The French chemist Antoine Lavoisier once said: "In nature nothing is created, nothing is lost, everything changes." This has proven to be true in physics, chemistry and many other scientific fields. Energy is transferred as it is used, changing from friction to heat, from light to electricity and more. Money is transformed into goods and services, with value-added turning back into money in the process. Time is converted into ideas, practice into value, money into wealth, which in turn provides time. The process appears to be universal and self-contained.
However, it seems that teaching is the exception.
When you teach, you share a piece of knowledge with someone. You are not left poorer by the experience. In other words, you have not lost anything in the process, merely invested a little time. However, in that time, other people have gained knowledge, which they in turn can spread further and farther in an exponential fashion. It becomes a viral experience.
When you acquire new knowledge, your brain rewires itself to accommodate this knowledge within its intellectual grasp. Much like a hard drive reconfigures its bits of zeroes and ones to go from an empty formatted disk to one full of data, the brain changes its neuronal maps as it learns. It does not weigh more, like the hard disk, but it contains more.
However, unlike the hard disk, the change is not merely a rearrangement of its physical self, but an evolution. Knowledge impacts not just what you know, but how you think. Therefore, teaching something to someone changes who they are, both intellectually and physically. Their brain is left physiologically altered by the experience. No matter how much they forget, they will forever be transformed by this learning experience. And it is highly likely that they will affect others in turn.
Teaching therefore proves to be an exception to Lavoisier's rule. Whereas a digital copy of an original file merely reconfigures a drive's bits without actually changing it, a teacher who delivers a lectures creates a new version of her students, who then go on to affect change and to create other versions of people with whom they share this knowledge.
In some way, teaching is a form of magic, a violation of nature's rule in the most beautiful sense.
Go out and teach. Share what you know. Create.
Be the exception that spreads.
