a quick nod to teaching [another article post]

.. still visiting my parents, so:
no technical details today, dear readers.

i did stumble upon this article, though:

NFL Player Turns To Teaching During Lockout
by Amy Ta @ NPR

As the NFL tries working through its lockout, one professional football player decided to teach youth from grades one through 12. In April, Denver Broncos safety David Bruton started giving social studies and math lessons at Jane Chance Elementary School and Miamisburg High School (his alma mater) in Ohio.

Bruton says he got the idea from his high school coach and teachers. Why did they think he was teacher material? Bruton says maybe it was because he performed well during his own high school and college years, and he had what it took to be a role model. His patience and persistence also helps, he adds.

... The NFL player naturally taught social studies because he majored in Sociology at Notre Dame. But math came as a total surprise, he remarks. The last time Bruton took math courses was his first year in college. "I was definitely in the books, on my iPad looking up how to figure out quadratic equations and finding out angles," he says.

Calling teachers "the guiding source of our youth," Bruton says no one in such a position should take it lightly. He describes the challenge of constantly being on the move in classrooms, "You go around, helping them out individually, and you constantly using your brain, especially teaching stuff that you — in my position — haven't done in six years."

it reminds me of how it feels to teach a new course and the work involved in figuring out what kind of structure it should have, how might the students best understand this or that concept.

sometimes we don't know everything, but that's not the point.

instead, a good teacher can pick up the material as (s)he goes, then effectively and appropriately convey the same lessons to an audience of students, who lack the same ease of "being good at learning."

in other words, it's not a bad thing for a teacher to know how to be a good student.

also: it's nice to hear a public persona say that "it is hard to teach well."