'Those Who Cannot Do, Teach,' but Why Is That?

Reader TC wrote, yesterday: "I've always found it strange how, with street photography, unlike other genres, people who don't really know how to do it very well seem more apt to try to tell other people how they should do it."

Mike replies: Well, of course! If someone is naturally good at something and has never experienced problems, how would they know what the problems are?

A little story. When I was at Dartmouth I roomed for one trimester with a guy who played number one singles on the Dartmouth tennis team and was ranked fourth in the Ivy League at the time. Because I had played tennis all my life and had always had problems with my serve, I asked him if he would give me a lesson and some pointers. I had taken lots of tennis lessons, so I knew how they went. He said sure, adding that I had picked the right guy, because he had a great serve. He did, too.

As we were talking down to the courts, he paused and indicated to a small outcropping of granite (New Hampshire is "the Granite State") some 20 yards away and said, "see that rock? Watch this." He uncoiled a ferocious serve and nailed his target. The ball zinged off the rock and went forty feet in the air. "That's how you serve," he said. Impressive. I thought, "this is going to be good."

But...no. Once we got to the court, that's all he did, again and again. He would say, "you do it like this," and then execute a few flawless serves. I then served, and he would say, "no, no, not like that! What are you doing? Like this," and then demonstrated a few more times. A few more rounds of this, and he was getting very annoyed—why was I was doing it all wrong? All I had to do was do it the right way, like he did. He was showing me how. Except he wasn't, of course.

Being a teacher-type myself, I even tried to help him a little with his teaching skills, which was funny. I tried to ask him about various elements of his serve, but every time he'd say, "I don't know. I just do it." I tried to get him to look at various aspects of my serve so he could tell me what I might change. That didn't work either.

That was as far as we got. He couldn't analyze a single thing about his own serve, much less anything about mine. He had zero suggestions as to what I could try to correct or change. He simply got exasperated with me because I wasn't doing it right, and then we gave up. The lesson lasted ten minutes, about eight minutes of which was mainly frustration for each of us.

Meet everyone where they are
The best serve lesson I ever got, on the other hand, was from a gentle and famously patient teaching pro at the Woodstock Club in Indianapolis who actually didn't seem to be much of an athlete. This man had a reputation for being able to teach tennis to anyone. When I arrived for my lesson—I might have been about 13 at the time—he was standing on one side of the court throwing a ball to a five-year-old from ten feet away, teaching the kid how to time his swing so he could hit it. I watched this for fifteen minutes while I waited. By the end, the little kid was actually hitting the ball, and about one out of three was finding the sweet spot on the racquet face and sailing surprisingly far, almost up to the net. The little kid was beaming, bursting with pride, calling to his mother to look. I swear, I learned some things just watching. With me, he said, "the first thing you need to learn is how to get the ball into the service court reliably. Once you can relax about that, then you can work on improving." By the end of my lesson, I had learned a reliable spin second serve that I used for the rest of my tennis-playing life.

Because I was always interested in teaching, after the lesson I questioned that pro about his teaching methods. He told me, "I try to meet everyone where they are," which has stuck with me. With intermediate students, he tried to pick something that he thought the student could improve in the hour. With all students, beginners especially, he was looking for ways to increase the student's confidence and sense of accomplishment, to give them a little of the sweet taste of victory. He said it really didn't matter to him what the level of the student was—he got as much satisfaction teaching a five-year-old how to hit the ball for the first time as he got from coaching a top high-school or college player. He himself, he told me, played at the level of a solid club player.

In pool, the best teachers aren't necessarily the best players. The guy I took lessons from, Jerry Briesath, couldn't hit his stroke any more, because of essential tremor, but he still worked with famous professionals. And all the way down to schlubs like me.

Sometimes great "do-ers" are also great teachers. Sometimes they aren't. Sometimes great teachers are not "do-ers," and sometimes they are. But the two are different things, and being one of them isn't proof of the other.

Mike

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Featured Comments from:

Charles Rozier: "Re doing vs. teaching: I think the arts, particularly past the early technical stages, are a different world. In my experience, time spent with a real artist (or a top level pro) can be much more valuable than any amount of more prosaic 'instruction' from others. In that situation one may be forced to learn by observation, imitation, and osmosis. Although it's a big plus if the master happens also to be a good teacher, it's not the essential thing."

Mike replies: True enough. I once asked David R. Godine, founder of the publishing house of the same name, how to get started in publishing. His suggestion was to get a job at a small publishing house doing anything at all—even pushing a broom—and then keep your eyes and ears open and absorb all you can. And of course what you suggest is the time-honored way to become a studio professional photographer—you assist for a few years while you learn, then strike out on your own. That's the classic model; I'm not sure if it's done that way any more.

T. Edwards: "Another great post—you're on a roll. I've always been fascinated by the relationship between coaches and elite athletes. I remember watching Tiger Woods out on a practice green before some major tournament. He'd stroke a couple of balls towards the hole and then huddle with his caddy and coach for an animated (though out of earshot) conversation. I would really would like to have been able to hear what they were saying because I always wondered what those two guys could possibly have to say to Woods who—at that time—was head and shoulders better than any other golfer on the planet."

Romano Gianetti: "Just yes. As a member of a University faculty, I can assure you that be an expert (even the expert) in a field and be a top teacher in the same field are two completely separated skills. The only impossible combination is that you know zero and can teach well—the other three are surely possible."

Trevor Small: "My son, who teaches senior school physics and chemistry, tells me that a lot of teaching consists of breaking down complexity into simple components, in the correct order and in the correct relationships. A very different skill set to actually doing the task, in many cases."

Edward Taylor: "I have written about this misconception many times. Whenever you see a criticism of a posted photo (like on Fred Miranda's site) the photographer (or his/her defenders) frequently responds with a request to see the critic's work. 'If you're such an expert, let's see your portfolio! You don't even post here.' In other words, if one cannot do top-notch work, one should not be critiquing. This is, of course, nonsense. One critiques as a consumer or a coach, not a performer. Rumor has it that Mark Spitz's swimming coach couldn't swim. Movie critics don't make movies. Art critics are not necessarily artists. I can say that I love The Beatles and hate the Stones, even though I am not one-thousandth as talented as either one. The best critics are not the best producers of art, obviously. And, since we are talking about art, everyone's opinion is valid and no one's opinion is valid. I just know good art when I see it."

Robert Stahl: "Having taught photography the past 46 years your article especially resonated with me, Mike. Thanks for this topic and your insights. In my view, it's a somewhat rare occurrence to be talented as both a teacher and creative practitioner of photographic seeing. Three who have excelled wonderfully at both skills are the late Ernst Haas, Freeman Patterson, and Sam Abell."

Geoff Wittig: "Having taken workshops in both photography and oil painting, and having taught some oil painting, I have an opinion on the subject. (My wife would say, 'I'm not surprised....')

"Mike is absolutely right. Skilled artist and good teacher are two independent skill-sets, often with little overlap. In my experience, a genuine desire to teach and the commitment to do it well are by far the most important factors. Without this, you're unlikely to learn much no matter how gifted the artist.

"I have met brilliant artists producing exquisite work who can't explain their workflow or why they chose a particular color palette. Watching them paint a demonstration is frequently unhelpful. A great teacher, by contrast, explains the logic behind her choices every step of the way; why this subject at this time of day. Why this composition and value structure. Why this area is emphasized and that one muted and softened. How the drawing is nailed down, how the technical tools like value structure, warm/cool color contrast, paint handling/brushwork and judicious details are used to serve the artistic goal for the picture. It's like a magician revealing his work; you can start to comprehend how to build your own art by incorporating some of that logic and technical skill. What you're trying to say with your art remains up to you; a good teacher gives you the tools to accomplish it."

Daniel: "Brings to mind Mickey Mantle talking about a conversation with Ted Williams. Subject was hitting the ball. Williams peppered Mantle with questions about almost every aspect, from stance to grip to timing ball rotation. Mantle finally said, 'Hell, I just swing the bat when the pitch looks good.' Over-analyzing is not teaching. Williams was a major league anal analytical type. He did not connect with Mantle on the explanation of fine points in hitting a baseball even though both were great hitters. Not every great teacher connects with every pupil."

Bob: "I recently retired after 45+ years as a flight instructor. I considered myself an okay pilot but a really effective instructor. The key, I think, is just what you said—teach the students on their level. Identify their weak points and use plain, clear language to suggest ways to improve. I’ve also taken a number of acting classes; the really good teachers took the same approach."

Simon: "We all remember poor teachers, and this can reinforce the notion that teaching is an inferior discipline to supposed excellence. But I think this is misleading. Like your tennis coach, a great teacher can do more for the sport and the individuals he/she works with (and on a deeper level than mere technique) than a grand slam winner ever could. In professional cycle racing the greatest achievers are not usually good at supporting others, whether in a coaching or mentoring role, or tactically when in the team car. The driven nature of 'winners' and their leadership role within the group, combined with their innate talent, mean they invariably don't understand the role of their journeyman teammates. With photography I think I have learnt more from the 'why' than the 'how.'

"Although learning things like the rules of composition help one understand why some images work better than others, it is not difficult to use a camera. However, it certainly is hard work trying to make meaningful images that stand the test of time. One thing that appears to link all great photographers is a sense of purpose, of needing to produce significant, meaningful work."

Comments

[Kenneth Wajda]

It seems like the ones who are most prolific post a lot of photos that are quite marginal, and others get inspired and say oh I can do that and then they make similarly poor photos. For me, it’s not enough to have people in focus and standing around or walking around doing nothing special or remarkable. I can see that out the window.

I went out for an hour on Sunday and made some photos and did a post about how to edit tightly and why it’s so important. I included some possible street photos and several outs to show what doesn’t make the cut. https://6x6portraits.wordpress.com/2023/06/19/street-photography-a-documentary-exploration-of-human-behavior/

The constant need to post work and show something when the work isn’t worthy of being shown, that’s what fills many Instagram accounts, and bombards us with mediocrity.

[John Merlin Williams]

Another take on TC's observation: "The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias whereby people with low ability, expertise, or experience regarding a type of task or area of knowledge tend to overestimate their ability or knowledge."

Many people who don't know what they don't know are often overconfident to the point that they feel free to advise others, based on their self-evaluated mastery of the skill.

[Benjamin Marks]

When she was 11 or 12, my daughter took guitar lessons from a guy, I'll call "Guy."* Guy was a good guitar player. I mean he could do anything he wanted to with a guitar, play in several different styles, change keys for a song seemingly without effort and so on.

My daughter was a beginner, picking out the melodies to songs she liked. Every once in a while, Guy would say, ". . .or you could go like this" and proceed to shred a tune in a manner that was way out of my daughter's league. I always kind of resented that -- not because Guy wasn't a good guitarist, but because he seemed incapable of either "meeting my daughter where she was" or resisting the urge to perform/show off.

My daughter's experience made me think that the worst thing you can do as a teacher is waste your pupil's time. Time is, after all, a resource you can't get more of once it is gone.

Seen from Guy's perspective, I am sure that he was using teaching to stretch his dollars in between paying gigs. Still, that was it for that level of guitar lessons for my daughter.

*Obviously, not his real name.

[David Aiken]

My experience is that I learn more from getting something wrong, working out what I'm doing wrong, and then working out how to fix what I'm doing wrong.

People who are lucky enough to have innate talent for something tend not to get things wrong so they don't go through the process of working out what they're doing wrong as often as people without the same level of innate talent do. They don't learn to fix things they're getting right because those things don't need fixing. They may be good at teaching others how to do things they had to learn to do well but they're not good at teaching others how to do something that they themselves never really had to do well.

On the other hand someone who had to work at learning how to do something well, who made their fair share of mistakes along the way or even more than their fair share and eventually achieved proficiency is more likely to be better at teaching someone who has a problem how to do it better. I say "more likely" because teaching isn't just about being able to identify the problem and knowing how to fix it. Good teachers are good at working with students, being patient, not talking down to them, and at encouraging them along the way to developing the necessary skills.

We all tend to be better at helping people learn to do things we had to learn to do ourselves. If we never had to learn to do it, if it came to us naturally and we just kept doing something in essentially the same way we first did it, then we've never really had to learn how to do it ourselves and that makes it harder for us to teach someone else how to do it simply because we've never had to develop a real understanding of just what it is we're doing.

[Albert Smith]

You did a good job explaining what makes a good teacher, but that is only one half of the learning equation. The best teacher of any discipline can't give knowledge to a person that won't receive that knowledge. Whether it is a large ego that convinces the student that he can't be shown anything or just a closed mind that won't even allow them try to be taught, a great teacher will not succeed when matched to this student.

I was a student of the martial arts since the '60s and of course was a follower of Bruce Lee back in the day. He gave a Chinese parable to simplify the value of being a good student. A teacher was trying to give a philosophy lesson to a young know-it-all student who questioned and challenged everything the teacher said. The teacher stopped the lesson and poured tea for he and the pupil. The student's cup filled and started to overflow. The student then said, "Stop, no more can go in!" The teacher then said "Yes, you must empty your cup to taste my tea."

The student quickly saw the analogy. The cup was his mind, and being full would not accept anything the teacher offered... tea or knowledge.

[John Krumm]

I've always liked teaching skills, one on one. My third job in my first restaurant, still in high school, after learning dishwashing (harder than it sounds) and assistant line cook, was head cook, in charge of grilling all the steaks and steaming the seafood in a sometimes busy steak and lobster place. And cooking the prime rib and finding the right cut for someone.... and training new assistant cooks and cooks. Often training meant a quick demonstration, then watching with correction if needed, and when it got busy, cooking half their food too until they learned how to work at speed, which just took time.

When I taught newspaper in a high school, one of the reasons I took that job was that they gave me a class period to do it in (instead of after school) and I could run it more like a journalism production lab, with me a head problem solver, mostly working one on one.

[TC]

"If someone is naturally good at something and has never experienced problems, how would they know what the problems are?"

Are you saying that anyone who is good at street photography is just "naturally good and has never experienced problems"? That seems a bit presumptuous, because I certainly didn't say that.

However, it's interesting that you do say that, because the common assumption that SP, unlike other genres, doesn't require the acquisition of skill through practice and technique, does go a ways towards explaining the phenomenon that I alluded to in my original comment.

Also, in both of your tennis examples, it was people who are actually good at tennis providing the instruction, but I'd think both of them would be preferable to an instructor who was just not good at tennis.

I hope this clears things up somewhat.

[Bear.]

I've got a great physiotherapist with a practice in legal district of the CBD. Unsurprisingly, most of his clients are lawyers (as am I). Having had my shoulders worked on, he gave me some homework - one simple rehabilitation exercise to be repeated for six minutes once per day. I quizzed him about why only one exercise and why only six minutes. His response: lawyers billed in six minute units and would readily give up one unit per day without hesitation; but they would not give up two or more units. As a simple rehabilitation exercise could be repeated numerous times within six minutes, he always assigned the single most beneficial rehabilitation exercise to be undertaken for six minutes. However much or little that exercise achieved, it was better than no exercise.

I have since adapted his approach to my teaching - my goal is to set students exercises they are both willing and able to do on the basis that if they do them and learn anything (however little), it was better than the alternative; namely, doing nothing and learning nothing.

[darlene]

My first teaching job (part-time) was at a school for the arts in Atlanta, ~1986. I always taught commercial photography and the business of photography, not fine art photography. I studied advertising photography under Gemma Gatti, and she taught successful commercial photography was fine art photography with advertising on top. The school’s full-time photo teacher asked me to teach him location lighting because he was asked to do a friend or family member’s wedding. He appeared a bit anxious in a bad way about this. So we talked briefly, and I learned he had an MFA in photography but had never learned studio lighting or worked a commercial job. So that teaching statement can be true, but sometimes programs are looking for experienced talent with a name locally to boost their enrollment.

[Kenneth Tanaka]

I offer the following verso to TC's riddle: Why are those who are highly skilled at some activity so reluctant or, more often, so utterly inept at teaching others?

Ask Michael Jordan how he became so good at basketball. Roger Federer at tennis. Et. al. You won't come away with any useful tips beyond "practice, practice, practice".

Taking photography beyond its essential technical craftsmanship requires skills and talents that cannot be taught. At best, they can be ignited with a camera...or a pencil, or a paintbrush.

BTW, if "TC" is who I think he is, he is an extremely talented and rather renowned photographic artist in his own right!

[xf mj]

Powell's Books in Portland often hosts author nights where a writer reads excerpts from their latest book. There is also a Q&A, and I was both disappointed and amused to overhear one with audience questions like "Do you use a pencil or a pen?", "What kind of paper?", etc.

The session seemed to be attended mostly by people trying to become writers and looking for any kind of magic bullet to make a book happen for them. I felt bad that none of those people asking those kinds of question would ever write anything of value. Maybe there was one new budding writer in the room that through it all heard "It doesn't matter. Just write. This is what works for me. You gotta figure out something that works for you."

I had a similar kind of peppering of questions when I returned to school after getting my teaching gig, mainly about what I did on my interview. What was a fascinating exercise for was that , though I'm not a great teacher I am naturally a teacher type, I had to think hard to make explicit to myself, then to the group, what I had done as an interviewee-- e.g. when I visited the schools, thought about what they needed from me and how particularly I might meet those needs with my particular interests and strengths-- basically paid attention to them and made them pay attention to me. I worried that the more vocal peers that asked procedural questions like "Did you email them immediately after?" etc, well, they seemed to line up personality-wise with not being natural teachers, and probably should've sought a different gig.

I love the succinct advice "Meet them where they are." Useful in teaching, useful on an interview, useful on a first date, useful in photography, useful in life.

[Rob Strong]

I can't claim to be a world-class doer, or a world-class teacher, but I do a lot more than I teach.

I love the opportunities I get from time to time to talk about, demonstrate, or instruct in photography. The job is often quite solitary; I've seldom worked on projects large enough in scope to involve an assistant, and rare are the gigs that have needed more than one photographer on hand. Often, when I teach, I will be putting into language skills that I have only thought about and practiced internally.

[Simon]

We all remember poor teachers, and this can reinforce the notion that teaching is an inferior discipline to supposed excellence. But I think this is misleading. Like your tennis coach, a great teacher can do more for the sport and the individuals he/she works with (and on a deeper level than mere technique) than a grand slam winner ever could.

In professional cycle racing the greatest achievers are not usually good at supporting others, whether in a coaching or mentoring role or tactically when in the team car. The driven nature of 'winners' and their leadership role within the group, combined with their innate talent, mean they invariably don't understand the role of their journeyman teammates.

With photography I think I have learnt more from the 'why' than the 'how'. Although learning things like the rules of composition help one understand why some images work better than others, it is not difficult to use a camera. However, it certainly is hard work trying to make meaningful images that stand the test of time. One thing that appears to link all great photographers is a sense of purpose, of needing to produce significant, meaningful work.

[Niels]

Imagine taking a photography lesson from Eggleston or Friedlander!
As much as I love both, I doubt that would be very satisfying.

I would love to sit in on a lesson by Robert Adams. Aside from admiring his body of work, I find that he is by far the most eloquent writer/educator on photography that I am aware of.

-Speaking of Friedlander. Check out this conversation with his grandson - and try to visualise how a Friedlander photography lesson would pan out:
https://youtu.be/X2OI1CIZkNs

[Bill Tyler]

If you've ever listened to a grade-school orchestra concert, you realize that it's not necessary to know how to play an instrument to make valid criticisms of the music. Of course, in that case, you keep your criticism to yourself.