Teaching is hard, work.
In graduate school we got paid to teach, and we’d have multiple sections of the same course each semester. Typically this was a first year, introductory physics course. Divided into weeks, teaching amounted to becoming an extreme expert in some new aspect of basic physics every seven to ten days.
By extreme expert I mean three things: First, the capacity to solve the relevant problems on demand. Second, the capacity to teach the underlying concepts clearly and succinctly. Third, a bank of new, instructive problems to offer students on the fly.
How it started
I always felt bad for my Monday morning students. I would learn all the relevant material for the week in my first section or two, and by the time I got to my last section, the teaching was easy.
Given the frantic pace of life back then, any guilt I had associated to poor performance on Mondays was completely forgotten by Wednesday.
The zeitgeist in graduate school, like Academia generally, was a confused mix of “teaching doesn’t matter compared with research” and “if you’re smart enough, you should be a great teacher”. The implicit connection there being that good teachers are born, not made, and therefore it was in your interest to minimize teaching efforts.
It’s hard to explain how internalized this kind of thinking was, at least among those of us ambitious to chase the full Academic career path.
How it’s going
What I’m reminded of today is how inverted this thinking is. Whatever innate intelligence has to do with your research, it was less important than organized work ethic. Acceptance into the graduate program was typically a sufficient condition for capacity. Those folks who performed well in research and teaching did so because they spent the requisite amount of time and attention to both.
Now of course this presupposes a host of other assumptions around capacity, family obligations and other time constraints. But for many of us, there weren’t major concerns.
TL;DR
Practice. As I’m getting back into teaching - in a far less structured environment - I’m beginning to remember how difficult it is to be effective, concise and consistent as a communicator. Especially when your mornings involve diving deep into technical material and your evenings involve a general audience discussion. To get better, we must practice.
