Two things to keep in mind when preparing or delivering teaching

There are two things I try to keep in mind when preparing or delivering teaching. Helpfully, they are both described in xkcd comics.

Ten Thousand

Average Familiarity

The first comic (Ten Thousand) is a reminder that, as teachers, we are privileged to teach a topic we know well to people who are new to it. To me, this suggests two things for us to do:

First, learn to enjoy that feeling of taking someone through a process of discovery. And think carefully about how to drive that discovery in a way that create excitement and favours learning.
Second, remember that there are always many more people who still don’t know what we just taught. We might be repeating ourselves but repetition for us is not repetition for an audience that is constantly renewed. This should be strong motivation to keep on going. Especially in a world increasingly governed by idiots that embrace misinformation: it matters!

The second comic (Average Familiarity) helps me remember that what I have seen labeled the “expert’s curse” is real. It is important not to assume that what is obvious to us is obvious to students, for this reason, providing scaffolding is particularly important. The real difficulty is that we find ourselves in front of heterogenous audiences, and scaffolding necessary for some is boring repetition for others. Sometimes we can mitigate this, for example by having the scaffolding as preparatory material that students can review before class if they need it. Other times, it implies a trade-off: one has to choose a primary audience, and accept that people that are not part of our primary audience might find us difficult to follow (or feel we are blabbing on about things obvious to them for way longer than they can bear).

I find that thinking about teaching in this way helps me find the right approach when developing material and avoid pitching way off for my audience. Overall, I feel very lucky to get to guide students in discovering something that I think is worth knowing and can genuinely help them. Despite all of that, I still sometimes find myself assuming too much knowledge on the part of the students and having to adjust from one session to the next. This is also why I always find prepping a new course challenging as it is only with the feedback from the students during and after delivery that I know if I have hit the mark. The first time giving a course is always a bit of an experiment. Only after the first year of teaching a new course am I in possession of enough information to make the delivery of that course successful.

Citation

BibTeX citation:

@online{vernet2025,
  author = {Vernet, Antoine},
  title = {Two Things to Keep in Mind When Preparing or Delivering
    Teaching},
  date = {2025-11-23},
  url = {https://antoinevernet.com/blog/2025/11/two_principles/},
  doi = {10.59350/ax7zz-3ae40},
  langid = {en}
}

For attribution, please cite this work as:

Vernet, Antoine. 2025. “Two Things to Keep in Mind When Preparing or Delivering Teaching.” November 23. https://doi.org/10.59350/ax7zz-3ae40.

--- title: "Two things to keep in mind when preparing or delivering teaching" date: 2025-11-23 description: "It took me longer than I care to admit to realise this, maybe I can save you some time." image: "https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/ten_thousand.png" image-alt: "xkcd comic ‘Ten Thousand’, about the 10,000 people who learn any common fact for the first time each day." twitter-card: image: "https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/ten_thousand.png" open-graph: image: "https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/ten_thousand.png" categories: - xkcd - teaching # resources: # - "img/*" doi: "10.59350/ax7zz-3ae40" citation: true --- There are two things I try to keep in mind when preparing or delivering teaching. Helpfully, they are both described in [xkcd](https://xkcd.com) comics. ::::{.columns} :::{.column width="70%"} ![](https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/ten_thousand.png){fig-alt="xkcd comic ‘Ten Thousand’. The narrator says they try not to make fun of people for admitting they don’t know things: for anything ‘everyone knows’ by adulthood, about 10,000 people in the US hear about it for the first time every day, and mocking them means missing out on the fun. One stick figure has never heard of the Diet Coke and Mentos thing; the other excitedly takes them to the grocery store, saying they are one of today’s lucky 10,000."} Ten Thousand ::: :::{.column width="1%"} ::: :::{.column width="29%"} ![](https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/average_familiarity.png){fig-alt="xkcd comic ‘Average Familiarity’. A geochemist says it is easy to forget that the average person probably only knows the formulas for olivine and one or two feldspars; her colleague adds ‘And quartz, of course.’ Caption: even when they’re trying to compensate for it, experts in anything wildly overestimate the average person’s familiarity with their field."} Average Familiarity ::: :::: The first comic (Ten Thousand) is a reminder that, as teachers, we are privileged to teach a topic we know well to people who are new to it. To me, this suggests two things for us to do: - First, learn to enjoy that feeling of taking someone through a process of discovery. And think carefully about how to drive that discovery in a way that create excitement and favours learning. - Second, remember that there are always many more people who still don't know what we just taught. We might be repeating ourselves but repetition for us is not repetition for an audience that is constantly renewed. This should be strong motivation to keep on going. Especially in a world increasingly governed by idiots that embrace misinformation: it matters! The second comic (Average Familiarity) helps me remember that what I have seen labeled the "expert's curse" is real. It is important not to assume that what is obvious to us is obvious to students, for this reason, providing scaffolding is particularly important. The real difficulty is that we find ourselves in front of heterogenous audiences, and scaffolding necessary for some is boring repetition for others. Sometimes we can mitigate this, for example by having the scaffolding as preparatory material that students can review before class if they need it. Other times, it implies a trade-off: one has to choose a primary audience, and accept that people that are not part of our primary audience might find us difficult to follow (or feel we are blabbing on about things obvious to them for way longer than they can bear). I find that thinking about teaching in this way helps me find the right approach when developing material and avoid pitching way off for my audience. Overall, I feel very lucky to get to guide students in discovering something that I think is worth knowing and can genuinely help them. Despite all of that, I still sometimes find myself assuming too much knowledge on the part of the students and having to adjust from one session to the next. This is also why I always find prepping a new course challenging as it is only with the feedback from the students during and after delivery that I know if I have hit the mark. The first time giving a course is always a bit of an experiment. Only after the first year of teaching a new course am I in possession of enough information to make the delivery of that course successful.