> I'm not a hundred percent certain of the exact mechanisms of how, yet. In my experience, I learn the most when I struggle; if a student can shortcut through all the hard parts on, for example, and assignment, they're not going to learn very much. On the flip side, when most students struggle, they just give up. Somehow I need to make assignments which thread the needle between being too hard to solve and too easy to learn anything.
The academic theory is that for each learner, there are three concentric circles - the way I was taught them, they were called the comfort zone, the growth zone, and the danger zone. (https://commonslibrary.org/the-learning-zone-model/ calls them comfort, learning and alarm zones) Learning happens best when you push people beyond their comfort zone, but not into the danger zone (where the amount retained rapidly converges to zero). Of course, this is easier said than done, especially with a class of students with varying abilities, though I like your approach to the problem. It's even harder when you're teaching a 200-student introductory class and there's no way to really set individual assignments.
> [Lecturing] is designed for the lecturer's convenience ...
I personally really liked most of my lectures I sat in as a student - yes there was one guy who just read out from the textbook he'd published, so I skipped those lectures and just read the book. But overall, I liked most of my lectures; I might be the exception to the rule. I think the important thing is to make a lecture interesting with some of the same storytelling ideas that writers and TV/film scriptwriters use, and to throw in jokes and asides every now and then. Be a human being with personality. Worked examples, live-coding, experiments etc. are also useful, depending on the topic. (For more examples and scientific background, see Willingham's book "Why don't students like school?") Of course, that's a lot more work for the lecturer than designing for their own convenience. I've lectured like this myself before and students loved it. I've also heard from students at various places that, now the pandemic has died down mostly, "We're not paying fees just to watch some videos. We can do that on youtube. We want real lectures back."
The most important part, which one of my professors told me in the first week and was some of the best advice I ever got at university, was that you don't actually learn anything in lectures. That's not the point. You learn things by doing the exercises, and by studying in your own time. Lectures are just there to prepare you for the learning, because without the prep you wouldn't know what to do in the exercises.
> If you're on the fence about teaching, you should definitely give it a try, if only because interacting with students is such a rewarding experience.
Definitely!