Carlson's Take On Teaching
Interest fuels understanding, and understanding fuels interest. Any material worth teaching is inherently interesting, so if students can just begin to understand it, they’ll see it’s interesting. When they find it interesting, they’ll be motivated to understand it better, and the positive cycle of learning continues.
You cannot teach by communicating the material in the way you currently understand it. A great example of this is how you get to familiar places like the grocery store from your own house. You just go until it looks good, then take a right. Then you go until it looks good and take a left. But try telling someone else how to get to the same place, and it becomes very clear that knowing something is not the same as being able to teach it.
To teach someone else how to get there, you must put back in the street names, cardinal directions, mileages and landmarks that you no longer need to help the next person learn what you already know. Teaching any technical subject is very much like this: We must learn where the student currently is, then give step-by-step help for how to get from where they currently are to the place we want them to be.