I have done a lot of disparate things over the years, but the main way I have made my money is through teaching. I like to say that I am a teacher because it feeds my addiction to learning. It’s a cliché for a reason, but I find the best way to learn is to teach.

What follows are some lessons I’ve learned about teaching.

Tests suck

The reason we have tests is that you have to prove that you have taught and that someone has learned, so that you can get paid. It’s a necessary evil.

The Socratic method is the best way to teach

Ask questions, don’t give answers. The best way to have someone learn and retain that knowledge is to have them come to a conclusion themselves. It is hard to see a student struggle when you know you can end their suffering by giving just giving them the answer. But if you are patient and let them figure things out on their own, they will learn more and retain the knowledge for longer.

School is a really crappy environment to teach

School is designed to teach a whole bunch of people the same thing. This means that you slow down the smart students and pay more attention to the slow ones to level them out. The real value of school is that it indoctrinates you into society. Public school is a great babysitter. College is great for preparing someone for more school, to open horizons, or find colleagues to work with in the future. As a professor, having a job at a university is a great way to prove that you are an expert. These are all valuable things. But not the best environment to learn unless you are that one student in middle who is not too smart and not too dumb.

Learning is best done by doing

The best way to teach is to make the student do something. Tell them the basics, have them do it, then tell them how they did it wrong or right (being as gentle as possible) and have them try again. Rinse and repeat, each time adding a little more to the task.

The Zone of Proximal Development

This is the hardest part about teaching. You need to keep the student in the zone of proximal development.

The Zone of Proximal Development is the space between what a learner can do without assistance and what a learner can do with guidance.

You need to motivate the student by having tasks that aren’t too hard for them to figure out, but not so easy they get bored. What makes it worse is that each student can be at a different level, even in the same class.

Not every class can be perfect

Sometimes you can teach a class and it goes amazing, and then you teach the exact same class a second time, and it bombs.

Those are my lessons for teaching. I hope you have prepared for the test. Class dismissed.