I think it takes a certain type of person and attitude to be a good educator.

The approach of using questions to more or less lead a person through until they arrive at the “correct” conclusion is basically the Socratic Method and as a mode of pedagogy it’s really one of my least favourite ones that I actually use. But the thing is that it’s much easier to apply and to describe in a comment than other modes that I prefer to use.

To use an analogy, trying to describe a good pedagogical method in a comment is a lot like asking a skilled chess player what moves they would make in a game - they might be able to provide you the gist of the overall strategy but without the input from the other player each turn, you can’t say what piece to move in response, let alone where and when. (Not that pedagogy is a competition between opposing sides to achieve victory over the other, of course. But I’m sure you get what I mean.)

The act of educating is a really good example of the difference between a process and a procedure - anyone can write down the steps of a procedure, but a process doesn’t have clearly defined, linear steps; to use the really big example here - you can give anyone the steps for the procedure of putting on a bike helmet and they’ll (probably) get it right but you can’t give someone the process for riding a bike because riding a bike uses a different type of knowledge. I’m going off on a tangent here but there’s a good book on this by Harry Collins titled Tacit & Explicit Knowledge.

I find educating to be really rewarding because you get to provide guidance to the other person and you see them start putting things together themselves in a way they couldn’t before, and oftentimes in a way that’s their very own especially if you strike the right balance of contributing just enough that you evoke development but not so much that you stifle their development or you stray into becoming directive. (Or, to use the precise term, didactic.)

I also find it really fun and engaging to predict how a person will respond to my input and to see what I’m right about and what I’m wrong about. On a practical level this helps you to understand what the other person responds best to in every respect - wording, analogies, points of reference, the amount of context and the degree of detail, whether they prefer more in the way of positive feedback or if they prefer stuff that is a bit more oppositional by using gentle challenges (think stuff like posing riddles or having someone poke holes in your argument), right down to things like your use of tone and inflection and body language - but on a more abstract level you also start to develop an understanding of how someone else’s mind works by seeing it in action which is really cool, completely fascinating, and honestly I see it as a kind of privilege as well.

I think it takes a lot of courage, and often quite a lot of trust, for a person to open up to a learning process when someone else is leading it. I feel honoured when someone chooses to share that journey with me.

It’s something even more special when you take a person who has been beaten down by experiences in their past - whether it’s bullies, terrible experiences with teachers, a lack of belief in themselves, being forced to learn when they don’t want to, learning without reward but only ever increasing demands and expectations, having learning difficulties/disabilities, etc. - who suddenly connects with the experience of genuinely enjoying learning, maybe for the first time ever or maybe for the first time in a very long time. It’s a bit like when someone first learns to read and suddenly this whole world opens which was closed off to them before because it connects them with an aspect of their humanity that they didn’t have before that moment.

[Insert obligatory Michael Parenti quote here]

Educating is to knowledge what jazz is to sheet music. Or something.