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I’m not sure you do either of those things in the way that Big Teacher wants to be true.
To teach a kid to read you just go over the sounds again and again, then go over words (which is the same thing). Eventually they get good at it. Big Teacher wants it to be the case that if that doesn’t work, then you move to some plan B that depends on esoteric that only Trained Professionals know about, but there is no plan B that works, which is why you have legions of functionally illiterate people. Plan A (“I make you practice and you will thereby learn automatically”) is not the type of thing they make movies out of.
Arithmetic is almost the same. At some point you see 1 and 1 making 2, and it just sticks. Same for subtraction. Smart kids grasp it after few examples, less smart kids grasp it after more examples. For something more complicated, like long division, the kid is still either remembering the steps or he isn’t (virtually no 9-year old actually understands what the steps are doing). There is no stronger tool or one weird trick- all you have are more examples. This is why patience is so often lauded in teachers. The good ones just grind out more and more examples without getting exasperated.
So kids learn to read and do arithmetic, but is that because adults do something to put the knowledge in the kid’s head (which is what most people mean by “to teach”) or just because the adults make the kid learn it himself?
This is called phonics and it works for nearly all children that aren’t actually literally retarded. It takes some skills to do, but a 110 IQ woman can follow detailed directions without much specialized training. The problem is that ‘big teacher’(which is probably more education bureaucrats that have never actually set foot in a classroom since they day they graduated than it is actual teachers) refuses to do it, instead insisting on things that do not work, which they insist will be overcome by the power of progressive wishful thinking. Functional parents are able to route around this, of course, either because their kids are smart enough to learn anyways, or because they teach the basics themselves, or because they can pay for private tutors that use phonics, or whatever the case may be. But of course large percentages of the nation’s children do not have functional parents. It would, indeed, be much better if public schools could just do phonics, but they don’t.
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Or, unfortunately, another plan A.
But I do think that that example illustrates that how you teach matters—phonics works better than other modes of instruction. Likewise, being able to hold students' attention helps with their learning.
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Setting aside whether that's how to do it --- if it is, that's teaching.
Big Teacher is even worse; they want to use things which don't work INSTEAD of doing things which work for most people. But that doesn't mean that things can't be taught; that means that Big Teacher sucks.
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