// Albert Einstein said: "If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself." I like to think this is true about explaining things to my parents
- Isn't this a quote by Richard Feynman?
- Isn't this a quote by Richard Feynman?
> Feynman was a truly great teacher. He prided himself on being able to devise ways to explain even the most profound ideas to beginning students. Once, I said to him, “Dick, explain to me, so that I can understand it, why spin one-half particles obey Fermi-Dirac statistics.” Sizing up his audience perfectly, Feynman said, “I’ll prepare a freshman lecture on it.” But he came back a few days later to say, “I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t reduce it to the freshman level. That means we don’t really understand it.”
– Feynman’s Lost Lecture by David and Judith Goodstein
It's about understanding the subject matter well enough that if necessary you could simplify and elaborate on topics to bring your audience to your level of understanding.
(i.e. - understanding your subject vs. being able to recite facts)
You really come to terms with how well you know a subject when you sit down and try to teach it to someone else.