Subject matter experts are not experts in pedagogy. Because pedagogy is a seperate subject entirely. And teaching is not about getting people to say aha. Thats just performance or entertainment. Seen everywhere these days thanks to the Attention Econnomy. You can gets ahas out of people playing great music. But dont equate that with getting people to play great music. Cuz that requires getting people to do lot of mundane mindless work for long long periods of time.
A few years ago, I tried teaching for a couple years. Something that struck me was that to teach at the elementary or high school level you need specific degrees, but to teach at a university you don't. There is this thinking that because you have a PhD you can teach, which is very far from the truth. Being a good communicator is a skill in itself.
Where I live you study pedagogy and practice it while doing your PhD. If you suck at it you can still pass, but at least they take a shot at teaching it to you. When applying for positions your record on teaching might make it harder to get to those where you're expected to do it regularly.
The usual nepotism, corruption and fraud in academia will of course allow some bad teachers to advance anyway.
> only people who are good at studying go to university.
I think this is arse over elbow; the purpose of an undergraduate degree course is to teach you to study and do research. The "research" done by undergraduates isn't novel research; the student repeats "research" that has been done by generations of students before them. I.e., it's practice.
For this reason, writing undergraduate essays felt to me like being an impostor; you try to write in the manner of a researcher, knowing that you're faking it.
I can explain memory pointers to a layperson in terms of numbered boxes and yellow notes. They're still long long way to go from that even to reversing a single linked list successfully.
