How to Avoid the Curse of Knowledge

Let’s say that your aunt is a wonderful cook.

She makes the world’s best apple pie with a light, flaky crust, and over time she’s perfected the steps for creating this magnificent masterpiece. After years of enjoying her pies at family gatherings, you ask for her pie-baking tips, only to discover that your aunt is unable to specifically articulate the process of preparing her pies. “Make sure the dough feels right,” she says vaguely. “If it doesn’t feel right, the pies won’t turn out.”

As wonderful as your aunt may be, she’s suffering from the “curse of knowledge.”

This “curse,” described by authors Chip Heath and Dan Heath in their book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, refers to the concept that the more you know about a subject, the harder it often becomes to communicate your knowledge to someone who knows nothing about the topic.

Just because you’re good at something doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re good at teaching someone else how to do it.

A master violinist intuitively knows just the right amount of pressure to apply to the bow to create soulful sounds, but may find it difficult to convey that knowledge and experience to another person. An Olympic equestrian can release his horse over the jump at just the right time, but he might not be able to explain the timing in a way that a novice rider will understand.

The idea of the curse of knowledge is of particular significance to anyone involved in the teaching process. As your child’s teacher, you might be an excellent reader, but the curse of knowledge may make it more difficult for you to take the appropriate steps to teach your child how to read. Most of us can’t remember what it was like not to be able to read, and so it can be difficult to determine the proper place to begin.

There are ways, however, to move beyond this curse and avoid its effects.

Always remember to empathize with your child—sometimes learning is hard work! Never assume that he or she knows something automatically; instead, take things slowly. Reading and spelling are complicated subjects—don’t try to explore too much information in a short period of time.

Break difficult tasks down into their simplest components. Take an inventory of every skill that needs to be taught so that there are no gaps in your child’s understanding of the subject. Teach each skill separately, and then combine the new skill with previously learned skills.

Or…get good solid lesson plans in which the hard work has already been done for you.

In All About Spelling and All About Reading, we’ve taken big skills—spelling and reading—and identified all of the smaller skills that kids need to learn to become strong spellers and readers. You don’t have to guess or reach back into the dark recesses of your brain to remember what it took to become a good reader. We’ve removed the curse of knowledge for you.

By eliminating the curse, you and your child can focus on positive learning experiences as you cover all the fundamentals necessary for a solid educational foundation.