Been Too Long Since the First Time

March 28, 2018

One thing I’d like to note on these Algorithm textbooks is that, for whoever writes them, it’s been so long since they’ve first learned the subject, that it’s so easy to gloss over the details. For some of these books, they write the mathematics, and like to gloss over the details without going into further explanation.

When this happens, I wonder if I’m just dumb, or if the authors have become so immersed in their field of study that what seems not as intuitive for the first time learner is super-intuitive for the expect.

But then again, I remember having a similar experience. From a teaching end. I was tutoring this girl in 8th grade math. At this point, I had to explain something like the equation of a line. I’ve seen it so much that it’s become nothing less than second nature to me. Needless to say, I had a hard time explaining something like this because it became so intuitive to me.

How can we fix this???

I think what we can do is write up, and perhaps have people who are learning the subject write about what things that they found confusing, and how they would restructure the text to make it more clear.

Before they too get sucked in, and what they first thought to be so confusing becomes something akin to second nature…