172 Teaching Minds Did I teach her to ignore stupid no left turn signs? Of course I did. But I never said such a thing to her or taught her how to decide when it was safe to ignore a sign. I was just in her world and she was watching. I observed a similar phenomenon with my son. I like to watch football and my son sat with me and learned to watch too. Twenty years later, when an event occurred on the field, I noticed that we said exactly the same thing at the same time. “Oof,” “oh come on,” “ugh.” Whatever event on the field caused me to exclaim something, caused my son to exclaim the same thing. Now, I could not tell you what was an “oof” and what was an “ugh,” and neither could he. I do this kind of thing unconsciously and so does he. He learned what I had to teach, but he doesn’t know what he learned and I don’t know what I taught. What does this have to do with teaching? Perhaps we just need to watch our teachers and then we can copy what they do. Well, not exactly. I took a yoga lesson the other day. The instructor got into a pose and said I was to copy what he did. I said there wasn’t a chance that I could copy what he did. He wasn’t used to being talked to like this. (Most students are better at being students than I am, of course.) I explained that I could barely understand what he had done, despite seeing it, and I certainly didn’t know the intent of what he had done, so I wouldn’t know which aspects of his action were significant and which were unimportant. I told him this was no way to teach. Now I know I will not be able to teach the yoga instructor how to teach better, and I doubt he will be reading this book. But whether you are teaching yoga or baseball or science or business, the rules are the same. Before I list them, let me start with the top mistakes teach- ers make. Some of these mistakes are forced on teachers by a badly designed education system, and some are ones that teachers make no matter what they are teaching or which system they are