What is fun about teaching...

I used to wonder if teaching would become boring as you explained the same thing over and over and over, year after year. Would you get tired of the sound of your own voice?

Today reminded me of those ponderings. In my multi-agent systems course, we were talking about mechanisms which incentivize participants to be honest. It is a fairly complicated concept with lots of cases, rules, and the math to back it up. We talked about ideas, insights, and counter-examples for much longer than you could have guessed. It was a great volley of ideas as they wondered about other solutions, challenged the rules, and compared the ideas to other topics. It was fun.

I think what is missing from some of our teachers in the church is the ability to REALLY understand and value the comments made (and the comments not made). Questions and answers are often intended to keep the audience awake by having them parrot back definitions and terminology rather than stimulating thinking or wanting real input.

If I’m explaining something difficult to my CS students, I can’t just tell them how to do something, I have to be able to understand their misconceptions and deficiencies and adjust my presentation accordingly. I can’t help them to understand until I really see it from their standpoint. I continually find myself saying, “That is a great thought. I hadn’t considered that before.” And I MEAN it. For me, that is the fun of teaching – to consider things you hadn’t thought of before. In addition, the fun of teaching is to see people understand for the first time as you explain it in a way specifically tailored to their way of thinking.

In the gospel, the concepts are simpler, so (often) we think we can just present the material and there will be no disagreement. Thus, we make the mistake of thinking there is a single point of view. We give lessons that assume everyone in the audience is happily married (in the temple) with children, rather than consider another vantage point.

I admit that mental gymnastics are required of the teacher in being able to hear something you weren’t expecting, understand the motivation, appreciate the viewpoint, react so as not to offend, and incorporate the idea into the presentation without losing the main point of the lesson.