You Don’t Have To Be Great To Teach Someone Else Something You Know

Many people want to learn certain skills you have and take for granted and they might even be willing to pay you for it

“When are you going to do it?”

My mom, who is 87, has been asking me for two weeks if I would teach two of her caregiver’s grandsons how to play basketball, and she can be persistent when she wants something.

You have a stroke, get older and you can’t do as much as you once were able to do a few years ago, and you want to be able to control a few things in your life.

“When are you going to do it?”

I resisted because it was her idea. It wasn’t a bad idea, and I wasn’t against it. It just wasn’t my idea, and I wasn’t sure how the boy’s mother felt about it.

But I agreed to do it last week.

I arranged a time with the boys’ mom. I thought it would be fun for my thirteen-year-old son and me, and I could share what I know about basketball.

The back story

The caregiver’s grandkids are ten and eight, and my mom learned from her caregiver one has started to shoot hoops at school during recess. But his dad never played sports as a kid, so he has no one to teach him basketball skills.

The dad plays video games with his kids. That’s how he connects with them.

So I guess my mom thought I could share a few things I’ve learned as a former basketball player who long ago dreamed of being an NBA player as a child.

I tried to pass on the job of basketball teacher to my son by giving him a few tips on how to teach basketball. But when it came time to teach the boys, he was content to be part of the lesson and I was a teacher since I am a teacher.

A little more back story

The truth is, my son (who is on the autism spectrum) is more interested in drama and voicing animated characters than basketball. He has been in a few community plays, and I have somewhat of a background in drama too.

Sort of.

I once got on the wrong side of a principal. He called me into his office at the end of the year, pointed at me, and said, “You’re teaching Drama. Talk to Mr. Smith (not his real name) and he will tell you how to teach drama.”

It seems they needed someone to teach drama and I became the solution.

And I had just enough of a dramatic personality to be able to pull it off. I eventually even taught Advanced Drama, but that is a whole different story.

Teaching drama

So while my son and I waited for the two boys to show up last week at my mom’s, two of my mom’s caregivers were out of the country and I trained one of their daughters to train her best friend until the two caregivers returned.

I didn’t know anything about caregiving either before my mom had a stroke, or hiring and firing (once) caregivers — and likewise, so there are a lot of skills you may have picked up in life that you don’t realize others want to learn.

I asked the caregivers if they wanted to play a drama game since one has acted in plays but has never taken an Acting class and the other is shy. I thought it would be a good way to involve my son in something that he enjoys doing.

“Sure,” they said.

My son and I modelled how to do the mirror activity. This is one of the main activities in a Beginning Drama class, and you’ve probably done this activity.

My mom, by the way, was taking a nap in her bedroom.

I stretched my arms above my head, yawned like I am waking up, brushed my teeth, rolled on some deodorant, pulled a T-shirt over my head, slid my arms into the sleeves, shimmied my legs into jeans, poured a cup of coffee, added some cream and sugar, and went through my typical morning routine.

My son mirrored all my gestures, and he did the mirror activity with the not-very-shy-at-all caregiver who made him do the Moonwalk, and my favorite part was watching the shy caregiver do the mirror activity with her friend.

Then it got crazy

I shared with them about the Taxi Driver game. An improv game. All it takes to play is four chairs from your mom’s dining room and your imagination.

One person is the driver. The three passengers get into the cab one at a time. The driver copies the emotion of the passenger and adds some dialogue. Then the driver and passenger mimic the emotion of the next two passengers.

The first passenger, the outgoing caregiver, told me her dog just died.

“My pet hamster just died,” I told her. “He was the best friend in the world.”

We wept and shared personal stories about Fido and Hammy and planned a joint memorial service at a church for them this upcoming Wednesday.

My son got in the cab and pretended he had to go the bathroom real bad, we all squirmed around in our seats and told the driver about our urinary needs.

“I’m about to piss in my pants,” my son said.

Then the last passenger told us she broke up with her boyfriend, and we cried and shared stories of how we got dumped. It felt cathartic. We laughed so loud my mom wanted to know what the noise was about in her living room.

So I told her what we were doing, brought her to the party in her living room, and I put her wheelchair in the driver’s seat, and we played the game again.

Fortunately, she fit right in the game because she once was a drama teacher, and I hope you’re seeing how you can share something you’ve learned and it can be a blessing to people who haven’t been introduced to this activity.

Teaching Basketball

The caregivers’ grandsons eventually arrived right after our second Taxi Driver game, and I remembered I was supposed to teach them basketball.

But first I asked if they wanted to do the mirror activity and hoped to play one more round of the Taxi game with the boys and, maybe, their grandmother.

One of the boys yes, the other one took refuge behind the sofa, and my mom asked me when I was going to take them outside to do my basketball lesson.

The mirror activity was great because the couch-hider is the straight-A student, the Golden Boy in the family, and the other is repeating a grade but he has talents such as supporting a new student from Mexico in his class.

I’ve learned not all talents are represented on a Report Card. It’s taken me 17 years as a teacher and 13 years as a parent to learn and appreciate this.

The non-couch hider aced the mirror game while his younger brother commented on how some of his gestures like shaving were not done correctly and my mom asked me when I was going to teach them basketball again.

“You don’t even know how to shave,” the younger brother pointed.

He missed the point of improv. But he’s eight, so that’s expected.

The basketball lesson

So we finally went outside for the basketball lesson. I kept things simple. I asked them what basketball players they already know (Lebron James, Kevin Durant, Kobe Bryant). We practised dribbling while standing, dribbling while walking, and dribbling while driving in the condominium parking lot.

No kids were harmed during the teaching of this basketball lesson.

Mostly, I hammed it up with the energy I cultivated in the drama game. I added a few basics like why you want to dribble with your head looking up.

“You don’t want to have Lebron James open and you don’t pass him the ball.”

Balls caromed off their feet at times. And I taught them “something you should do with a basketball because it’s dangerous,” and showed them how to bounce a ball through their legs and to catch the ball behind their back.

No kids were harmed on this part. But some private parts became sore.

The point of this story

I learned you can teach something you take for granted because you’ve done it for many years and you can impart that knowledge with someone else who is at the beginning point on the learning curve and it can be a lot of fun for you.

It could be basketball, drama, underwater basket weaving, or whatever you know to do and have some passion for and someone else wants to learn.

You could probably even start a business, podcast and online course doing this like Jenna Kutcher, who created online courses and a podcast (The Goal Digger) teaches others how to start a business and market a product on social media by sharing her experience of running a wedding photography business.

Or you could just to for fun out of the goodness of your heart like us.

Shout out the KiKi Walter and her eye-opening experience/story, “The Time I Ran Away To Join The Circus,” about someone teaching her hard truths about life.

She is the owner of The Memoirist publication on Medium. It’s a great place to submit work if you like to do creative non-fiction-memoir writing.

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