, ok this is where it can be generalised, and where it can't. If not, they will feel like understood it, but probably not retain it.
Clarify what's most important, try to avoid overloading with detail, explain what's absolute and what's a generalisation, especially try to avoid lots of people shouting at once
When explaining something like bridge, it's easy to overwhelm someone. I personally find it important to clarify which things are fundamental building blocks, and which things are quick and dirty rules of thumb. And which things are rules you must follow, and which things are advice. And which guidelines are really fundamental, and which are applicable in one particular situation -- I've seen people paralysed with indecision, because they had hundreds of guidelines, but would have been better with the five most important ones, so they didn't randomly disobey the big picture to obey some special case someone ranted about once.
It's hard to see the downside of "oh, here's an interesting detail", but I find for many complicated things, doing them AT ALL is quite hard the first time. You don't want to wait too long before heading off habits which will become problems if they persist. But most people learn football by kicking it about a bit first, not be thrown into a regulated (if casual) game where they're given penalties every few minutes because they didn't understand some particular rule. Likewise, when teaching bridge, I would like to get people to the point of playing in order, understanding who won a hand and roughly how well it went, how to bid to a vaguely plausible contract, before interrupting them every three seconds with "that would be illegal in a club, but shall we pretend it didn't happen because this is casual?" They don't know what would be illegal in a club, they don't know what you're asking them, forcing them to run a gauntlet of "here's three hundred laws for experts you can't possibly know, but wing it and I'll interrupt you every time you get it wrong" is dispiriting for almost everyone. Teach the general outline first! Add everything else when they're ready for it.
Get people thirsty
I don't do this anywhere near as often as I should, but ideally, knowledge wouldn't be an expert trying to force it down someone's throat, it would be a learner who understands the goal, but is learning how to achieve them, who can see which decisions they need to improve, asking the expert for how.
If someone doesn't understand that there was a decision to be made, they probably can't understand your explanation of what they should have done. In order for knowledge to go in, there needs to be a gap to be filled, and it's often a lot easier to find a gap which is there (anything the beginner recognises they don't know) than try to argue them out of something they thought they were ok on.
I'll ideally hit a stride where someone is asking me things they're 70% certain of, so they're clearly moving in the right direction, but not embarrassed to ask for guidance. And the learning is led by them.
Recognise when you're reaching too far
I almost always reach too far and try to explain too much at once. If I'm explaining maths, often to someone who has a good maths background, but little current experience, I often try to explain something I mentioned in passing, but realise that each step itself requires a lot more practice that I'd expected, and the person I'm explaining to is probably going to tire their brain out before I get to the end. And I either need to give a higher-level overview, or explain a smaller chunk.
Being a co-pilot
This is almost the opposite of one of the pieces above. But for some things, I was pleasantly surprised to find how useful it was to for me and a complete bridge beginner to play as one player, and them to concentrate on following suit and learning how to do the legal things and obvious moves, and me to back them up with strategic decisions when they weren't sure, or when one nudge set the right direction for a hand. That there IS a lot of things you can learn by pattern matching, by saying "oh, in this situation usually happens". It's true in maths too -- you always have to be able to prove it, but you form intuitions that say "this SORT of thing can usually be simplified, lets try it" or "this sort of thing doesn't usually come up, I probably made a mistake earlier".