I've never seriously wanted to teach, not for a living. Seems like I wanted to be a teacher sometime in third grade or so, but I think I wanted to be an astronaut, a plumber, and a firefighter that year too. I've had people tell me I'd be good at it, and I suppose I have some teaching-inclined genes as my dad was a teacher. But really, it's never been something I've taken all that seriously.
I have had some limited, informal experience. I've been the instructional assistant in a couple of classes, a CS lab and a remedial math class, as well as having done a little coaching. And through all that, I learned that teaching is not as easy as it looks. I had always assumed that if I knew something and they didn't, I could simply tell them, the light bulb would go off, and they would skip happily off with their newly-found knowledge. Apparently, it doesn't work like that. So I've learned some things myself through my few teaching experiences.
Lesson one: What makes sense to you doesn't necessarily make sense to them.
With the math class, I found myself at a loss to put what I wanted to say into words. I saw the solution in my head, could turn it upside down and every which way, but it was all numbers and not words. And apparently words were necessary for these people. I couldn't just do a couple of examples and assume they would see the pattern. Even if I did manage to somehow get an explanation out, it was not always one that was acceptable to them. It was hard to put myself in their mindset, particularly when these kids were not mathematically-minded at all. Some things will click for some people, but not for others. If these kids learned the way I did, they wouldn't have to be in the class at all.
Lesson two: You have to pretend you don't know too much more than they do.
I had a guy come into the lab one night and asked for help on his CS program. It was for the entry-level class, one I took two years ago. I looked at his code for probably fifteen minutes, at a complete loss. I knew fifteen different ways to solve the problem he was working on, but they were all at a more advanced level than he was taking. Finally, I had to just think the whole thing out from the beginning and then I was able to help him some. But I felt like an idiot, being in junior level classes and not being able to solve his problem.
Lesson three: They don't listen.
The example here comes from the same experience with the guy who came into the lab for help. After I worked this all out, I managed to give him about four lines of code that would solve the basic problem. He still had to add a few things to make the output exactly how he wanted it and to write a segment that performed a simple task, but it was pretty much the general answer. I showed it to him, and he said, "Oh, that's the thing that the teacher gave us in class." His teacher had given him that much, which he had lost. Ten minutes later, he was still trying to use the same procedure he had been working on before he ever asked for help.
Lesson four: What is obvious to you may be revolutionary to them.
I was the assistant coach for a middle school volleyball team my junior year of high school. There were two assistant coaches, a short one and a tall one. As the taller one, it was my job to teach the girls to spike. They were having trouble, which was to be expected since they'd never done it before for the most part. I stopped the exercise to explain something about hand movement or whatever and said something, completely offhand, about hitting the ball down. A girl interrupts me to say, "You mean, we're supposed to hit it down?"
"Uh, yes."
"Oh!"
She then proceded to perform the best spike I've ever seen hit by a middle schooler. Unreal. I thought it was obvious to anyone that of course, you wanted to hit a spike down. That was the whole blessed point of a spike. Therefore, I hadn't specifically told them that.
Lesson five: Assuming they know nothing insults and bores them.
This is one I learned at work. Having been at Vintner's an obscenely long time by Vintner's standards, I'm generally the one who trains the new servers. This consists of them following me around to tables and looking a little bit foolish standing awkwardly to the side all the time. The people have all different levels of waiting experience. Some people have been doing it for years, and others are amazed to have been hired with no experience. I never know what to tell them. I'm at a disadvantage because I came in completely new to the job, and I don't really know how much is Vintner's-specific and how much could be said at any restaurant job. I try to give them advice in addition to information about where the coffee is kept and whether they can take smoke breaks, and while some are gratefully received, others stare at me like I've just told them something terribly obvious. Even if I ask them ahead of time how much experience they have, it doesn't help me much to narrow down the level of training they might need.
Lesson six: They won't ask for help.
In the math class, most of the people in my group did okay. They weren't blowing anybody away, but they seemed to understand most things enough to pass, and since they generally had low math-standards, that was good enough for them. But there were a couple who were obviously not gettting it. The homework they bothered to do received dismal grades, and I'm not sure if they ever passed a test. We had work days where they would work on some problems and I would help them if they asked for it. Or rather, I would recognize that they had been staring at the same problem for ten minutes with a very blank stare on their faces and force my assistance upon them. After I worked them through something, I would ask if they were doing okay. They always said yes, that they thought they understood it now. They weren't stupid, but apparently they had difficulty with the difference between understanding something and otherwise. They both had to repeat the class.
Here is where I'm a big hypocrite. I won't ask for help either. It's a little unnatural how much I dislike it. Asking for help is way up there in my list of dislikes, worse than going to the dentist, but not as bad as cantaloupe. I have to be so confused I can't see straight to seek assistance. Otherwise, I just assume I don't need to know that badly or I continue to work on it myself until I either get it or start to cry and then I ask for help. But if I were ever in danger of failing a class, a remedial class, you can bet I would be asking some questions. Part of me thinks that they just didn't realize how badly they were doing, but even they could put their grades into a calculator and get an average.
Teaching is an art of fine lines, where you pretend not to know while trying to tell them, where you assume they know nothing without insulting their intelligence, where you tell yourself that you're helping when they go off and do whatever they want anyway, where you help them without doing it for them. I have had many amazing teachers, and I can only assume that they found most of those happy mediums, probably through more experience than assisting with middle school coaching or remedial college math. It suffices to say that I haven't found the lines. Frankly, I don't know that I'm all that interested in finding them.
And I'm surely not going to ask for help.
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