Quote #46

“If you can’t explain it to a six year old, you don’t understand it yourself.”
– Albert Einstein

This quote came up in a class I am in today. I brought it up, though I was embarrassed by being unable to quote it reliably. I knew the basic idea, but the instructor was interested in the exact quote. So I went and found it, then decided to share it here too since I really do love the quote.

I have found this quote to be absolutely true and endlessly applicable in almost any situation.

For more than ten years I have interacted with and taught children in a variety of situations. There have been times that I have gone into a classroom thinking I would teach all of the children something that I thought I fully understood, only to emerge an hour later feeling frustrated and inept.

It turns out that the level of understanding required to explain things to six-year-olds is much more in-depth than one might initially assume. We might claim to understand a principle, but until we try really explaining it to someone of a lower understanding than our own, we can’t truly claim to fully understand.

Ever since discovering this principle for myself in practice, I have become much more secure in discerning between things that I understand and things that I do not understand. You can know something without fully understanding it – and that’s OK. Just make sure that you know the difference between knowing and understanding, because it can really get frustrating to realize that you didn’t understand something as well as though thought you did; especially when communicating the idea and finding that you just aren’t getting your point across.