Education and Racquetball

A friend I'll call Sarah and I like to play racquetball together. Sarah isn't very good at sports and has in mind that I'll teach her how to play. We've worked our way into a rhythm of hitting the ball around a bit and then playing a few games. Yesterday Sarah got frustrated because she couldn't return my serves and declared I wasn't doing a good job teaching. I was certainly able to admit that could be true, but I didn't know what to replace it with. Sarah didn't have good form hitting the ball, didn't have good timing, didn't use the back wall effectively. She knew it, too, but couldn't fix it.

I thought about our lesson the rest of the day and realized that there were several factors contributing to my ineffective teaching.

First, I don't know how to correct the bad habits Sarah can't correct. Simply put, she hits like a girl: her arm moves like a shaken hose, only having force at the tip. I noticed that was different from the way I hit, but we haven't made much progress getting her to be less noodly hitting the ball.

Second, I learned racquetball on my own, so I have no authority in telling people what's good and what's bad. In juggling, for example, if you can do a pattern, you must know how to do it. Racquetball takes two people, though, and just because I frequently beat Dan doesn't mean I actually know what I'm doing. I feel bad telling Sarah she's doing something wrong when I might be doing something wrong, too, and just not know it.

I mention this only because it made me think about a theory of education. I think education is naturally like this picture:


The dark red is your knowledge area, and the light red is your ability to communicate it. The most basic parts can be communicated easily: there probably isn't a lot of difference in the way I explain the rules of racquetball and the way an expert would. His dark red square would be five times the size of mine, but my light red is almost as dense as his would be at the middle. The closer you get to the limits of your ability, the less able you are to explain what you're doing. I can barely juggle seven balls, so if I saw someone struggling, I'd just be able to root them on. What's wrong with their pattern? They're not doing it right, I guess. I don't know. Why can't Dan beat me in racquetball? I don't know, I'm just a little bit better than he is.

If someone teaches you something, you have an additional layer of knowledge: you remember how you learned it.


Now your light red has paths so that if you barely understand something, you can still explain it to others parroting the way you learned it. I'm not great at differential equations, but I can still talk people through my notes.

And so, since I never learned how to play racquetball and didn't have to fix the same problems, my light red area is pretty thin. Now to just convince Sarah it's not my fault I can't teach her, it's just that I don't have a lot of light red...