Did you ever help your dad with a home repair project? Your part of the job probably wasn't big. You might have been holding the flashlight or pulling a wire through a hole (because you could fit into a space that he couldn't). He told you what to do, but you likely didn't understand it the first time. This likely led to frustration on your dad's part and you feeling pretty dumb. This is not just a common problem with dads and home repair; it's a problem any time someone who knows what they are doing VERY well tries to explain it to a novice. This phenomenon is ominously called "The Curse of Expertise."
Expertise is a wonderful thing, and I've extolled its virtues many times, including last week's post. The problem isn't that people have expertise; it's that they forgot what it was like before. There is jargon that they use fluently, forgetting that many people don't know those terms. This is what happened when your dad told you to shine the light on the cam shaft, and you pointed it somewhere else. It's what happens when doctors use abbreviations for the cardiac event you had or the treatment she wants to prescribe. It's why you might think your child is speaking a foreign language when they excitedly talk about the video game they are obsessed with. And it is why you often had difficulty processing the lectures of some of your college professors. People simply forget that what is obvious to them is not obvious to those who have no achieved their level of familiarity with a topic.
School is starting soon in most of the United States. Every student in front of you will be a novice in the thing you are teaching. Remember that when planning your lessons. There is a certain amount of pre-requisite knowledge you might assume they have - if it was something they were taught last year - but it's a good idea to check. When you are planning to present new information, slow down and think about the terms you are going to use. When you teach gas laws, you are going to use the word "pressure" a lot. They know the word, but are you sure they know what it is in context? When you are going to teach solving a multi-step problem, make sure you are giving equal attention to each step with novice learners. There are steps involved in solving Doppler problems in physics that I can carry out unconsciously on my way to a more complex step, but I should not skip them while teaching juniors how to solve them because, if I do, they won't know why I chose the minus sign instead of the plus sign and assume all problems involve subtraction. Part of good pedagogy is figuring out what students don't know. Some knowledge is foundational, and we can't just move forward as if they had known it, or the knowledge we are trying to build will be shallow and best (or completely collapse at worst).
Adapting to their knowledge gaps will take extra time. I know there is a lot of pressure to get in all of our curriculum, but that should not be accomplished at the expense of learning. I would much rather have students learn well the things they have learned while having to omit a chapter at the end of the semester than to "cover" everything without their actually learning it.
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