Do You Prefer Learning or Teaching? How Switching Roles Helps Kids Build Confidence
The goldfish cracker crumbs were already ground into the spine of Lila’s third-grade math worksheet when she pushed it away, pencil hovering, and asked, “Do you prefer learning or teaching?”
It was 7:30 on a Tuesday, I still had my substitute teaching lanyard around my neck, and my beginner watercolor homework was spread out on the other end of the table, half-painted pine tree already blurring into a green smudge. She’d had a rough math period that day: raised her hand to answer 6×7, said 48 instead of 42, and two boys at the next table snickered. I’d been halfway through my standard “everyone messes up” line when she cut me off with the question. I sub two days a week at her elementary, so she sees me stand at the front of classrooms and pass out papers, and she sees me at home fumbling through night class assignments and burning toast on a regular basis. The split between “teacher” and “learner” didn’t make sense to her anymore, and honestly? It had stopped making sense to me a few months prior.
I sat down, wiped a smudge of cracker dust off the table, and tried to think of an honest answer, instead of the generic “both are important” line I’d rehearsed for classroom discussions. I thought back to the previous week, when I covered a fourth-grade geology class. The regular teacher left a rock identification worksheet and a box of unlabeled samples, with a note saying I could go over the answer key with the class for the last 20 minutes. I’d taken one earth science class in 10th grade and still couldn’t tell gneiss from schist without the textbook. I almost faked my way through anyway, like I did when I first started subbing, convinced kids would tune me out if I admitted I didn’t have all the answers.
Then Javi, a quiet kid who sat in the back, raised his hand and said he had a rock tumbler at home, and he’d brought his collection in for show and tell earlier that month. He asked if he could lead the sorting activity. I said sure, pulled a chair to the side of the room, and watched. He passed around chunks of mica and basalt, pointed out flecks of quartz in a piece of granite he’d polished himself, and mixed up slate and shale halfway through. A girl in the front row corrected him, holding up her own sample, and he blinked, laughed, and said “Oh, right, I always mix those two. Let me check the sheet.” No big deal, no blushing, no teasing. By the end of the period, half the class was crowding around his rock box, and I’d learned three easy ways to tell igneous from sedimentary rock that I still remember. After school he told me he never gets to talk about his rocks—most friends think it’s boring—and he’d braced for teasing when he mixed up the rocks, but no one cared.
I told Lila that story, and she leaned forward, crumbs forgotten. “So you were the student that day?” she said. “Even though you were the teacher.”
That’s the quiet split most kids pick up on by third or fourth grade, whether anyone says it out loud: they sort the world into learners and teachers. Learners are the ones who get tested, who blurt wrong answers in front of the class, who have homework to grind through. Teachers are the ones who grade the papers, who know all the answers, who never have to raise their hand and risk being wrong. Grown-ups reinforce that split without meaning to, when we sigh and say “this is easy, why don’t you get it” while helping with homework, or brush off a kid’s off-topic question because it’s not in the lesson plan. It makes learning feel like a temporary, embarrassing stage you have to survive before you get to be the person in charge.
I thought about the month before, when Lila begged me to make slime with her after school. I followed a random online recipe, messed up the glue-to-baking-soda ratio, and ended up with a sticky glob glued to the dining room rug. I was ready to throw it out and order a pre-made kit, but she stopped me. She’d made slime three times at a friend’s house, she said, and knew how to fix it. She added an extra pinch of baking soda, showed me how to knead slow instead of squishing fast, and 10 minutes later we had a stretchy batch that didn’t leave residue. For 20 minutes, she was the teacher, and I was the one fumbling, getting it wrong, following directions. I still remember how proud she looked when it worked, way prouder than she ever is when I walk her through a math problem.
That night at the kitchen table, after I told her the rock story, I pushed her math worksheet toward her and said I wanted to try something. I told her to teach me the 9s multiplication trick her teacher had showed the class that week, the one I said I’d never learned. She rolled her eyes a little, but she sat up straight, held up her own 10 fingers, and walked me through it step by step. I messed up the first two tries, holding up the wrong finger, and she sighed and corrected me the exact same way I correct her when she rushes through reading directions. By the time she was done teaching me, she’d worked through the three 6s problems she’d been stuck on before, no tears, no complaints about how stupid math is.
This isn’t a fancy strategy that requires workbooks or extra hours after school. It’s small, low-lift stuff that fits into regular days, for both teachers and caregivers. When I sub now, I say out loud when I don’t know something, instead of faking it. If a kid asks how to spell a word I haven’t written in years, I say “Hang on, let me look that up, I always mix that one up” instead of guessing. I keep a blank whiteboard spot for “questions we’re answering together” for off-topic facts I don’t know, and we look them up before recess. It takes 30 seconds, and more kids raise their hands to guess answers after they’ve seen me get one wrong first.
At home, we changed our dinner check-in. Instead of only asking Lila what she learned that day, my partner and I each share one thing we messed up or learned, even if it’s tiny. Some days it’s “I learned I’ve loaded the silverware basket wrong this whole time”; others, “I messed up a work email and had to send a correction.” Once a week, we do 10 minutes of “kid teaches” time, where Lila walks us through anything she knows that we don’t: a new dance move, flower breeding in Animal Crossing, the order of all the Paw Patrol pups. We don’t correct her or jump in with a better method, we just ask questions and follow directions.
It’s not a perfect fix. Lila still slumps over her math worksheet some nights, and she still gets red-faced when she gets an answer wrong in class. I still crumple at least one bad watercolor painting a week, and I still get slime stuck on the rug sometimes. I still don’t have a straight answer to her original question. Some days I prefer teaching: I like getting to step back and watch a kid realize they know more than they thought they did. Some days I prefer learning: I like not having to be the expert, getting to mess around with paint and get it wrong without anyone watching.
Last week she came home from school and said she got to lead her math table’s review game for the 6s facts, and when one kid got 6×7 wrong, she didn’t laugh. She just said “I messed that one up last week too, here’s the trick I use.” Last night she asked if I’d rather learn how to do a back handspring with her or teach her how to paint a pine tree in watercolor. I told her we’d probably end up doing both, and we’d both mess most of it up. She nodded, grabbed a cracker off the counter, and said that sounded fine.
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