Can You Teach What You Don't Know?

David Carson: 00:00:00

My friend, Jake, told me the most embarrassing story last week, and I can't stop thinking about it. He was at his nephew's birthday party. You know, one of those chaotic suburban affairs where eight-year-olds are hopped up on sugar, and someone inevitably cries about the pinata distribution logistics. And his sister-in-law, who's a middle school teacher, corners him near the snack table and says, "Tommy keeps asking if you can help him with his math homework. He's really struggling with fractions, and for some reason, he thinks you'd be cooler than boring old mom." Now, here's the thing, and Jake wasn't proud of this. He hadn't done fractions since, like, the Clinton administration. But there's this kid looking at him with these hopeful eyes, and he's standing there holding a juice box thinking, "Well, shit. How hard can it be?" So Jake sits down with Tommy and his worksheet, and he's basically learning fractions as he's teaching them. He's making up explanations on the spot. "Okay, so think of this pizza."

And you know what happened? Tommy got it. Like, really got it. Better than he had all semester. And here's the kicker. Jake suddenly understood fractions better than he ever had in his life. But when Jake told his sister-in-law about their little breakthrough session, she looked at him like he'd just admitted to performing surgery with a butter knife. "You can't teach what you don't know," she said. "That's irresponsible. What if you confused him?" And that's when it hit me, listening to Jake's story. What if everything we think we know about learning is backwards? What if the most dangerous advice in education is master it before you share it? What if the dumbest-sounding idea, teaching something before you understand it yourself, is actually the secret to real learning?

Welcome to Dumbify, the only show where professional educators would probably revoke my speaking privileges. I'm your host, David Carson. Let's get dumb.

THEME SONG: 00:02:10

Dumbify, let your neurons dance. Put your brain in backwards pants. Genus hides in daft disguise. Brilliance wears those googly eyes. So honk your nose and chase that spark. Dumb is just smart in the dark. Dumbify. Yell it like a goose. It's thinking wrong on purpose with Juice.

David Carson: 00:02:36

Today, we're exploring why the best way to learn something might be to teach it immediately, before you actually know what the hell you're talking about. Now, I know that sounds insane. But I want to tell you about Sugata Mitra, who, in 1999, did something that made every educator in India want to file a formal complaint.

Mitra was a computer scientist in New Delhi, not an education expert. When he carved a hole in his office wall that bordered a slum and embedded a computer with an Internet connection. Then he walked away. Just left it there. The educational establishment was horrified.

OPERA SONG: 00:03:21

You can't just give children unsupervised access to technology.

They need curriculum. They need qualified teachers. They need structure.

David Carson: 00:03:40

What Mitra was proposing sounded not just irresponsible, but dangerous. "These children have no computer literacy," critics said. "They can't possibly learn without proper instruction. They'll break the equipment, or worse, learn everything wrong." But here's what happened. Within hours, children who had never seen a computer were browsing the Internet. Within days, they were teaching each other how to navigate programs. And within weeks, they had learned sophisticated English computer terms, all without a single teacher. But Mitra wasn't done being professionally reckless. In one of his most audacious experiments, he left a computer loaded with genetic engineering materials, all in English, in a remote Tamil-speaking village. Two months later, those same children, with zero formal education, could explain basic principles of genetic theory. How? They were teaching each other. The kids who figured out a little bit immediately started explaining it to others. And in that process of teaching what they barely understood, they solidified their own learning and pushed each other forward. Today, Mitra's dangerous method is used in schools worldwide. But back then, educational experts called it educational malpractice. But Mitra wasn't the first person to discover this backwards magic. Let me tell you about Richard Feynman, who, in the 1940s, developed what would become known as the Feynman Technique, though he probably would've called it "How to not look like an idiot at faculty parties." Feynman was a brilliant physicist, but he had this weird habit that drove his colleagues crazy. Whenever he was trying to understand something complex, he would immediately try to explain it to someone else, often a child or a complete novice, using the simplest possible language. His fellow academics thought this was beneath him. "You're dumbing down advanced physics," they'd say. "You're oversimplifying. You're going to confuse people."

But Feynman had noticed something his colleagues missed. Whenever he tried to teach something he barely understood, the gaps in his knowledge became glaringly obvious.The act of teaching forced him to confront what he didn't actually know. He famously said, "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." But what he was really discovering was that teaching isn't the end point of learning. It's the tool that makes learning possible.

out this backwards wisdom. In: 2007

Dr. Karpicke's explanation turned conventional wisdom upside down. When you attempt to teach something you're still learning, your brain has to actively reconstruct the information. The struggle to articulate half-formed understanding actually strengthens the neural pathways. But here's where education experts got defensive. This research suggested that the careful, sequential approach they'd been advocating, master then teach, was actually inferior to what looked like reckless improvisation. The study sparked heated debates in education journals. Critics argued that this approach was pedagogically irresponsible and would lead to misinformation propagation. They insisted that only fully-qualified, completely knowledgeable instructors should ever attempt to teach. But the data didn't lie. Teaching before you're ready creates what neuroscientists call desirable difficulties, cognitive challenges that feel awkward but actually accelerate learning. But here's where this backwards principle gets truly dangerous, where the stakes become life and death.

tell you about Bill Wilson in: 1934

So Wilson changed his approach. When he met Dr. Bob Smith, a surgeon in Akron, Ohio, who was also a hopeless alcoholic, Wilson stopped preaching and started sharing the medical reality of alcoholism as one alcoholic talking to another.

atment didn't work. Then came: 1939

The Cleveland group had only 20 members when the Cleveland Plain Dealer published a series of articles about AA, triggering countless pleas for help.... they were completely overwhelmed. Here's what happened next, and this is what makes education experts lose their minds even today. The Cleveland group took alcoholics who had been sober only a few weeks and immediately set them to work on brand new cases. People who were still figuring out their own sobriety were teaching others how to get sober. The medical community was apoplectic. "This is criminally irresponsible. You're having amateur patients treat other patients. This will lead to mass relapses." But the opposite happened. Within a few months, Cleveland's membership had expanded from 20 to 500. For the first time, it was shown that sobriety could be mass-produced. The teaching while learning approach that doctors had called dangerous amateur therapy became the foundation of the most successful addiction recovery program in history. Today, AA has an estimated membership of nearly two million worldwide. What Wilson discovered, and what the medical establishment initially refused to accept, was that teaching recovery while still learning it wasn't dangerous. It was the secret ingredient. The vulnerability, the shared struggle, the humility of saying, "I'm still figuring this out, but let me share what's worked so far." That became AA's greatest strength.

SONG: 00:13:29

Dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb word of the day. Dumb word of the day. It's a word, it's dumb. Use responsibly.

David Carson: 00:13:39

All right. It's time for my favorite part of the show. It's time for dumb word of the day.

The only vocabulary lesson that endorses educational malpractice. And today's dumb word is: docendo. Spelled D-O-C-E-N-D-O. Docendo. Docendo comes from the Latin phrase docendo discimus, which means "by teaching we learn." It's the principle that you don't just learn and then teach, you learn by teaching. But here's why it's perfect for today's episode. For centuries, educators have treated this as a cute philosophical saying, not an actual teaching method. The idea that someone could learn through the act of teaching seemed backwards, even dangerous. And you know what? Our entire education system has been built on the opposite principle. We've created this industrial model where experts stand at the front dispensing knowledge to passive recipients arranged in neat little rows. It's not about learning, it's about crowd control. We've convinced ourselves that knowledge flows in only one direction, from the certified professional to the ignorant masses. We've turned schools into factories where students are products on an assembly line, and teachers are quality control supervisors making sure everyone gets the same standardized information delivered the same standardized way. God forbid a student might know something the teacher doesn't, or worse, might learn something by trying to explain it to a classmate. This top-down expert-only model has created a generation that's terrified to share knowledge unless they have a PhD in it first. We've literally trained people not to learn through teaching. Docendo isn't just a word. It's a rebellion against the idea that knowledge must flow in only one direction from the fully informed to the completely ignorant. Let's use it in a sentence. After my cat started to docendo quantum mechanics to my house plants, they all suddenly and without warning achieved enlightenment. It was then that I realized how formal education credentials might be slightly overrated, or that cats are magical professors of the enlightened arts.

That was really weird. Moving on. Here's your dumbify challenge for this week. I call it the docendo experiment. Here's how it works. Pick something you're currently trying to learn. Could be a new language, a skill for work, how to fold fitted sheets, whatever. Now here's the twist. Find someone who knows less about this topic than you do and immediately try to teach them what you've learned so far. Don't wait until you've mastered it. Don't prepare a perfect lesson plan. Just start explaining, stumbling, and figuring it out together. You can teach your grandmother about cryptocurrency, explain your yoga poses to your dog, or walk a friend through that coding tutorial you're halfway through. The goal isn't to be a perfect teacher. It's to discover what happens when you turn your confusion into conversation. Pay attention to the moments when you realize you don't actually understand something you thought you knew. Notice how explaining forces you to think differently. See if teaching makes you a better learner. Bonus points. If an education professional tells you you're doing it wrong, that's when you know you're onto something. Send me your results. I want to hear about the concepts that became clearer when you tried to share them before you were ready. And that's our show. Thank you for getting dumb with me today. I'm David Carson, and next week we'll explore another delightfully backwards idea that makes experts question their fundamental assumptions. If you want more counterintuitive insights delivered directly to your inbox along with permission to teach things you barely understand, subscribe to the dumbify newsletter at david-carson.com. Until then, keep your questions flowing, your explanations imperfect, and your willingness to teach what you're still learning embarrassingly high. Because sometimes the best way to learn something is to be brave enough to butcher it in front of someone else first. And remember, if education professionals aren't slightly horrified by your learning methods, you're probably not learning fast enough. Stay brilliantly unqualified. Stay dumb.