Do we ever fake our ability to teach?
It takes a leap of faith perhaps to believe you can teach. Afterall since most of us feel confused and intellectually lost at some time or another, it seems quite arrogant to teach someone else something.
I mean if you have a clear skill, like you really know how to shoe a horse, then perhaps teaching others how to do that makes some sense. I mean a particular skill might translate. But then again what happens after you’re taught that skill when an unknown situation occurs that was not covered by the farrier? Perhaps the old shoe won’t come off or the underbelly of the hoof is too damaged.
Then what do you do?
Seems like we all fake our expertise but maintain a sense of I don’ t know a bit of calm so others don’t know.
I mean it’s not like having imposter syndrome. After all the expert farrier knew what they were doing, right? But then you have to add an interest or a capacity or desire. I just heard about a situation where a trainer just could not get the trainee to get it. The person was just not ready or interested or motivated or capable. So no matter how hard the trainer tried the effort was lost.
So there are those situations that can’t be taught. It just has to be accepted and that’s ok. Really we all have had teachers who just didn’t get it. And when they felt like failures it made everyone’s experience terrible. I just heard about a language teacher who did not know how to teach the language. Now how does that happen?
So what do we do about this? Perhaps we need to provide the best possible experience for everyone in the pre-school to college classes. But at the end of the day, we just need to be honest and to be clear for ourselves about what we know and what we don’t. And we need to understand how important it is to be a good teacher.
Progressive Teachers Network 
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