I wish it was like that, huh?

Sharing knowledge/teaching/showing other people how to do things is a difficult process. Not only is it difficult but also mostly underestimated. For the “untrained eye”, teaching sounds simple until you actually have to do it.

Learning is messy

We all learn in different ways. Some people learn in a visual way (using mental maps, diagrams or other techniques), some people have fantastic auditive memory and comprehension skills, and learn better by recording lessons, or attending events/classes in person… regardless, the gist of it is that there’s not a single universal way to learn, and we all function in different ways.

Attention under attack

To make things worse, nowadays we have big attention issues thanks to having every single device fighting for our attention. It’s almost impossible to focus without putting some boundaries and I feel this is where a lot of people fall into that trap, get disappointed/discouraged/anxious and go into bad “mental places” making things worse. (of course, in a totally unconscious way)

In general, human interaction is mostly underestimated

And on top of all that, we also underestimate the human part of the whole thing.

I generally feel there’s a lot of “human interaction” type of activities that people tend to underestimate, probably because we miss that teaching isn’t just showing something or doing a demo. It’s paying attention to how people actually learn, respecting their pace, and not assuming the way we learn is the universal way. If we did that more often, half our “communication problems” would probably be alleviated.

Anyway, that’s my rant. Teaching is hard, learning is weird, attention is broken, and humans are complicated. But if we remember that, maybe we’ll stop expecting this process to be easy.