I haven’t read TEAPOD (tm Karen) yet, and I won’t have read enough by class time to reliably discuss it in this post. No important reason for mentioning that; it’s just that pretending otherwise via omission would make me nervous.

I mentioned in class that I have little experience in the teaching of literature, writing, or any similar subject. What I do have experience in, and where I can see many applications from the readings and from everyone else’s posts, is in athletics. I’ve coached in swimming for several years, and the idea of expertise failing to translate from instinctive understanding to practical application is one I’m familiar with. I know several world-class athletes who—at least in teaching swim lessons to children 5-8—aren’t the equal of 50-year-old matrons who’ve been doing it for a number of years.

To a certain extent teaching inexperience, combined with the wide disconnect in ability, doom the athlete to teach above the child’s level of understanding; however, this tendency also concerns how strategic patterns—those referred to in How People Learn—become instinctive. The expert uses patterns that are superior in quality, if not quantity, to the novice. In swimming, this is because the world-class athlete spends as much as four-six hours in the water daily, with supplemental training on dry land. Sets of varying difficulties are offered to the athlete, and they use their advanced training methods to implicitly plan their approach based on any number of mitigating factors (point in the season, overall physical fatigue, level of mental exhaustion).

But this concerns conditioning, which can only be taught to young children on a limited basis, since their physical maturity hasn’t evolved to the point where it’s useful; in fact, more often than not it’s harmful. Technique is different. Rigorous training schedules don’t just condition; they evolve technical understanding to the point where it becomes habit.

However, this is a habit they’re rarely prepared to explain. And teaching it involves understanding swimming on a level far above the habitual. I believe this level of understanding in sport can be similarly applied to the teaching of literature. It’s not just a matter of experts being poor teachers because they lack a certain pedagogical understanding outside their primary area of expertise; it’s a matter of this primary level of expertise being sub-standard—or insufficient—because they do not have that understanding.

Instinct is imperative in swimming. Constantly thinking about technique would fry the brain and negatively affect the intensity of training. But a metacognitive understanding of how to perform something that was long ago instilled as habit allows the athlete to step back at key moments and solve problems with greater skill. In the middle of a long set they can recognize an involuntarily devolving stroke and autocorrect. It’s like rereading a book or short story and being able to understand different aspects of it in a different context. You read it and glean the same understanding, the same interpretation, but that is supplemented by a different kind of expertise.

Incidentally, I know a lot about swimming and not much about anything else. So prepare yourself for a great deal many athletic references in my posts.

-Matt