Mr. Rogers Never Once Said "Let Me Pull Up My Slides"
November 20, 2025
I taught STEM for eight years before I moved into tech.
I still think about teaching every single day. Not because I miss the classroom — though sometimes I do — but because the best technical communicators I’ve ever worked with are, at their core, great teachers. And most of them have no idea that’s what they are.
When I think about what great teaching actually looks like, two figures come to mind that have nothing to do with formal education.
Mr. Rogers. And Yoda.
Bear with me.
Neither of them ever overwhelmed their audience with information. Neither of them performed expertise. They didn’t lead with credentials or complexity. They started where the learner was — not where they themselves were — and they moved at the learner’s pace.
Mr. Rogers could take something abstract and emotional and make it feel simple and safe. Yoda could take something impossibly complex — the nature of the Force, the weight of a choice — and compress it into something a kid could carry with them.
That’s not a gift. That’s a skill. And it has three components.
Simplification.
Not dumbing down. Simplification is the discipline of removing everything that isn’t essential so the essential thing can be seen clearly. It requires you to understand something deeply before you can explain it simply. The teacher who can’t explain it simply doesn’t fully understand it yet.
In tech, we’re trained to demonstrate depth. To prove that we know the thing. But depth demonstrated through complexity is just intimidation. Depth demonstrated through clarity — that’s credibility.
Constructive feedback.
Great teachers don’t just correct. They build. There’s a difference between “that’s wrong” and “here’s what’s close, and here’s the step you missed.” One shuts the learner down. The other keeps them in the game.
The best managers I’ve seen operate this way. The worst ones don’t give feedback at all, or give feedback that’s really just judgment dressed up as coaching.
Authentic connection.
Mr. Rogers looked directly at the camera and said: I like you just the way you are. And people believed him — because he meant it.
You can’t fake this. Learners, customers, new hires — they can tell immediately when you’re going through the motions. Connection requires genuine curiosity about the other person: who they are, what they’re struggling with, what matters to them.
The most effective sales calls I’ve been on weren’t effective because of the product. They were effective because the SE actually cared about the customer’s problem.
Here’s the thing I want to say plainly:
You don’t need a classroom to be a teacher. If you have expertise, and you’re in a room with someone who needs to learn something, you’re already teaching — whether you’re doing it well or not.
The choice is whether to do it intentionally.
After eight years in the classroom and several more in tech, I’m convinced that the most underused skill in the industry is the ability to teach. Not train. Not present. Not enable, in the watered-down LMS sense of the word.
Actually teach.
The professionals who do it well are the ones who build the most trust, close the most deals, and develop the most people around them. They’re also, in my experience, the ones who find the work most meaningful.
Mr. Rogers spent his whole career teaching one thing: that you are worth being known and understood.
Not a bad framework for anyone who works with people.
Who’s the best teacher you’ve ever had — inside or outside of a classroom? What made them different?