Interesting that it it takes so long. I am reminded of SilasBarta's claim that a lot of things that require lots of experience just require the right insights plus some practice.
It would be interesting to write down a bunch of student questions, and lists of questions from an experienced TA and a naive TA and then try to figure out how they differ.
The reason was probably that there was a large amount of material (the class included electricity, magnetism, circuits, and optics), so that I had to learn many different explanations. Each of these topics is a course by itself, and so and to explain things for an introductory course you often have to have a deeper level of knowledge. I hadn't taken any classes other than the intro class, so acquiring the deeper explanations was a long process.
We've learned not to expect short inferential distances when explaining ideas we understand. We've also learned that leaping too far ahead when explaining ideas like transhumanism can freak people out.
I want to be really really good at explaining ideas. Does anyone have recommendations about how to figure out what the next inferential step is in another person's mind?
Categories which are not answers themselves but are areas in which I expect to find answers: