You Learn More Than You Teach

The title can be understand in the sense that you need to learn enough before you can teach; which is true. If you don’t know enough about something, you can’t teach others about it. If you’ve never eaten a type of dish, how are you going to able to describe to others, how it taste? You can imagine about it, but there’s a limit to how much the mind can conceive. And also imaginations are always, always, based on experience.

But what I meant with the title is a bit different. People learn more about a subject, when they teach it to others. To take the same food analogy, when you describe a food you have just eaten, it imprints stronger on your mind. When you’re asked how does it taste, you search deeper into your palate and try to understand the sensations you taste on your tongue. I may be a bit weird (a bit?) but I find it more interesting when trying new food, to know how it is made. To stretch the analogy even further, when you try to explain about the food, it is helpful to know how it is made, so that you can make sense (pun intended) of how the food came to be so, with all its taste. So going back to teaching people, you need to know a little bit more than you are teaching, so you learn more. And correlates to the first paragraph above.

There’s also the deeper understanding needed to be able to explain things in simple/simpler terms. I can’t remember the source but I remember reading the levels of understanding consists of these levels (hypthetically)

1. Learning enough to know about it.
2. Learnt enough to use the knowledge
3. Learnt enough to know what is lacking, or needs more learning.
4. Learnt enough to be able to explain it.

I am pretty sure the source worded it better, and I appreciate if anyone can point to any material that sound similar to the above. Anyways, point is the highest level of understanding is to be able to explain things in a simple way. And to achieve this, is possible by teaching others. Hence let’s do that.

Thank you for reading.