On Teaching

I spent a good number of years of my life teaching. I began as a TA back in 1990, and taught for about 13 more years, either as a teaching assistant and as an instructor/lecturer.

I've been out of teaching for several years now. Someone asked me recently if I missed it. Sure, I miss some of it. Some of it I don't miss.

Ideally, you want all your students to be pretty self-motivated, needing just enough guidance so you have some purpose, but not so much that they literally can't do anything unless you are poking and prodding them. Most college-aged kids have reached a phase in their life where they know they don't have to do everything college demands of them. They can say "I'll aim for a 'C', and that's good enough for me".

Some realize that they don't like to study. Some realize they don't think about the subject right. Well, perhaps they don't realize it. They conclude there are too many smart folks, and they like their free time too much, or have far too many personal issues to properly address school. And, of course, not everyone comes into college knowing how to study and how to learn, and therefore, students come in with varying backgrounds and aptitude.

The negative parts are the students who have lots of personal issues, and these issues tend to prevent them from doing well in the course. However, all they care about is whether they pass or not. They know if they don't pass, they'll have to spend more time trying to graduate. And so they figure they can talk you into passing them. This is where it helps to be callous and insensitive. Some people pass, some people don't. We don't want to be that cruel, but there we are.

Ideally, students would come to the same conclusion that you've come to, and accept that they didn't do so well in the course. But that doesn't happen very often. Most people figure there's a way out. The goal is "passing" the course, not learning stuff from the course.

There are two things that interest me in teaching. The first part is rather abstract. I like thinking about teaching like folks who study communications think about communications (as in radio communication, not like people who want to be DJs). Fundamentally, there is a transmitter transmitting a signal-think of that as a function-and a receiver trying to receive that signal, except there's noise that can corrupt the signal, and the receiver needs to compensate for it the best it can.

A teacher is like the transmitter, and the student the receiver. However, even this model has its deficiencies. This assumes one-way communication. The teacher transmits (lectures), the student receives (learns).

A better model is the "missile" model. Ordinarily, it would be very difficult to get a missile to its target. Computing all the right forces is difficult. Instead, missiles use a feedback loop. It determines what its trajectory should be, then finds out what the trajectory is, then compensates for it. If you compensate fast enough, then you get a pretty accurate missile.

If you don't like the military nature of missiles, think about driving. You make tiny adjustments to stay between the lines, adjusting speed, trajectory, etc. to deal with nearby traffic, while, overall, aiming at your final destination.

This is a better model for teacher student interaction. As a teacher, you try to estimate what the student is learning, and then make corrections. This is generally difficult because, first, there are lots of students. You rarely have the time to individually correct each student, and let's face it, how do you correct what the student does?

Old school professors use fear. I knew a professor from Russia, and he'd do the same thing each semester. At the beginning, he'd tell you the good old days when a third of the students would fail. He would be impatient and short-tempered. People would be fearful of him.

But strangely, as the semester moved along, he'd get a little more calm. He'd tell a few jokes. He'd be a little more patient. I know, because he made us TAs sit in his class. It was interesting to observe. He started off as bad cop, and went to, well, not-so-bad cop. Students, probably unaware of this, might even realize he seemed to be getting nicer.

Most students seem to do well in classes they like. That seems reasonable. It's not a perfect thing, to be fair. I recall a professor who told me that the worst TA (by students' opinions) had the best average grade. The other TAs were baffled. How could that be?

They hypothesized that maybe the TA was bad, so the students, who needed to pass, taught themselves, and that was much better. After all, students who teach themselves is what all teachers should strive for. However, the professor also pointed out that even if the students learned more by themselves, their happiness might be lower, and so they might be disappointed with their course overall, leading to higher dropout rates.

I've learned that you can only do so much to help students, that a lot of their success comes from within. However, I'm willing to tell them this, so they understand this.

I find it's worth talking to students about how to learn, and not simply disseminate information. If a few students improve their ability to learn, that is so much better in the long run. As they say, teach a man to fish.

It takes time to understand why students have a tough time learning stuff. As a good teacher, you are part psychologist (or whatever it's called). You try to learn what motivates people, and how they behave. I spent a while trying to understand where people fail to learn, where their confusion lies. That takes a while, because you think it's so easy. You can't understand why the students don't get it.

Most teachers spend very little time discussing teaching with other teachers, which is a real pity. They might learn something from talking to others (although many teachers, paid to be opinionated about their own teaching, are closed to many ideas).

The other part I like about teaching is interacting with students. What do they do outside of class? What do they want to do with their lives? I know. Most people prefer to keep a professional distance, but this means you also don't understand where the students come from when they enter your class. Are students lazy? Sure. But some students are dealing with personal issues. Some are breaking up. Some have family problems. Some have money problems. Some have health issues. You don't get a sense of this if you simply teach and go home.

Now that I've been away from teaching for a while, I get a better sense of what people need in order to be successful in the real world (at least in programming). Part of it is a kind of fearlessness. I like to tell the story of a friend who is doing her graduate studies.

While several other instructors showed how to download and install Eclipse, she said "it wasn't in the weekly plan" so she didn't have to do it. Indeed, the reason she didn't do it was because she's fearful of failure. I understand this too because I'm fearful of failure too. You know how there are older folks that won't touch computers. Why not?

They're afraid to break something. And then, they don't do anything, and so they don't learn anything. And then, they really are helpless.

Fearlessness means giving something a try, and if that doesn't work, spending some time figuring out why. So, this friend didn't want to download Eclipse because it was something she didn't know well, and it would take her time to learn it, and she was afraid she wouldn't learn it properly. Most people are like her. Even in computer science, there are many people like that. They can't do something unless it's been shown to them, or unless they are comfortable with it.

The other part is patience (and a logical mind). If you're fearless, but impatient, then when a download fails to install, you'll quit. It takes too much time. But the best folks keep trying, and often, they get it to work. And the more they continue to do this, the more they learn overall.

I have no idea how I would teach that in a class. Can you teach fearlessness, plus patience, plus a logical mind? Is it surprising that there are a lot of people that are OCD in computer science? It's actually a benefit in the field, if you can control it.

The other thing I'd do differently is I'd have the students do more on their own. I realize that most people learn by doing. They can listen with blank stares, so the more they can do on their own, the better.