Teaching?

The other day I was with a group of colleagues, though I should explain that I retired sometime ago but still go in and hang about. We were discussing how to explain what we do when asked by by someone. Well person just dais he taught and I commented that I never said that because I didn't feel that I was a teacher and I just said that I am a mathematician. But people are not very clear what mathematicians do so we often just avoid the question.

This caused me to speculate as to why I don't describe myself as a teacher. Partly because as a university lecturer I didn't feel responsible for the students learning. The role was to assist in the learning process, to guide the students through material, some of which is quite hard to understand by yourself, but in the end it was the student's responsibility to learn. After all they are adults and should by the age of 18 be taking care of themselves, not depending on an authoritarian figure to tel them what to do. In some ways I am happy to show them what they need to do to learn but am not willing to hold their hand whilst they do it.

There is also the difference between training and education. One like all dichotomies which gets blurred around the middle. To simplify, training is showing someone how to do something without learning how whilst, in a parody, learning is why something works without learning how. Of course all good education is a mixture of both learning how and why. An example from maths is when students can solve a problem that involves finding an answer given certain data BUT when given the answer and some of the data cannot work out the rest. That is they can't reverse the process because they don't fully understand what is going on.