#especially teaching software...uuugh

[technecat-scratchings]

Hmm, as a Career and TechEd teacher, I disagree with the assertion that you shouldn't teach your strongest subject; you absolutely should! The best teachers are the ones who both find their content area fulfilling to do and to teach, because otherwise you'll burn out from boredom alone.

But you have to be good at both parts. You cannot just be strong in your content area, you have to be able to break it down and understand how to relay that information to others. Teaching is 90% communication and management skills and 10% content knowledge, so you'd better be delivering the best, most expert content possible, or you're not going to be providing the knowledge necessary for anyone (especially kids) to actually learn from you. (Also, I don't know how much OP knows about teaching certs but the pedagogical stuff comes first and content comes after. My content area exam was a piece of cake, but I had to study hard for the pedagogy part.)

Which isn't to say that teachers should not be constantly learning— we literally have to be. Ask any (US) teacher how much of their time outside of class hours goes into Professional Development and Professional Learning Communities and they'll tell you: probably too much, tbh, but it's all for the best and at least it's salaried hours.

And do you know what all that professional learning is about? It's about how to be a better teacher. How to differentiate your lessons so students at all skill levels all have equal opportunities at learning. How to break down complicated things into smaller, easier tasks and make those tasks clear. How to approach the ultimate question: "Did every student learn this, and if not, how did I mess up, and if so, how do I fix it?"

So, it's not about not being an expert in your field or not teaching what you are best at or what comes to you the most naturally, it's about being an effective teacher first and an expert second. But you have to be both. 🧑🏻‍🏫

The urge to say, "oh, but it's easy!" is why IMO teachers below the college level shouldn't teach their best subject. Honestly, college teachers should ALSO be teaching some of their less-good subjects, the things they had to work to learn.

I'm very good at English, and that is why I shouldn't be an English teacher, especially at the level of teaching people to read but also just...in general. Because I learned to read before I have conscious memories. Because my family was reading Shakespeare out loud to me and taking me to performances before school thought it time to touch the stuff.

Which means I don't know how to struggle with these things. I don't know how to learn to read on purpose; I was read to every day of my little life, is how it happened for me. That's not a method you can duplicate in the classroom. It's, you know, great that it's obvious to me, but the whole point of teaching is to provide something to people for whom it is not obvious! I didn't need an English teacher - not that I never benefited from one (thank you Mrs. Hartmann for teaching us about subject/object pronouns and sentence diagrams), but that I would have reached a high level of literacy without one. So English teachers shouldn't be focused on students like me, should they?

My high school chemistry teacher was an excellent chemist, definitely overqualified for the job on paper. But my god she could not teach. If you couldn't understand from the book, or from the one way she was able to explain it, you were out of luck. Because it was easy.