Beware of What Comes Easy

Teachers, recognize the risk that you run whenever you treat something you teach as if it were easy to learn. Rather than making it easy for the students, you are making it easy for them to ignore you. This dictum becomes more true the more basic the knowledge you are trying to impart. For it is upon the basics that we build our overtly and admittedly complicated schemes. When students ignore the basics, therefore, they are also turning their backs on the complexity that springs from a foundation of simplicity.

All new knowledge has its consequent ignorance, a special ignorance that can only be achieved through learning something new. The better and longer we know something, the more thoroughly we forget what it was like not to know. Eventually, our very bodies forget how to fall off a bike. For most people, this process of learning and forgetting works perfectly well, because all we forget is what we didn’t know. Teachers, however, are paid to remember what it was like to be ignorant.

When teachers treat their subject as if it were easy, they are forgetting the first thing they needed to remember: It is always difficult to go from not knowing to knowing, no matter how basic the knowledge. Or, more simply, beware of what comes easy.