The Feynman Technique
dsebastien.net
dsebastien.net
Another Feynmann Technique (also not actually said by him, but of him. https://wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman
You write down the problem.
You think very hard.
Then you write down the answer.
In my experience, for ordinary problems, this is so important that it often directly reveals the solution in itself.
A compelling essay would be to rigorously argue that this indeed was his technique. It would be a lot of work, long, and I suspect you won't find support for some elements; you'd have to modify your proposition. In particular, although he does do each of these things, I don't think they are chronological or form a systematic "technique". It may be easier to argue for them separately, as e.g. The Four Feynman Techniques.
Then, reference that essay from a shorter, lighter overview, like the one submitted here.
"How did you manage to teach something you didn't know" I asked.
"It actually wasn't that hard, I just made sure to always be 2 weeks ahead of what the students were learning. It actually made for a good forcing function to learn the content well." i recall him saying.
After reading this article, I wonder if he was born with gifted intelligence and intuitively employed this method, or if he BECOME so smart by employing this method...
He was probably gifted, and made good use of his gift by applying this approach, leading to wonderful results!
The hardest workers I know are the ones of ordinary intelligence. They have jobs that require more hours for less money, and often have families to take care of as well.
I don't think of anybody in my circle of acquaintances who's genuinely dumb, so I can't vouch for what happens once intelligence really dips far below average. Still, my anecdotal experience is that the really smart people are only kind of ordinarily diligent.
I feel teachers who use that technique can't provide much depth in their teaching. The best teachers I had were way ahead of what they were teaching and knew the topic in and out.
But given the scenario is being the TA (ie a PhD student tasked with supporting a professor's class, often 1 of many TAs) then I don't think we can expect him to be way ahead of every topic in the class.
When I was first learning to code, it took some effort for me to understand what a function did, particularly the concept of returning an expression, or what happens if you write `foo() + bar()`. (In what order are `foo` and `bar` called?)
Now of course those concepts are trivial. But it’s easy to forget their initial difficulty when teaching, so I might be liable to just breeze through functions and leave most students behind. A freshly-learned TA would remember what was hard and be able to tell students the intuition-pumps that helped them, while directing more advanced questions to the professor.
For example, a TA might know to explicitly say that every time you call a function, it remembers where it was called so it can `return` there at the end of the function’s execution. Then if a student wants more detail about that, they can ask the professor who can explain how a function call is invisibly being converted to code that allocates a new stack frame and sets the execution pointer.
aside/ school teachers are different, they learn typical misunderstandings with experience.