The older I grow, the less skilful I am to walk others through my route. Yes, that’s the curse of knowledge. The curse makes it hard for me to imagine not knowing what I know. It is often said that those who can’t do, teach. It would be more appropriate, as the organizational psychologist Adam Grant emphasises, that those who can do, can’t teach the basics.
And that brings me to a study I published over 15 years ago. At that time, I thought it’s important to explore the trainers’ experience in teaching our patients with kidney failure. It bothered me, then, when my patients on peritoneal dialysis got infection because of improper technique. I took a good look at their dialysis training nurses’ level of experience. As I pored over the results, I was in for a surprise. The patients who were trained by nurses with more than 3 years of experience were running a two-fold increased chance of subsequent infection secondary to behavioural lapse such as improper handwashing.
Many were angry with my counterintuitive finding that more experienced nurses weren’t doing better with teaching patients. Oh, the stare I got. “How dare you suggest experts are worse off?”
Now I know the way to explain my findings. Much as an experienced doctor has a harder time teaching the beginners, an experienced nurse who almost stays on autopilot can have a hard time to explain the simple steps of handwashing.
If you hear about Einstein's curse in his classroom, you wouldn’t be surprised that Einstein knew too much, and his students knew too little. He had so many ideas in his head that he didn’t know what his students didn’t know. Curse of knowledge. This, I believe, is the reason his thermodynamics course attracted only three students.
To me, the message is clear: we can sometimes be too experienced to teach.
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