h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Very interesting - reminiscent of my forays into teaching.

Apart from a few sessions of informal tutoring, which were not easy as I sometimes couldn't understand why other people couldn't understand various mathematical concepts, I only did formal teaching when I was a PhD student - I preferred the idea of teaching people who had already learned how they learned. However, I was fortunate to be teaching in the days when university in the UK was less 'commodified', if that's the right word - some people didn't like my style so they just gave up attending my seminar group (they weren't forced to attend, which might have made them disruptive).

I actually can't remember what the preparation for the seminars was like, but whatever it was it wasn't more than a 3-day seminar. I did have experience from my undergraduate degree of being taught by PhD students, though, so I picked up some good practice/things to avoid from them.

I felt particularly sorry for one guy who completely forgot he had a seminar one week, so hadn't prepared - he tried (and failed) to solve the maths problems live in class, rather than asking us to do it from our coursework. Then again I didn't excel in my very first session when I asked one of the students to write their answer on the blackboard and they somehow managed to make a mess of it so I had to backtrack and make sure everyone had written down the correct answer instead...

Another challenging experience was when I was scheduled to teach the seminar in a lecture theatre - there was wheelchair access to the auditorium, but the timetabling team hadn't realised there was a step up to the lectern, overhead projector etc. Fortunately that was a good group, so we muddled through together, sharing the correct answers and drawing on a piece of paper! We were rescheduled to a better room after that, which made things easier.

I wasn't particularly aware of how good (or not) my teachers were, but thinking back there were some that did make learning easier than others. When I was 5, I was very fortunate to have excellent teachers who worked out ways to include me and my wheelchair - to this day I remember my first train trip, the museums we visited and even climbing a mountain! I also loved art sessions, when they would bring in objects for us to study, and was given plenty of time for story writing, too. In high school the teaching seemed more limited, as we were following specific curricula, but I was fortunate that my maths teachers were generally inspiring (as the ones I was given were ones who liked to teach people who liked maths already) so we got to look at puzzle books as well as the standard textbooks. I also had fun in English lessons, reading comedy plays out loud and doing project work such as roleplaying council meetings

Oh, those activities sound like fun!

Yes! When we teach we're part of a chain that probably goes back to the first enthusiastic teacher who ever lived - probably a cheerful hominid who said, 'Look! This rock makes a great tool. Let me show you how...'

I thought of that yesterday. The music teachers in the county get all the honors band students together one weekend and invite a guest conductor to teach them - the students AND their teachers, who play along with them. Then they put on a mini-concert, and we all show up and pay a few dollars, which covers the cost of their seminar.

The guest conductor teaches bassoon (!) at a local university. He has fun, they have fun, we enjoy the music.

But oh, I can imagine how hard you have to work with math teaching! I had exactly THREE decent math teachers in my life - one in primary school, one in junior high, and one at university. He was a working physicist from Westinghouse Labs, and I snagged him by attending night school - and finally passed calculus.

Math is hard to teach. Nobody will convince me otherwise.

I'm all for applied Mathematics (I want to know what the point is of learning specific bits).
Two consecutive Math teachers did not really help me. The first was overzealous and and very smart (in Maths) but thought that only a select few were meant to excel in it (actively excluding the female half of the population by default. He did get fired eventually). The second was only counting the days till retirement and didn't bother to teach us in the process.

I am part of a teaching family (it appears to be contagious). My daughter just started her course to become a primary school teacher. They do practice teaching with a mentor (on real students) from the second week (once a week) and she has her first full week of teaching in two weeks from now.
My wife switched to teaching musical (song/dance/drama) to 3-16 year olds after first working as a surveyor.
Both my parents and my parents-in-law were teachers (as were the parents-in law of both my brothers).
Despite being a mechanical engineer I do tend to try and educate (new) colleagues.

I hadn't thought of teaching being a chain, but that makes sense about the cheerful hominid!

Yes, very difficult with maths teaching, as people can so easily be put off the subject... At my school I was very lucky to get a teacher who worked well with my style of maths learning. Another teacher had a more visual style, eg drawing diagrams to help with algebra, and worked well with my sister who went on to become an artist

Good point about training colleagues - I do quite well with that by showing people how to do something, then getting them to do the task a couple of times so they get the idea of it

Good plan!

Sometimes patience is the key. A lot of times I have helped colleagues figure things out by themselves by looking over their shoulder without saying much.