I don't mind some bashing but your comments actually read relatively warm to me — no worries about the tone. Re: expectations, it's a tricky thing. I think it's a bit unfair to say that this particular serialization of concepts can only serve as "me documenting my journey" and not "me teaching someone". Like, it's a bit presumptious to say that no one will actually learn from it. Maybe 45% find it incomprehensible, 40% find it overly verbose and obvious, and 5% find it the best thing ever that unlocks the understanding for them. That's kind of what I expect, honestly, and that's good enough for me. I'm genuinely proud of the pedagogical approach in this article. It's a bit "experimental", which is why I didn't put it on my main blog, but this is exactly how I'd want to be taught in the beginning. I assume others like me exist.
back
1 comments
Someone learning from your journey is not you teaching them.
Teaching is a very particular skillset and craft, especially teaching languages. It should be grounded in a teacher’s own experience learning something as it helps them to empathize with the learner but simply talking about how you learned something is not teaching.
I'm familiar with teaching. It's in a different space (programming) but I've done plenty of highly successful educational writing before. I understand what you're saying and again — I'm claiming that I've rigorously arranged the layering of intuition in this article. This is teaching. You may disagree with the approach but it's not a random braindump of "what I learned".
Well, if it’s teaching, it’s not very good then as you don’t seem to know much about your supposed students struggles with learning this concept. You only know your own.
E.g. the visualization you’re proud of — what problem does it solve for your potential learners? Do they actually have this problem? Not your assumption of the problem but you actually seeing them experiencing this problem and offering them visualization and seeing how it helps them to close the gap? If yes, why do you think your approach failed for HN audience?
I'm saying that there's a subset of people (people like me) who find this approach enjoyable. Maybe you find it difficult to believe; that's cool. I'm not here to litigate whether these people exist. I didn't write this article for the HN audience, and I think some of the lurkers have likely found it helpful. I am offering what would have closed the gap for me. I trust my intuition on this.
As I said in the comment above, I do enjoy it as well, what I am pushing back is calling it pedagogical approach or teaching.
If you taught, you know that you and your mind don’t matter much in the process of teaching, your student’s mind is in the center.
Talking about something based on your own experience into an abstract void and hoping that some lurker’s mental model matches yours is not a rigorous pedagogical approach.
Ordering topics by strict topological sorting with no cyclical dependencies, ensuring that there's a consistent picture built with each step, and that this picture monotonically converges towards the correct model as you move towards the end of the article is a rigorous pedagogical approach.
No, that’s just rigorous writing. Rigorous pedagogical approach implies helping other minds to solve problems and obstacles with acquiring knowledge. Your approach results in coincidental learning because you don’t care about the mind of your learners and their problems, you care about your own.
I do suggest to experiment with your writing — try writing only about your own journey (and nothing else!), try sitting down with another person, multiple people, and teaching them the same thing. Try writing a post for them and them only after the session and see whether there are any differences.
A good teacher is not the one who proclaims themselves to be one.
Good luck!