Teaching is Difficult

I give it to school teachers and professors - I find teaching a very difficult and exhausting thing to do. My friend (who has a Bachelor’s in Communicology) gave me some of his intuition that he picked up during his four years at UH Manoa: communication isn’t really communication in the sense of what most people think it is.. there isn’t any real way to move a concept from one human brain to another, we can only attempt to lead the other person to the same conclusion that the original person had.

This probably couldn’t be more true for teaching. If we all had a way of directly transferring knowledge, teachers might become extinct or rather just a profession to tend to the equipment that has this function. I don’t know how public school teachers do what they do, day in and day out and get paid the way they do. I’ve had enough trouble trying to teach my peers some programming workflow concepts. My peers are often seniors who are majoring in engineering and are supposed to be among the best of and smartest students in the university.

Teaching drains and tests me - it is ruthless when any technical material is involved. In a way, teaching is a great way to learn things yourself.. you can’t explain a certain concept to others if you don’t have a good grasp of it yourself. Others will expose the weaknesses in your understanding and you will challenge theirs.

Don’t get me wrong, I love teaching and helping out others. I had many mentors along my academic journey in engineering that I’m sure that I would have never made it had I been alone. It just mentally drains me incredibly faster compared to many other activity.