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Comment by ntropic_thundr | Hacker News Reader

One the smartest people I know employed this technique when he was in grad school and working as a TA for a subject he didn't know.

"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...

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" I just made sure to always be 2 weeks ahead of what the students were learning"

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.

I totally agree, but maybe it’s best to have some of both. A professor who knows the subject inside and out and a TA who’s two weeks ahead.

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.

Further to your point, a lecturer who has long understood something can find it hard to understand how someone could misunderstand it - the kinds of misunderstandings they night have.

aside/ school teachers are different, they learn typical misunderstandings with experience.

This falls in line with how I've always thought it might be better to learn a foreign language from an instructor who mastered it as a second language rather than a native speaker. Assuming two instructors of otherwise equal theoretical ability and experience, the former might have a more empathetic understanding of the learning process a second language student would go through whereas the latter might unintentionally, innocently gloss over things that, to them, seem intuitive but the student may encounter as huge stumbling blocks. The ordering of direct and and indirect object English versus Spanish pronouns spring to mind.

I completely agree for full time professors/teachers.

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.

My favorite teacher in high school taught AP Calculus and learned the material one month ahead of teaching my class. I loved it. She was the best “explainer” of any teacher I’ve had. She knew which homework problems were going to be relatively hard, and which were crucial to understanding the core lessons of each chapter. She also emphasized intuitive understanding a lot, which I enjoyed. Very Feynman-ey. I think this approach shines when your goal is to help struggling students. I’d imagine this approach would be pretty bad at helping gifted students achieve their maximum potential.

*1 month, not one week, sorry. My edits aren’t going through atm.

Thanks for sharing this story.

He was probably gifted, and made good use of his gift by applying this approach, leading to wonderful results!

what does "gifted" even mean?

I find "gifted" is usually a derisive term for "hard worker" :p

All the extraordinarily intelligent people I've known worked unbelievably hard.

Huh. Most of the smartest people I know are really pretty lazy. They'll put a lot of effort into something they care about, but they're usually aware of the effort-to-reward ratio.

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.

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