The Best Study Method Is Also the Most Embarrassing: Teach It to Someone Else

I want to describe a very specific kind of silence I've experienced in my classroom.

I ask a student to come to the board and explain to the class how they solved the problem. The student has done the problem correctly. Their working is there on the page. But standing at the board, faced with explaining it to others, they freeze. The correct marks on the paper do not translate into words.

This silence is one of the most instructive things I ever witnessed as a teacher. It revealed, more clearly than any test, the difference between performed understanding and actual understanding.

The student had followed the steps. They had not understood why the steps worked.

The Feynman Technique

Richard Feynman was a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who was also famous for being able to explain extraordinarily complex ideas to non-experts. He described a learning technique that has his name now — though the idea is much older — which goes roughly like this:

Take something you're trying to learn. Write it down or explain it out loud, as if you were teaching it to someone who knows nothing about it. No jargon, no shortcuts, no assumed knowledge. When you hit a point where you can't explain it simply, that's the gap. Go back to the material. Find out why it works, not just that it works. Try again.

The technique's power is that it forces genuine understanding. You cannot bluff your way through an explanation to a real, confused listener. They'll ask "but why?" and you either know or you don't.

Why This Is Embarrassing

I used variations of this constantly in my teaching. I would pair children and ask them to take turns teaching each other a concept. I would ask individuals to explain their method to the class. I would ask children to "teach" me something as if I'd never heard of it.

Without fail, the first reactions were resistant. Children hate not knowing something they're supposed to know. Standing in front of even a small group and attempting to explain something, then discovering you can't, is — in the social ecology of a classroom — deeply uncomfortable.

This is particularly pronounced in Hong Kong, where educational culture places significant weight on performing competence. Struggling in front of peers, or in front of a parent who expects mastery, feels like failure.

But here is the thing: that discomfort is the entire point. The awkward moment where the explanation breaks down is not a sign that the method isn't working. It's the method working. You have just located, with surgical precision, exactly where your understanding stops.

Re-reading notes does not do this for you. Re-reading notes allows you to believe you understand because everything looks familiar. Trying to explain produces the gap, visibly, undeniably, usefully.

How to Do This at Home

The most natural version is: explain what you learned today to a family member who doesn't know the topic.

For younger children, this can be genuinely appealing — they enjoy being the expert, teaching the parent, being the one who knows something the adult doesn't. Lean into this. Ask questions as a curious non-expert. "Why does it work that way?" "What happens if you do it differently?" "What would happen if that number changed?"

For older children, who are more likely to find this awkward, the threshold is lower: explain it as if writing to a clever classmate who was absent. Write it out. Speaking and writing both work; writing leaves a record you can review.

The stuffed animal method sounds silly but works for children who resist performing to people: explain the material to a toy. The toy makes no judgement. The child still has to organise their thinking into explanation. The gaps still appear.

What doesn't work is explanation to a parent who already knows the material and "helps" at every stumble. The value of the technique disappears if the listener keeps filling the gaps. The struggle to find the words is the learning. Rescue shortcircuits it.

What I Saw in Students Who Did This

The students who were comfortable explaining things — whether because their parents asked them to regularly, or because they'd developed the habit themselves — showed a specific quality in their work. When they encountered a new, unfamiliar problem type, they were better at approaching it.

This is the outcome that most Hong Kong parents actually want, even if they don't describe it that way. The ability to handle a question you haven't seen exactly before requires genuine understanding of underlying principles, not pattern memorisation. And genuine understanding is built, more than anything else, through the process of organising knowledge into explanation.

The students who had only ever memorised methods could solve problems that matched their templates. When the template didn't match, they were lost. The students who could explain their thinking — even imperfectly, even messily — had something more flexible.

A Practical Structure

If you want to try this with your child, here is a low-pressure structure:

Five minutes after the study session, say: "Okay, can you teach me one thing you just practiced? Pretend I know nothing."

Let them try. Do not help. Ask genuine questions about the parts you don't follow. When they get stuck, say: "That's interesting — do you know why that step works? What happens if we go back to the notes on that bit?"

Then try again.

If they can explain it clearly — genuinely clearly, to someone who doesn't know it — they know it. If they can't, you've just found the study topic for tomorrow.

It takes about ten minutes. It is more valuable than an hour of re-reading. And yes, it will be awkward at first.

That's how you know it's working.