To what extent is MSE reputation an indication of potential in education?

Question

Similar question as in Academia StackExchange except education instead of academia.

Quote:

High reputation on a technical Stack Exchange site might indicate that you're a good teacher of that subject, since well-explained, easy-to-understand answers tend to get higher reputation.

Paraphrasing (or whatever is the term to change words of another to suit an analogous situation)

I'm due to start my PhD in mathematics education next month, fully funded by a scholarship, at an average university, I'll be specialising in how language affects mathematical definitions, and I have a strong First in Mathematics from a Russell group university. My goal is to become a kindergarten/primary/secondary maths teacher and an academic.

This is my Mathematics Stack Exchange (MSE) profile. I've been an active user since 201X, visiting pretty much daily, but my reputation is currently just [4 digits] and I haven't used MathOverflow at all (as the questions there every time I visit, which isn't that often, are beyond me). This seems quite low. Should this worry me?

Answer 1

1. It's an imperfect correlation. The best athletes are not always the best coaches. Sometimes those who struggled to perform can teach better than the star athletes that did it all naturally.

2. The how language affects definitions and triangle square nitpicking scares me. And the "Russell group". And the academic eduction versus practical education slant. I think this is not as useful as being a salty and empathetic (but not soft) teacher. Go coach a sport. Lot of really good things you can learn from that that translate to being a good teacher.

Answer 2

I'm not a tenured faculty member so take this with a grain of salt: No one is going to care, your reputation in the field and job prospects will almost certainly be based on your PhD work. Many people don't use these forums and even if they did academic hiring is based on publication output and the opinion of your recommenders.

I know of one person who bothered to put their stack exchange reputation on their cv and it's because at the time they had something like the third highest reputation. But they put it on as a joke, and the jobs they got were certainly more due to the highly influential papers they published than their reputation on a website.

If you start answering a lot of questions thoughtfully it might be good for your name recognition, but no where near as applicable to success as writing a single well thought out paper. Furthermore, you could potentially do yourself some harm if your postings are shoddy, low quality, or just incorrect. I would say don't worry about trying to inflate your score, use stack exchange as a resource to understand what people in the field think and to practice carefully writing and answering questions. Pay close attention to the feedback people give you and try to improve your writing accordingly.