I have noticed a certain phenomenon where people who are bad at something read books about it to compensate, and then having read books on the subjects start considering themselves experts on it and preach to others, closing the loop from descriptive to prescriptive.
Edited: Added second paragraph
I had a bad case of this, I did it a lot. Fortunately, some people made me aware of this tendency. Now a lot of those things I've learned are natural as if they've always been part of me. To be fair, there's 10 years in between both points.
People who learn a second language understand its grammar from the first stroke, since it’s taught along with the language. People who learn a first language recognize its grammar (i.e. they can tell you whether or not something is grammatical) but don’t understand it, because they picked the language up “naturally.”
Often a master will come to a sophomore student and ask them to explain a concept to the juniors (after checking their explanation for not having any faults the master can find), because a usual master’s explanation (presuming the master isn’t also a master of education) is far less useful to a junior’s understanding than a sophomore’s is. The master is aware of nuances that greatly affect the end result, but aren’t so relevant at first; while the sophomore is aware mostly of things in the order they’ve managed to absorb them so far—which likely reflects the order of least-to-most difficult to absorb, and so reflects the things the juniors would be most likely to be struggling with.
I think of teaching something as a separate skill. As you say, teaching is about helping a student where they are. Mastering topic X doesn't convey knowledge of how students A, B, and C each relate to topic X.
A friend of mine once told me something that stuck with me, truly mastering something isn't the ability to do it well yourself, it's the ability to pass on the knowledge to others. Having taught before I agree. You never realize how little you understand the details of things until you try to teach someone else, and once you become cognizant of the details you forgot while learning enough to teach them to someone else, while retaining your skills and muscle memory, I feel like you can begin to call yourself a master.
https://www.etymonline.com/word/sophomore
> 1680s, "student in the second year of university study," literally "arguer," altered from sophumer (1650s, from sophume, archaic variant form of sophism), probably by influence of folk etymology derivation from Greek sophos "wise" + mōros "foolish, dull" (see moron). The original reference might be to the dialectic exercises that formed a large part of education in the middle years. At Oxford and Cambridge, a sophister (from sophist with spurious -er as in philosopher) was a second- or third-year student (what Americans would call a "junior" might be a senior sophister).
A motivating way to learn is to teach or re-iterate what you know, you learn new things that way. Going overboard or thinking you are a genius on the topic suddenly is annoying but sometimes it is how that person is motivated.
As far as sharing what people know through learning, that they previously didn't know and is interesting and fresh to their mind, that is part of their learning process.
Spaced Learning [1] + Spaced Repetition [2] are very effective learning/memory techniques, revisiting a topic many times over time.
Even commenting on topics you are into or researched on, simply restating them sometimes leads to learning more about it, at a minimum it sets it into your knowledge through repetition or spaced learning.
There is a fun spaced learning game using Spaced Repetition called How To Remember Anything Forever-ish [3].
Really both techniques just pattern-ize already existing techniques how people learn things through repetition and time. It is really just revisiting a topic in intervals that will put it in memory and make it important, which the brain will spend more cycles on, and new ideas and uses for that knowledge come up.
Talking or sharing what you know about what you just learned is part of that unstructured spaced learning/repetition that helps learn. It plays into presentation as well, when you are teaching a topic you start by summarizing, then get to the details, then resurface with the summary while hitting key points multiple times throughout. A teacher or presenter will learn more and more the more they repeat that topic/lesson etc that is impossible to get to on early iterations or draft/sketch phases.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_learning
I think the problematic thing here is seeing alone isn't feeling+seeing but making assumptions that it is.
"Emotional false memory in autism spectrum disorder" ... unfortunately not on sci-hub so I didn't make it past the abstract :( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30973243
Definitely. I once worked in the central office of a well-funded NGO. The activists for this cause had long since burnt out and lost their enthusiasm, but they liked the salary and job security of these office positions, and so they remained with the NGO for decades. Everyone did the bare minimum of activism to get by, without really caring.
that's just word games with 'activist' at that point. They were salary-people who worked for an NGO; Activists can work for NGOs, but that doesn't make one an activist -- personal ethos and actions produces an activist.
Sounds just like a previous team leader of mine.
I figured that it gives such people a mentality in which they are simply accepting live as it is, because you kind of have to by force (in a sense). I think the introspection from that would also be really valuable. But the issue here is: the price is too high.
And I also think that's the case for the autistic group that has trouble with integrating themselves in society in the way they want to. Yes, resilience gained from introspection, for example, is amazing. But the cost might be to live with almost no close friends.
Obviously, this is a sketched scenario and doesn't apply to everyone. But I can imagine that the cost is too high for quite a few people who have issues with social skills. Unfortunately, we still live in a time where we pay a fairly high cost for integrating into the social fabric of society when you're not able to do that by yourself.