Isn't it so simple

As a teacher, I've come to distrust claims of "It's really simple!" Well yes, that might be true. Many aspects of nature, once you sift through enough experiments and analysis, trial and error, dissent, frustration, and perplexity turn out to be blitzingly more direct than anyone realized. But I think if we were to see these answers naively, like children, we would not at first consider them simple, anyway. We'd need to have the right concepts in place.

There are three major reasons I distrust it's-so-simple-look. First, I see most students struggle with things I find mind-squishingly obvious. At some point I have to put aside whether I think a thing is simple or not. There have been times when I have simplified and simplified and then just told a student the answer, told them exactly which one step to take, a step I know perfectly well they have been able to do easily for years, and they have not been able to do it. It happens more than you think. Once a person feels confused enough, they'll struggle to tell you their own name. You will find that there are times you cannot make anything simple enough, and in those moments you will have to admit that something other than simplicity is critical. Whether it's anxiety about not understanding or a grumbling stomach, it's important.

A decent teacher can reduce problems to individual steps so uncomplicated that anyone can do them. But simplicity isn't enough. I've found myself saying, having lasered in on the next step in a bigger problem, "You add the two numbers. 7 and 3. You add them. What do you get?" And a student no longer in elementary school will not be able to break open this safe, no matter how I phrase it. This deer-in-the-headlights effect is a feature of human psychology. Eventually, I'll have to tell them. "7 plus 3 is 10." Then they'll feel stupid. But I've found it's better to get that over with sooner rather than later. Once a person has reached overwhelming confusion, I'll have to take the wheel for a few seconds. The alternative is sadly a lesson that's so frustrating it's pointless or worse. Before teaching, I had no idea intelligent human minds could be reduced to pebbles so easily by confusion. And I should know, shouldn't I? If you think this is only young students, you are quite mistaken. Whether you remember it or not, you've been there.

Second, when a teacher takes anything as simple, that's often just an assumption too many. The belief can predispose you to demonstrating poorly. You need a hook. You need a good example. You want to tie this to something familiar to your listener; you want to extend their worldview rather than drop in something totally alien. A teacher needs to assume less, rather than more, about what a person knows. As I was just saying, it's much easier to skip ahead when a student gets this area than it is to backpedal into the basics when the student is confused. The best teachers I've watched tend to assume as little as possible about what a person knows. They start with square one and politely ask if the person is familiar with this. If the answer is yes, they test the waters of comprehension with a strategic question or two, then go from there.

How often have you been sitting in a class, or any lecture or presentation, when suddenly it dawned on you that you'd lost the thread? Everyone seems to get what's happening, you even thought you did, but now it hits you that you don't, and you can't even say when that started. It isn't very pleasant, is it? (For me, the answer is "very often." I have ADHD-I.) There's research that says some discomfort from confusion can help learning, but it's also clear that people have different tolerance levels, different points where they'll simply tap out, tune out, fall asleep, or go home.

To make a new idea simple for someone, to see the mist blow away in an instant, it helps to understand what they know and how they think and what kind of stuff they like. "Simple" is mostly relative. (Okay okay okay, we're putting aside the information theoretic way of analyzing this—Kolmogorov complexity—which is not relative. We're talking about practical psychology. And I'm sorry, I'm such a show-off sometimes!) Finding simplicity, even the nexus of an idea you know like a favorite t-shirt, can take a lot of work. But when you find simplicity, it doesn't feel like education. It feels like discovery, because it is.

Third, when I tell someone this thing they are struggling with is simple, they might feel deflated. The best-case scenario is that they immediately see why, actually, this is really easy. They hadn't heard or seen a good explanation; no one had broken it all down for them. But I've seen that fail too many times, whether I was the one teaching or someone else was. I'd rather not promise a student that an idea is simple. It's like telling someone the board game they're about to play is "really fun." Intuitively, you'd think this would encourage them, cheer them up, excite them, etc. Nuh uh. Almost never. They get tense, visibly. "What if I don't find it fun?" they're asking themselves. "What if everyone else gets it and I don't?" And "What if I hate it, how will I make my exit as soon as possible?" I'd rather watch a person discover that they're having a lot of fun with a new game and tell me that. I'd rather watch a student discover that this is actually like making toast or boiling an egg (yet simultaneously amazing) and thank me. There's no need to promise here, in my experience. It just makes people antsy. And it could take away the best part of the surprise.