okay, but seriously:

I was/am an educator and I am a huge fan of the socratic method, where you ask questions designed to guide students towards finding knowledge themselves rather than just spoon-feeding it to them, BUT!

socrates called his method "maieutics" (a word I have to look up almost every time I need to write it) which literally means "midwifery" because he saw it like helping a student build upon a foundation to fully realise an idea

knowledge, like babies, starts somewhere!

so, to use an example from my own teaching, last year I was working with a student who didn't understand percentages - she was learning them in class but nothing was clicking, you know how it is

after a couple of abortive attempts at working through a problem, I stepped back and asked, "do you know what the word percentage means?"

she did not! because nobody had ever thought to teach her!

so I asked, "well, do you know what per means?" and she did! good start!

"so how about cent, what do you think that means?"

a shrug, so I asked, "how many cents in a dollar?" then when she got that right, "how many centimetres in a metre?" then, "how many years in a century?"

"okay, so what do you think cent means?"

she thought about it and answered a hundred! great progress!

"so what does per cent mean?"

a pause

"...per hundred?" she guessed, which is a) correct and b) almost all you need to know about percentages tbh!

when I tell you that after that, her ability to work problems involving percentages basically improved *overnight*! and I didn't really have to do anything, I just asked her questions about stuff she already knew and she figured out the rest because *she had a foundation*!

just like you can't be a midwife to a baby that doesn't exist, you can't teach using the socratic method when there's no foundation on which you can base your questioning, so if you aren't doing that you're not the new socrates, you're just a nosy asshole

I haven't had to teach much cooking, but if, just to pick a completely random and totally meaningless example, I were teaching a kid how to open a can and they had *no frame of reference* for how a can opener worked, I would not expect them to figure it out from nothing

you can't "birth" ideas in your students from nothing, that's not how learning works

you can't teach a kid who doesn't know what numbers are how to find the area under a curve because they are missing some extremely crucial information

kids are actually very quick on the uptake most of the time if you give them somewhere to start! I have taught a lot of kids and I've met very, very few who couldn't understand a concept or even intuit it given a good jumping-off point

knowledge, like kids, starts somewhere!

consider: if you think of yourself as a "socratic" educator but your questions don't lead to useful answers, maybe you're asking the wrong questions?

consider: expecting a kid who has never used a can opener to open a can with absolutely no instruction is fucking absurd?

there's this myth of rugged individualism that I think most of us living in a capitalist society internalise to some degree, but if you sift back through your childhood memories you'll find that you prob didn't spring fully-formed into adulthood like athena from the head of zeus

all of us were kids once and all of us had to learn how to navigate the world and if you're any kind of educator, in the home or in the classroom or anywhere, you owe it to the kids in your charge to guide them towards the knowledge they need without being an asshole about it

by the way, I ask the wrong questions sometimes! no teacher is perfect, I know I'm not!

being a good teacher isn't getting it right the first time every time, but learning from your students about how they see and understand things so that over time, you get it right more often

I really appreciate that my students of all ages are patient with me while I figure out how they learn best teaching only works if the learning goes both ways!

p.s. something I think a lot of teachers forget is that *we* probably enjoy the puzzle-solving element of the subjects we teach a lot more than students do because a) we tend to teach subjects we already like and b) we have a much stronger foundation upon which to build

I personally am *such* an independent learner - I love the feeling of solving a puzzle and I hate when answers are handed to me because it feels like cheating

but also, I am not the target audience for my lessons; my students are!

I study maths for fun (I hardly need it as a law student) and am completing two degrees I chose to study of my own free will as an adult, which is a very different situation from being nine years old and needing a passing grade (or a meal)

when you are in school, especially earlier on, school is your *life* - if you don't pass, your friends will all move on without you, plus you'll be stuck in school for longer (and when your age is in the single digits, even one year is a huge percentage of your life to date)

we put *a lot* of pressure on kids to succeed at this thing that more or less controls everything about their world at that point, from where they can go to who their friends are, and that's a lot of pressure even if you have the best teachers in the world

it is so different coming back to learning as an adult, when you make the choice to invest time in further education and when your schedule for the best part of your day isn't dictated by when you have recess

maybe we forget that and maybe that's why so many adults are obsessed with turning learning into a puzzle, because if you're learning by choice, it can be a fun journey of discovery!

kids are often not learning by choice! they are often legally required to be at school!

I obviously believe in the value of education or I wouldn't love teaching so much, but it would be great if we thought more about its value to children vs its value to us

I'm not saying kids *can't* enjoy school, or that they shouldn't - I loved school and I want all my students to love school! I loved it so much I decided to go back for more! - but just that their ideas of what is enjoyable may not square with ours

this idea that learning equals problem-solving is a very adult one that makes sense to adult brains and is completely bizarre and foreign to a lot of kids with good reason, that reason being that they do not have the same emotional investment in solving the problem

"but I loved math at school! I enjoyed solving problems!" well first of all, I'm not sure how my dad found my twitter, but second of all, the fact that you enjoyed something compulsory as a kid doesn't mean every kid enjoys it!

I hated sports because I wasn't naturally athletic as a child and running when I could have been reading just felt like punishment

I loved reading because it came incredibly easily to me, so having to do it in class felt like getting videogames for homework

my baby sister is way more athletic than me, did track for a little while and hated reading until she was no longer forced to do it at school

these days, she's just as compulsive a book-buyer as I am because it's her choice!

kids like different things, which is fine, but school forces you to do the stuff you don't like along with the stuff you do, and if you're bad at it, you might never get to see your friends again and everyone will talk about how you got held back! no pressure!

anyway, stop turning every lesson into a fun problem for your kids to solve because they will hate you for it the way I hated my eighth grade home economics teacher for not just explaining to me exactly how she wanted me to dice onions thanks for reading!