Student teaching

Conventional wisdom is that a teacher should be someone who knows a lot about the subject, which on the face of it seems pretty sensible. But experts have a very different context to novices; they don't have the same kinds of problems or make the same mistakes. They tend to focus on the high-level ideas when novices are still struggling with the mechanics. Or they teach mechanics that are obvious and miss the ones that are actually difficult. Not because they're bad teachers, just because they don't have the novice context anymore.

On the other hand, how can you possibly teach people the material without knowing the material? Embedded in that idea is an assumption about learning: you learn because someone tells you things, the words enter your brain and then turn into knowledge. Of course, there's no reason to think that this is actually how learning works, and in fact very good reasons to think the opposite: you learn when you build associations, and you build associations by doing things.

So what does a teacher do in a system where you learn by doing? You can't just give students knowledge, you have to encourage them to explore ideas in order to discover knowledge on their own. From that perspective, knowing a lot about the subject is useful only in as much as it tells you which ideas to explore in which order. Actually knowing the answers is only useful to the extent that it allows a student to be confident that they're on the right track and not wasting time.

Ideally, you would want someone who has the novice context, and approaches the problems and knowledge in a studenty way, but who doesn't lead you down the wrong path and get you stuck for days or weeks figuring that out. How can we have such a thing? Hollywood's magical time dilation. A student could record their experience of learning the material, making the mistakes, learning from the mistakes, and slowly working their way towards understanding. When they get there, they just go back and edit out the boring bits.

The end result would be something less like a knowledgable expert dispensing wisdom from on high, and more like an older sibling in concentrated form. You can see the path they've walked and the mistakes they've made, but you don't have to make those same mistakes yourself to learn from them.