Easy and hard teaching

There are two things that are usually easy for anyone who wants to be a teacher: teaching people whose learning styles are the same as yours and teaching anything that you struggled to learn.

As we grow up, we learn about our own learning processes. We learn where our strengths are and we learn how to deal with our particular set of deficits. As we learn to teach, our starting point is to think about ourselves as learners and to try to create lessons that we would have responded to when we were children or young adults. We tend to go at the pace that we learn best with and to provide the amount of detail that we would have needed in order to understand the concept. We use media that we are most comfortable with.

Likewise, if we have struggled with something, we know what it feels like to struggle and we also are aware of misconceptions we had or areas of weakness we had to overcome in order to learn that subject. We know where we made mistakes and how we learned to get around those mistakes.

The hard part of teaching is teaching people who are fundamentally different from us and to teach things that are easy for us.

When I speak of differences, I am concerned with how people think, which can be related to culture, history, and language but also psychology and neurology. Current attempts at teaching people to teach a diverse population continue to essentialize and stereotype people. I think it might be better to understand that people, whatever they look like, are going to have different patterns of thinking, different personalities, and different educational needs. It might be more fruitful to ask ourselves: what is the nature of this student's thinking? What does this student understand? What does this student misunderstand? How does this person learn? Given everything I have learned about teaching and learning, how can I create a successful learning experience for this person? This means using strategies, paces, and means of learning that are different from our own preferences.

Likewise, when teaching something that we found easy, we have to learn about where the struggles are for students who don't find it easy. We have to watch ourselves and guard against a negative attitude towards people who don't find a particular topic (or even a lot of topics) easy. We have to use our own struggles in other subjects to help us remember what it feels like to be frustrated. We have to learn from other teachers and other students strategies that work for breaking a topic down or teaching key aspects of a topic that is difficult for students.

The people who go into teaching are often people who enjoyed school. We need to be able to reach out to people who don't enjoy school for one reason or another and to learn from these people in the process of teaching them.