It is funny how as a teacher occasionally I can’t see more than a foot in front of my own nose. I recently have been teaching another class where we’re reading a lot around the French Revolution. I kept talking about it, making casual reference to how it was important. After about two weeks it occurred to me that the class had no idea why it was important. Or at least why people thought it was. I spent the next half hour going over it. At the end, someone said, “Oh. I now get what we’ve been doing for the last couple weeks”. The rest of the class nodded.

I recall in a statistics class I once took I asked about the difference between the an odds and an odds ratio. I was told the formula. I replied, “I actually get the formula - I did it right on the test. I just don’t really know what the difference is, in the world.” My professor told me, “You’re looking for an intuition. I’m not good at giving intuitions… [pause]… have you ever been horse racing? [Reply: No]… Go to a track and look at how betting works. Then you’ll get the difference.” I never went to the track. But I get it now. And in fact telling me to go to the track actually produced the “intuition” the professor was looking for.