Curse of Knowledge

When we discussed false beliefs and the curse of knowledge phenomenon, I thought mainly of differing teaching styles. My finance class is taught by a 70+ older man who lost his outstanding 3 page resume in a study guide that he had prepared for us. I also laugh to myself that someone could be so knowledgeable about a subject but so poor at teaching it. He probably has dreams about finance and is so good at what he does that he no longer has to pay complete attention while he is doing something. The problem is that when he comes into the classroom he doesn’t really turn on. We spend most of our time listening to his life stories and looking at chicken scratch diagrams that he scribbles up on the board. Whenever he asks a question and the whole class doesn’t have the faintest idea what the answer is, he gets this confused look on his face as though we all must have simply forgotten. When no one answers he points to his nonsense diagram where only he sees the answer popping off the board. It wasn’t something that we discussed, but all of this seems to follow in with the hindsight bias. When individuals already know something, they are more likely to argue that they knew it earlier then they did. For an elderly teacher, teaching students a new subject like in my class, the results are pretty disastrous. There are the occasional surprises when you get an older teacher that is really good, but my experience has usually been to learn more from younger teachers. What’s interesting about older teachers, and I guess older people in general, is that they are well aware of how hard it can be too learn new things! Our classroom in Lillis has one of those new projector document cameras, and someone has to go up every class time and turn it on for him. This is interesting because despite his own confusion in a new area, he is incapable of recognizing his students’ ignorance in another. My point is not to rant on old people or my finance teacher, but to point out how to effectively learn, teach, and basically communicate. We all know that the best way to learn something is to teach it, but it may also be that the inverse is true. What if the inverse is true and the best way to teach something is to learn it again. By re-learning you’d have a better chance at identifying the common pitfalls and steering the students around them. This all seems to support a hybrid theory like was mentioned in lecture. We seem to have a more incremental ability when we are younger to learn and teach others, and it seems like this ability gradually gets worse until it appears to resemble the Entity theory.