Part III: 3 Skills I Would Learn If I Were A Teenager

Out of the three skills, let’s delve into teaching next. If teaching is a keystone skill, what other skills result from teaching? Number one is responsibility. While a shoe seller has one customer, the teacher has – at least – two customers for the price of one. The first customer is your student, the next is the parent; and if you teach in a school, the institution itself. The point here is that for one service (of teaching) you have at least two customers with the potential for many more.

And you have to navigate the complexities revolving around all of them. Who says teachers live a simple life?

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The next skill teaching helps you to develop is being an effective student yourself. You become a knowledge seeker because as a teacher, you should be able to answer your students’ many questions – to a large extent. To do that, you have to learn.

Three, you become a better teacher. As you try to learn and improve yourself, you gain insight into how your students learn. Therefore, you feed that insight back into your own teaching. It is an iterative process.

The fourth advantage of teaching goes without saying. But I’m going to mention it: You know the subject more than others.

Five, you gain humility. Interestingly, this humility results from knowing the subject more than others because you are acutely aware of your own knowledge gaps. Because while you may know more than the general population, you know that there are people far more knowledgeable than you – and also because you can’t answer all questions. This is a mark of scholarship.

Six, you gain purpose. Research shows that 70% of millennials want to quit their jobs because they lack purpose. This has far-reaching consequences. A reading of Daniel Pink’s book “Drive” shows that having a purpose (in addition to mastery and autonomy) gives us intrinsic motivation. For teachers, the purpose of teaching comes preinstalled. Ask any teacher and they would tell you the purpose is to raise a generation of better humans – or something similar.

In her book, “The Purpose Myth,” Charlotte Cramer said that to find meaning in your work, you need three things: to survive (meet your material needs) , strive (make a difference) and thrive (learn new things). Teachers meet all of these needs. While it takes some professionals a long time to know whether they are making a difference, a teacher can know in as soon as one week or one hour.

Seven, you learn self-control and patience. If you have patience, you have everything. There is an abundance of empirical evidence that shows that self-control (a measure of patience) today is as important as literacy. People who have patience age more slowly than the general population and they are more likely to be successful in life.

Eight and lastly, you become a better communicator because you can remove fluff from complex ideas and simplify them. If having self-control means having everything, then the ability to communicate helps you get those things faster. If you use them in combination.

This may explain why our early leaders in Nigeria were mostly teachers: Tafawa Balewa, Zik of Africa, Aminu Kano, etc.

Even those who organize tutorials when they were students in the university become more successful in their vocations. That may be due to the array of the benefits of teaching.

Encouraging Children to Teach

If you have kids, let the older ones teach their younger siblings.  I know that the tutorial session can turn into a wrestling match that will require you to referee but don’t give up. They are probably engaged in dramatic play – which is great for children. But even if it is a serious fight, your intervention should only be about using their mouths to resolve issues not their hands.

For example, my daughter likes trouble – particularly, that of her brother. And he is not patient enough to tolerate her shenanigans. But we still make him teach her. There was a day that he was so frustrated he said “me, I’m tired!”

Sometimes I will leave work for them and say “mark your sister’s and I will mark yours when I come back.”

He can also list this on his CV as his teaching experience. “I was able to teach a girl who wouldn’t sit still or listen and who fought her teacher. This is to say nothing about her difficult parents.”

If teaching can help you learn eight different skills, then teaching is indeed a foundational skill. And remember what Jason Fried and David  Hansson said in the bestselling book “Rework”: companies should not outsell their competitors but should out-teach them. So teachers are needed in every sector.