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aretae comments on Being a teacher - Less Wrong
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As before...Teacher for 20+ years...dozens of different topics taught (~40K hours): Math (K-16), English (to Natives and Foreigners), Sports (Springboard Diving, Soccer, Basketball), Programming(C-->Java mostly).
The most interesting part of explanations is that the same explanation doesn't work for everyone. If you're going to be an effective teacher, you need 2+ backup explanations for when the first one doesn't work. Examples are frequently even better than explanations, and enough examples will get most folks a long ways.
My personal obsession in education is the feedback system, which is all but ignored in most education discussions. Difficulty with swimming is that folks with low kinesthetic awareness have very little ability to check what they're doing. Underwater video-cam would give quite a bit of advantage here.
3 takeaways:
I can easily see posts about your experience teaching being very informative. Specifically: digging into the details about how to deal with inferential distance.
I've long been frustrated about how much easier it is for me to explain concepts to others, compared to how hard it is to get a good explanation out of others. I was planning writing an article, and have an early pre-draft, in which I tell my "secret", but I've delayed it for ... way too long.
There are several tricks, but it's basically this: trace back to the nearest point of common understanding ("nepocu"), and then follow the inferential path back to the concept you want to explain, making sure to go over the motivation for each step, and to connect related topics. And of course, actually understand the topic yourself. (Anyone can PM me if they want the current draft.)
You would think that this is obvious, but in my experience, people generally don't follow it, or lack the requisite understanding.
I've done that before, but I'm not sure if I do it consistently. You've had long discussions with me, have you noticed whether do I do this more or less than others?
My advice mainly applies to high bandwidth exchanges (i.e. real-time conversation). Other than that, I don't know how to explain our failure to overcome the impasse.