CMP Review 2025-06-12

June 12, 2025

“Research shows that novices and experts organize knowledge very differently,” explain Jeff Froyd and Jean Layne. “Experts may make huge leaps up an educational ladder of inference and often forget how to explain the reasoning process through which they arrived at their complex, deep understandings. Shortcuts become invisible. In an educational setting, this phenomenon is called ‘curse of knowledge.’”

How can knowledge be a curse? Surely the more we know (about math, science, Latin…) the better we teach. Isn’t knowing more than our students (our children) a blessing?

Yes and no. The curse comes in when our shortcuts of understanding become invisible, even to us. We can no longer explain the reasoning process. Worse, we become impatient and frustrated when our children don’t “see” what seems so obvious to us.

One solution is to somehow break down what is obvious to us into smaller pieces that may somehow become obvious to our children. But professor Eric Mazur hints at another solution. “The person who knows best what a student is struggling with in assimilating new concepts is not the professor, it’s another student,” he explains in his celebrated “Confessions of a Converted Lecturer.”

Do you feel like you’re only one step ahead of your child (in math, science, Latin…)? Do you feel like your lack of knowledge is a curse? Actually it’s a blessing. It can enable you to teach your child in the most sympathetic way — as a fellow learner.

Plus it’s kind of fun. When it’s late at night and everyone else has gone to bed, I like to crack open the math book. I have a good reason to — I’m learning with my son. But it’s not worry that’s keeping me awake. It’s the fine and health-giving air of that mountainous land called math.

@artmiddlekauff