Listening to Matthew Crawford's Shop Class As Soul Craft, I learned that Aristotle made a distinction between some arts and some others. Crawford used as an example building construction vs. physician. The building construction is supposed to be an example of certainty. The competent builder knows what is needed to make a good building and he performs his art in a way that results in just that, a good building. The physician or mechanic tries to fix situations not of his own making, which may have unknown or even unprecedented causes. Aristotle used the term "stochastic" (stow 'kas tic) for the chance-y arts. This is the same word used in mathematics to describe a probabilistic process such as moving through the lines at a supermarket.
The more I think about it, the more I see that all arts are stochastic at some level. In fact, one way of looking at the arts is that they are chance-y from start to finish. Roughly speaking, math is pretty firmly fixed or algorithmic, at least the already invented and codified part. Then science, which explores but also tries for certainty. Finally, the arts, where the 'feel' and the 'gut' and the intuition are very important.
You might think that the typical professor knows the subject to be taught and teaches it, in a cut-and-dried way. Not so. All subjects are constantly changing, especially in this age of instant communication and many academics, organizations, writers and thinkers. But if you want a chancey-art, try teacher training. Usually, the student seriously interested in becoming a teacher either starts with a strong desire to be with children or a love of an academic subject. Neither of these is really a poor motivation to become a teacher but both are far from sufficient. Generally, a college student aged 18 to 22 has not had much opportunity to work with the vagaries of younger people's natures. Guiding would-be teachers to just the right blend of an appreciation for the talent and future of pupils and a stern stand for steady work and standards is quite stochastic. Getting the right blend and learning to use it effectively requires knowledge of one's self. As actors sometimes say, the teacher needs to know how to use his or her "instrument" (one's body, voice, facial expression, ability to read and empathize with emotions, etc.). It often takes four or five years of teaching to begin to know what one is doing and to enjoy it, too.
