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Comment by lupire | Hacker News Reader

It really is a shame that in the 20th Century, the "best" math and science books were judged not for their educational power, but for how difficult and impressive they were to fellow professionals. It seems as though the professors were afraid that they'd lose their lecturer jobs if the books were too educational on their own.

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Subject matter experts are not experts in pedagogy. Because pedagogy is a seperate subject entirely. And teaching is not about getting people to say aha. Thats just performance or entertainment. Seen everywhere these days thanks to the Attention Econnomy. You can gets ahas out of people playing great music. But dont equate that with getting people to play great music. Cuz that requires getting people to do lot of mundane mindless work for long long periods of time.

A few years ago, I tried teaching for a couple years. Something that struck me was that to teach at the elementary or high school level you need specific degrees, but to teach at a university you don't. There is this thinking that because you have a PhD you can teach, which is very far from the truth. Being a good communicator is a skill in itself.

Where I live you study pedagogy and practice it while doing your PhD. If you suck at it you can still pass, but at least they take a shot at teaching it to you. When applying for positions your record on teaching might make it harder to get to those where you're expected to do it regularly.

The usual nepotism, corruption and fraud in academia will of course allow some bad teachers to advance anyway.

That sounds good, wish more places did like that.

> Something that struck me was that to teach at the elementary or high school level you need specific degrees, but to teach at a university you don't

So, the thing about elementary and high school is that everyone goes to it, but only people who are good at studying go to university.

Given that the students are highly selected in the latter, you can get away with much worse instruction.

> only people who are good at studying go to university.

I think this is arse over elbow; the purpose of an undergraduate degree course is to teach you to study and do research. The "research" done by undergraduates isn't novel research; the student repeats "research" that has been done by generations of students before them. I.e., it's practice.

For this reason, writing undergraduate essays felt to me like being an impostor; you try to write in the manner of a researcher, knowing that you're faking it.

What does "aha" mean to you? To me it means understanding. And isn't that the point of teaching?

I can explain memory pointers to a layperson in terms of numbered boxes and yellow notes. They're still long long way to go from that even to reversing a single linked list successfully.

> And teaching is not about getting people to say aha. Thats just performance or entertainment.

Thank you. Reading the article will not in fact give you an easier time at the Jackson Problem sets.

I think many people who think this would have helped them back in the day have simply forgotten what the actual hard part of the degree was.

Are you sure the hard part is the most important part?

Yes. There's a difference between thinking you understand something and having to prove it via problems.

Often that's how I discover I didn't really understand something at all.

I don’t think this is true at all… Jackson is a good book not because it’s an easy introduction to EM but because it exposes you to more complex problems than would typically be looked at in undergraduate courses. There’s clearly a place for advanced texts for this reason.

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