"What we don't understand, we explain to each other" was Robert Oppenheimer's 1948 description of theoretical physics as a profession. Because the phrase connects research, teaching, and learning, it seemed the right approach for the talk I gave to the AAPT [American Association of Physics Teachers] on receiving the 2013 J.D. Jackson Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching, on which the present article is based. In what follows I describe how my experiences as a student, researcher, and teacher combined to shape the way I learn and teach physics, from my own courses to inventing and editing "Frontiers in Physics," reshaping "Reviews of Modern Physics," and experimenting with different approaches to communicating key concepts in physics.