the nature of teaching/learning?

spent the day making the first in a series of videos on drum tuning for the Puremix website. puremix.net is an advanced audio tutorial website. it is interesting having to think and talk about a subject that one knows to others that don't know about it. I think that doing it well is the key to teaching - all teaching. In regards to the teaching he's done all his life, my father always says, "never forget the problems of the beginner".
the difficulty for me occurs when I don't remember them, because the material was learned so long ago.

How much of being a good teacher is throwing the student in the deep end of the pool and letting them sink or swim?
How much of being a good student is being willing to be thrown in the deep end of the pool, almost drown, climb back out and do it again, a little better?
these are the things I think about when teaching, mainly because I can be overly didactic and detailed, but also because a complete science of education is not known (nor is a complete science of anything). I remember growing up - much of the education I had in Chicago area public schools was pretty soft - not because the schools or teachers were universally bad, but because there was a liberal trend in education, or so it seemed.
did I get a better or worse education than I would have in a more heavy-handed system?
dunno.
maybe I would have bucked against stronger academic discipline. maybe I would have risen to the challenge. hard to say - from my current perspective I wish I had a stricter educational experience in primary-high school; but who knows what that would have done - maybe I would be a doctor and not a drummer! 

© Graham Hawthorne 2012