Note to myself: MOve this to the Anything section and then fix the keywords

Some unfortunate people teach the same subject over and over again throughout their lives without progressing in the topic. Others are fortunate enough to be asked to teach different things.

No matter what profession you are in, it is advantangeous to be able to vary the work that you do. For example, translators should never get into the rut of only translating issues in their field of expertise.

The problem with teaching an unfamiliar subject is that you don't have a feel for it, you don't know what the important things are, and you have difficulty arranging your lesson so that it is coherent. These are important issues, but there are ways to go about them in an intelligent way.

Your first step should be to hit the Internet and look for existing lesson plans, tutorials, and articles about the subject that you are teaching. These materials have been prepared by people who, in some cases, know what they are doing. You will have to sift through the tremendous body of information to find the good items which are arranged in a logical sequence that would be teachable. Once you have this information, sift through the few documents that you have selected in a logical way so that it fits your pattern and style of teaching and then put it all together and try to rehearse it the way you would teach. Imagine yourself standing in front of a class. Imagine the words and the topics that you would use. And then present the material in a similar way. That is how you would arrange the material. Since you have never taught it, it will mean that you have to review the lesson out loud with or without an audience in order to become smooth at saying it.

At the end of this period, you will be able to present the material as if you were an expert.

The first time that I, the author of this webpage, discussed how to take video pictures, I had never held a video camera in my hand. I didn't know how to go about it at all. Yet I taught it to an advanced college class. The college class had no idea that I was not an expert in it and they kept taking notes on all of the things that I had to say. How did I go about doing this? How did I explain my topic? I used materials that were available on the Internet and I culled from each item the things that met my style and that seemed relevant. I was very happy when I found tips on filming movies. I used those tips in order to be able to explain to my students how they should go about things and they accepted them as new tips themselves. All of this material had been accumulated from the Internet. By the time I was through teaching it I felt almost as if I was the expert filming things myself.

It is important to make sure that you can win the students' confidence in your knowledge of the subject. Therefore, don't try to accept the temptation to get into things that are deeper or more complex than you can explain yourself. If you do then you may have difficulty when the students ask questions about the material and you're not able to answer them because you've gone too far beyond your own sphere of knowledge.