After reading my previous post about teaching it reminded me of a couple other interesting observations I've made about teaching to the "prepared" and "unprepared" students over the years. So I thought I'd spend a few words on the subject.

From my experience, when you're teaching to the unprepared students, it matters greatly whether or not you practice your teachings. However, if you're teaching to the prepared, that really doesn't matter as much. The unprepared students are usually unwilling to adopt a new idea unless it has some proof of its validity. The prepared students simply take the idea and decide for themsevels whether the idea is worth trying out after calculating all the risks associated with it. For all they care they could be the first person to actually practice the new idea since they don't mind as long as they believe it's worth giving a shot. Another point is that trying to teach the unprepared by example is doing them a disfavor. I've come across this many many times during my Junior year when I had to tutor other students how to program. It was quite obvious which students were prepared and which weren't because when I showed them an example of how to accomplish a certain task, the prepared ones would constantly bug me until they understood what my motivations were behind solving the problem the way I did. However, the unprepared ones took it for granted that whatever I did was simply a pattern they should learn by memory and never really questioned much. So what I did after a few sessions was I stopped giving them examples, and instead I started walking them through a verbal solution. In other words, I tried to help them understand every logical step that took me to come to a conclusion that convinced me that a certain way of solving this problem would be the best. Some students got annoyed that it took too long to learn to solve a problem and wanted to just jump to the example where others were quite intrigued by the whole process.

I wonder how many times during the course of a day I forget to maintain the mindset of a prepared student... How about you guys? Are you guys always prepared to learn?