Michael Jordan is arguably the greatest basketball player of all time. With 6 NBA championships, 6 NBA Finals MVPs, and 5 NBA League MVP awards, he’s the equivalent of a straight-A student with perfect scores on everything. But with all his championships and accolades, do you think that he’s the best person to coach a ten-year-old how to play basketball?
Probably not.
He’d probably start talking about the importance of the pick-and-roll, full-press defensive schemes, and fade away 3-point shots before the kid even knew how to dribble the ball!
Or in an example that might hit closer to home, have you ever asked your kid to teach you how to fix your computer and heard this in response: “Simple. Just defragment the hardware’s offset memory beta-chip multiplier magnifier doohickey. ”
If so, then you’ve made one of the most valuable realizations when it comes to teaching:
Not all experts are great teachers.
In fact, a lot of experts that try to teach others their skills find that they have a terrible teaching disease:
“Expertitis.”
That’s the disease of being REALLY good at something, but NOT so good at teaching others how to do it.
Revolution Prep receives tens of thousands of applications from “experts” with perfect 2400’s, 36’s, 800’s, 5’s and all the blue-ribbon accolades you could imagine. How many of those “perfect scorers” do you think we hire?
Very few, actually.
DON’T JUST LOOK AT THE SCORE
We only accept 10% of perfect scoring applicants, because a perfect score isn’t good enough. Somebody with good test scores might be a high-performer, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they know how to best teach your child.
You need to look BEYOND the test scores, at two things that are much more important: A tutor’s ability to connect with your student and their skill in the art and science of teaching. We’ll cover those two traits in our next posts.
In the meantime, we’ll be on the basketball court working on our jump shot.
