Height killed interest in basketball playing and coaching.
I wonder if this is a relatable experience.
When I was in high school, I used to feel deeply at the fact that other students could not play basketball competitively with me, without great exertion, and I really didn't want that to be true. So, I tried very hard to devise all sorts of ways of being able to demonstrate ball handling techniques much faster than they are currently taught. I was quite passionate about this (think Harlem Globetrotters).
Later on, life taught me that what I could do was in large part genetics, and so there's no way the basketball finesse I had could be taught or conveyed to someone who wasn't also quite tall and coordinated. That the "teaching strategies" which I thought up were actually often used to teach professional teams (and so I had reinvented the wheel), but wouldn't work with average or even fairly tall and athletic children.
It's like on a scale from 0-100, if someone's height is a 2, you can push them to play competitively with persons having a height of 4 on the scale, with exceptional coaching, but some people just start at a height of 10 on the scale, and playing competitively with these cannot be taught to someone who possesses a much shorter stature.
The futility of the entire exercise made me give up playing and coaching. From personal experience, I know that someone with talent will teach themselves during pick-up games at a local park and by watching others play in person and on TV if nothing else is available and often doesn't require coaching or membership on formal teams to get to a very high level.
Yes, I believe you have articulated a relatable experience insofar as that what you have observed about the human trait of intellect is somewhat analogous to other human traits, such as talent in athletics being related to physical attributes.
However one need not give up teaching/pedagogy after developing such insights, but rather may adapt to fit the instruction to the readiness and ability of the student, so that each may learn in their zone of proximal development, and grow to be their personal best.
