layout: essay type: essay title: Teaching and Learning Axioms date: 2017-09-08 labels: ——-

You Learn to Teach the Same Way You Learn Everything Else: By Doing It

Teaching isn’t something you analyze and solve once; it’s something you practice repeatedly. Skill at teaching develops like any craft—through experience, reflection, and the integration of theory and practice. Over time teachers build tools, intuitions, and heuristics: knowing when explanations should be concrete or abstract, recognizing confusion versus anxiety, and using analogies that unlock understanding.

The Teacher Helps, but the Student Does the Learning

Teaching involves synthesizing interpersonal cues, content knowledge, and context into real-time decisions. But no matter how well-designed the environment, students perform the hard intellectual work of interpreting information and turning it into knowledge. Good teachers create spaces where students feel curious, ambitious, and resilient enough to embrace challenges, learn from failure, and pursue their own goals.

Teaching Always Happens Somewhere

Teaching always occurs within a context that deeply influences relationships, interactions, and outcomes.Asking for help from a friend is different from attending a formal class; middle-schoolers interact differently with teachers than graduate students, and adult learners in community settings have distinct expectations from full-time students.

The Best Way to Learn Something is to Try Something

Learning thrives through active curiosity, experimentation, and iterative making. Creating tangible projects grounds theory in reality, provides rich feedback through failure, and demonstrates how complexity emerges from simple, manageable parts. Trying something, seeing what happens, and trying again develops resilience and deeper understanding.

Education Is Childcare

The core responsibility of teaching young people involves caring for them as people first. Formal education and informal childcare aren’t separate; learning spaces must prioritize emotional safety, kindness, and genuine relationships. Important development often emerges naturally from informal interactions and trust-based communities.

Everything Matters

Every element of a learning environment communicates values and expectations to students. Conversations, physical spaces, materials, and routines can either inspire curiosity, creativity, and confidence or produce anxiety and disengagement. Thoughtful, intentional design of every detail reinforces the community’s educational goals and ensures that students know their contributions and ideas matter.