How to teach

Had a bit of a break, but now I'm back!

I stumbled across a cool site today: Amateur Astronomy. Work your way through it, it'll only take you 5 minutes or so.

It's nothing flashy, complicated or groundbreaking, but it is a very simple tutorial on a few key points. That exemplifies some key points in teaching.

• Minimise: break it down into a very small number of simple points per lesson. Have multiple lessons if necessary.
  
• Repeat: keep going over the points you've already covered and recap frequently so that everything branches off from one point.
  
• Practice: make sure there's something for your pupils to do. The astronomy example is a good webpage, but if you're giving a presentation have multiple choices for people to show their hands at, or if it's with kids have them move about and vote with their feet or something.
• Cheat: provide tricks and tips for how to remember things, anecdotes and jokes make for a more enjoyable lesson and that will trigger the memory. If you have to teach facts hunt for little mnemonics, I am truly awful at remembering formulae, after many many years studying physics pretty much the only formula I can remember is that for a pendulum - "The laws of nature quoth he, are truly a marvel to me, for each tick and tock, of the grandfather clock is 2 pi root l over g"

Be more than you're paid for

From indexed

I'm a big fan of multi-disciplinary-ism, my first job out of college was working for a very small technology start-up and they went out of their way to hire people with potential and allow them to diversify their skills. In the nearly three years I was there I worked in 3 different departments and had at least 4 different job titles. I went in as a monkey level coder and ended up involved in product management, usability, QA, marketing, public relations and advertising.

If you encourage people to take an interest in other people's departments you end up with a team that can cover for each other's holidays and illnesses, help each other in busy times and potentially saves you hiring additional staff or temps to cover. Meanwhile your staff feel that they're actually progressing and learning new skills.