Learning Curve

There are plenty of teachers at colleges who've never had one single education course. Not one. More than that, have they even wanted to take an education class? I doubt it. Teaching is easy. You just teach. And there must be some evidence of it too. What university has ever required their faculty to learn how to teach? They figure it's the transferrence of knowledge from teacher to student, and most of that, they figure, isn't how that knowledge is transferred, but what the knowledge is.

To be fair, education classes are no more about (in general) teaching and learning theory as computer science courses are about installing software. Sure, some of it is about that, but there's also courses dealing with students that have learning disabilities, or teaching younger kids or adolescents.

For some reason, though, everyone else outside the education department seems pretty content that they don't need to learn much about teaching. All the years I taught, I was never really advised to do anything to improve my teaching. Indeed, if anything, it was mainly about putting out fires. For example, a colleague set a deadline for a particular time, and said the project would get a 0 if it came after a certain time. And it did, and it got a 0. Student wasn't happy about this. He was furious. Why should that be the case?

What's the fair thing to do? I mean, without such rules, students (some) would always turn things in late, and you'd encourage that lateness is fine, and that you should be cut a break, when other students worked hard so they could get it in on time.

And what if a student is sick. Not a day. Not two days. But a week. Two weeks. This is already a significant part of a semester. Do you cut them a break? What kind of break? In general, as a teacher, the more you can keep everyone on the same schedule, the more efficient you can be. If anyone is late, you are dealing with them differently, which means they are causing you much more grief. That one student can take as much time as a dozen other students who do things on time.

There are many issues that sit outside of plain-old teaching. In general, most teachers would rather simply teach. Help students learn. Reality means that a teacher's job is not confined to just this, because the teacher student ratio is high enough that teachers must find ways to be efficient with their time.

I do want to get to the issue of teaching, however.

I like to think of teaching in much the same way people think about transmitting information, say, music through an antennae. There's a transmitter. There's a receiver. Information is sent accurately if the signal received by the receiver matches that sent from the transmitter.

This is quite a bit more complex when it comes to teaching, because what we convey is only approximated by words. Concepts such as, dare I say it, recursion and pointers require time for the listener to digest, reformulate, and eventually comprehend.

The most surprising thing I learned about learning is that, no matter how good you are, if the material is sufficiently technical, then half the people listening will have no clue what you are talking about, or only partly grasp what you're talking about. I remember, sitting at a restaurant, watching a basketball game, hearing someone ask about the posession arrow. A person piped up and said that it alternated between teams.

Technically, that's true. That's what the possession arrow does. But it doesn't explain why the possession arrow exists. So, here's the explanation. In basketball, there are times when two players are contesting the ball. Say, I grab at the ball, and you grab it simultaneously. I'm pulling. You're pulling. There's no clear advantage.

A referee would normally call "jump ball" to settle this dispute, to decide who should have the ball. A referee would stand between the two players, toss the ball higher than either player, and on the way down, each player would try to bat the ball to their team.

However, jump balls favor taller players. In college, there are only a handful of very tall players, and so certain teams would generally always have the advantage when it comes to jump balls. So, college basketball instituted a rule that said that in jump ball situations, the team that has the arrow pointing to it gets the ball.

Say, the arrow points to your team. You get the ball. At that point, the possession arrow switches over to the other team. If there's another similar situation, then the other team gets the ball.

With this explanation, you see the history of how the possession arrow came to be, you get the sense of why it exists. Of course, you might wonder why the NBA still uses jump balls, or what exactly is a jump ball situation. And in the end, you may not care about the answer, since you don't care about basketball.

The answer I give depends much on who's listening. Part of the problem with explaining it to someone who doesn't know much about sports is that they are convinced they don't know much about sports, and so they don't make a particular effort to pay attention.

To give an explanation that may resonate more with people who do follow sports, but don't play, say role-playing games, I could tell you a rule about when you should roll 2 ten-sided dice vs. 3 six-sided dice. But it is an isolated rule in a game filled with rules, and makes very little sense in isolation.

If the game is well-crafted, I might be able to give you a good explanation. Or it could simply be a rule that doesn't make sense, but is simply part of the game.

I've tried to explain to my brother the basics of football as well as programming, but he has a strong aversion to me explaining it to him. For one, he honestly doesn't care. For a second, he just doesn't like me explaining stuff to him. For some reason, it grates at him. Maybe because he's really, really not interested. But even when he is, I think it's painful, because he's so used to not wanting to hear me explain stuff.

What's the point? The point is that teaching something to someone is challenging because it presupposes they want to learn. Go and ask a class if they want to learn, and they'll say they do, but they'll also say they don't want to be bored, that they want to expend less effort to learned. If you're funny, then it's much easier to hold someone's attention.

Part of the challenge of learning is that much of learning is indeed doing. You can hear an explanation of how to make, say, a pie, but if you don't try to make it yourself, you don't make mistakes, you don't realize what's important to know. A teacher can run into this problem too. One reason teachers learn about teaching by doing is that they make some assumptions about what the students are learning and how they are learning. They get exasperated if students aren't learning at the pace they want.

I remember taking a class where the teacher would assign algorithm problems to work on. He rarely gave complete solutions. They were sketches of solutions. That was his problem. He thought that you simply had to give a solution. It never occurred for him to think about how one would come up with that solution. It's getting the right kind of thinking that helps you head to the solution, but so many people are unaware of how they come to solutions. They think hard, and get to it. But have the m explain how they do it, and they aren't really sure. Then, have them explain how anyone else is supposed to get it, and they'll say "Well, I figured it out. And a few others figured it out too!". And eventually they decide it's something you're born with, which makes you wonder why they bother teaching, except that, with some odds, the people who are born to understand it just need to be directed to the right problems to think about, and all is well.

Oh, I forgot to say that there were solutions for only those problems he cared to give solutions to. The rest, he'd point to some paper or another. At the time, I thought this was the height of laziness. I believe I was right. He honestly didn't want to spend more than ten minutes writing solutions, even if he'd have to spend hours and hours writing up a paper to submit to a journal, he couldn't devote even a fraction of that time to writing good solutions, which, by the way, he could even reuse if he had done it right the first time.

But, it's not like he was wrong either. If I really wanted to be successful in this area, I needed to read papers. But I had never done this as an undergrad. No one had bothered to explain it to me, and I was supposed to magically infer that reading papers, even papers that were probably written in a rush to other people who are well-versed in algorithms.

If you want to explain things to people, you need to know where they're coming from, and the truth is, the audience is far from homogenous. Give me one person, and I can sketch out an explanation for them and they'll go "yeah, yeah, I get it". Same explanation, different person, and I'd have to explain it ten different ways, make them review stuff they should already know, and even when it kinda got through, it would not make as much sense to this person as it did to the first person, who had the right mental tools to take that answer, and make sense of it, and more importantly, take it to the next step.

And really, many people find it incredibly challenging to listen to an explanation. You might think, well, I'll simply ask them "Do you have any questions?". But it's the one thing that you can ask that simply doesn't work. Many people are so lost that they couldn't ask a well-formed question if they wanted to. Some get it, and don't need to ask questions. Some are indeed too shy to ask.

You would think, for such bright people, teachers would realize how rarely this works. My solution is simpler. Ask the students an easy question based on what you've been teaching. If they can't answer it, then you need to work on your explanations.

For technical things, I'd suggest the following strategy. First, show them how to solve a problem. Then, ask them to solve a similar problem. See how well they do. Then, add a twist to the problem, and see how well they do. You'd be surprised that there are people, when shown a solution, then asked to reproduce it, aren't able to do it. That goes to show you how much you showing, and them not doing makes a difference.

There's a problem with this idea. It can slow you down. Also, there's no guarantee people will want to do it. Learning is a painful process for some. They feel like they're being forced to do something, and some mentally rebel against it, even as they ought to know it's in their best interest to pay attention.

But, when it works, it should work far better than the way you've been teaching now, because fundamentally, it gets students to do things now. And doing is almost always a better way to teach then having them watch you.

How obvious do you think this idea is? It doesn't seem revolutionary. Maybe it isn't. But see how often it is used, and then ask yourself why teaching is often this passive one-way experience.

And then you'll have the answer why students don't learn as much as they can.