Teaching Tennis, Part 2

These days, you probably don't find too many people that haven't dabbled with some sports here or there. Given that people generally fall back on what they know, it's not surprise that when learning to play a new sport, you're likely to use other sports as a frame of reference.

Yesterday, I was teaching Raj to play tennis. His main background in sports is badminton. He's used to hitting a ball that's over his shoulder, and using the forearm, bending at the elbow. For the most part, tennis requires a moderately straight arm, and a bent wrist (at least, these days). Although it's wristy (these days), it's a confined sort of wristiness (not like the slap shot of racquetball). Once you hit the ball, you follow through to keep the momentum going.

Raj stops swinging the racquet just as he makes contact. Despite telling him to follow through, he seemed mostly unwilling to do so, figuring on his first few tries that the ball wasn't going where he wanted.

While he had some idea how to hit a forehand, he had no idea how to hit the backhand. So he simply ran around the backhand the whole time.

Were I to teach him more seriously (unlikely), I'd have to work to straighten his arm, and get him more aware which way the racquet face is pointing, and more importantly, he'd have to listen.

Again, surprisingly, when he hits the top of the racquet, it seems to go in. The miracle of modern racquets, I suppose.

Ravi's wife seems to take direction far better, and adjust her strokes accordingly, while Raj seems more adamant about hitting the ball the way he wants to.

I've noticed that Stan seems to be plateauing some. He made a lot of progress, but now, he's mostly at the same level. That, I suppose, is not so unusual. Many people play weekend doubles, and never get much better, year to year, mostly, I assume, because they don't set any goals, and partly because they don't know how to achieve the goals, even if they set them. They're just out to have fun, and getting better doesn't seem to be part of that fun.

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.

In a Pickel

Ah, how could I not use a pun like this?

I was returning back to Maryland from Tennessee to Reagan National (I liked it better when it was just National) returning after a modestly brief holiday.

I had woken up just before 6 AM, something I'm not used to, to get on a flight at 7:50.

As I was seated in the modestly sized plane, I saw, in a distance (I was in the back) someone that looked vaguely familiar. Mr. Pickel!

Ah, those high school days where all teachers went by their honorific, as if they lacked a first name.

I took Mr. Pickel's class twice. Which is not to say I repeated his class, but that he taught two different classes. Once was in 10th grade when I took "Combined Studies". A rather clever idea whose cleverness only became apparent years after I completed it, the course was two courses: an English class and a world history class. The idea was to synch up the course so that if we read something in world history, we'd also read some literature related to that time period.

There was a team of maybe five who taught the course. Mr. Shedd, Ms. Wankerl, Ms. Kinnamon, and possibly one other. Can't recall. They'd give lectures in either the literature or history in back-to-back courses.

All the smart kids took this course.

In 11th grade, I took AP American History, and he taught that course too.

One thing I remember about Mr. Pickel was his enthusiasm. He always seemed like he was having a good time, and was always positive. He was friendly and everyone liked him.

When I saw him boarding, I realized it had been over 20 years since I had taken the course. That's quite a while. He'd gotten a little grayer, but otherwise looked like he did 20 years ago.

He was still just as cheery, happy to talk. I suppose I noticed just how extroverted he was. He sat behind me, so I had to contort and crane my neck in some DNA helical move that left me aching, but better me doing that than him. When I wasn't talking to him, he talked to the person seated beside him.

I suspected he'd talked to hundreds of anonymous people in this way. I could imagine him hosting some sort of Charles Kuralt like show as he went from place to place and talked to people along the way.

He had retired from teaching a few years ago, had his share of world travel (interesting how so many teachers spend their years traveling--how do they afford it?). He wanted to limit his travel to the US.

It's hard to say whether Mr. Pickel really remembered me. He sees so many students, that I can hardly he remembers everyone, but I think he has a better memory than most, and we did take the class a year, and he knew everyone in class. When I taught, I would teach to large numbers, and there were plenty of students I never knew that well, if at all.

We talked a little about teaching, a little about the changing technology of the world (he fit more in the old-school view, though he uses email). He said he no longer cared for phones, and preferred email. I'm sure so many people know him that keeping up in any other way is just too much. I told him Donald Knuth had given up on email. He, by contrast, gave up on the phone.

He said he had had a wonderful life so far, enjoyed what he had done, and was still enjoying life, and that given that, he's not sure he was willing to switch with a younger person, if that were at all possible.

And I think that's as positive a thing as one can say about their life.

Lies and Truth

Read this guy's blog entry.

In it, he recounts the story of a professor who said he would deliberately lie once during each of his lectures. He wanted students to discover the lie. Initially, it was blatant, but as time passed, it became harder and harder to detect the lie.

Why did he do it?

Because students are notorious for not listening in class, or being generous, for failing to question what is being said in class.

If the job of the student is to learn, they must question "truth". I put "truth" in quotes, because I don't particular believe in truth. I believe in shades of gray, and that certain statements are truer than others. But too often, we delegate to authority, be it professorial authority, religious authority, presidential authority, or legal authority.

The number one goal for students is to learn and to learn is to question. The professor created a clever idea to promote doubt, to make students think twice about what is said, and he did it in the form of a game.

Not surprisingly, this article zipped to the top of the Reddit ranks, because knowledgeable people understand that an informed public is one that questions. There are leaders who would have us trust what they do, right or wrong, because they react as many react when told what they do is wrong. They deny it.

I once heard a kid who proclaimed innocence at wrongdoing, though it was clear he had done the deed he denied. It was more important for him to avoid punishment than to utter truth. Why do we desire truth so much? That I don't have an answer for. Perhaps, most pragmatically, it's because we try to model our world, and if we have agents that have incentive to lie often, our model of the world can become corrupt, so much so that we may block any reliable information.

Being truthful helps. Of course, our perception of truth can be clouded. We may, like Othello, be shown something, and interpret it incorrectly. But we're willing to allow people to tell truth as they see it, as long as what they say, most of the times, makes sense.

Thus, the professor, in his one well-constructed lie mostly spoke truth, and spoke the lie to elicit truth seekers, to get them to ponder what would normally glaze, and that is what all teachers should strive for, to get students to think.

Innovative Teaching

Just perusing over an article about teaching in the Washington Post.

Most articles about teaching occurs where teaching is most desperately needed, i.e., in schools where students do poorly. It's elitist of me to say this, but people also need to care about teaching where students do well. I'll tell you why.

On the one hand, if we don't teach those who are hard to teach, we're creating a generation of Americans that are more likely to lead lives of crime, whose opinions are likely to be easily swayed, who don't look beyond the immediate gratification of what they can purchase.

To be fair, these attitudes can strike the most well educated and the most affluent. Advertising is insidious, and even as the well-educated can now buy things that show their education, utensils that show their research (Jeff Smith's enduring suggestion of the Susi Garlic Press, or high quality kitchen-aria are the purview of the rich and educated), they still buy. My parents, frugal as they are, find that if the items they own still work, they have no desire to get anything new to replace it. Thus, a redesign of a kitchen, or something to replace the gaudy 70s style wallpaper is seen as frivolous. There is many an item they have that's 20 years old or more.

Even so, education, as slow a process as there is, has value that carries on, and yet, it must be repeated generation after generation, as kids often want some easy way out, that takes less time, that offers quicker rewards.

This style of education, as laudable as it may be, is much like training those worst in basketball to play basketball. True, basketball lacks the kind of social climbing that education does, but humor me a moment, while I explain.

Imagine if we spent all our effort trying to train the worst athletes in basketball. We'd, in effect, have very few elite players. These players may still come around anyway, but I doubt, to the extent they appear today, where we can take one limitation (poverty) and use that as an excuse to teach the disadvantaged how to play basketball.

Even so, people (apparently) want to see great players, and are willing to shell the bucks to watch Senor Iverson or Senor Bryant square off against Messrs. Wade and Nash.

Similarly, when we educate, we also need to educate to the best, to make them better.

Some of this education is not education per se. It's merely giving assignments to the bright, and using a sink-or-swim philosophy to see how well they do. Our brightest minds lack the ability to educate, at least, in any conventional sense of the word. Instead, they rely on their ability to pick interesting problems and hope the best can indeed learn these lessons, however indirectly.

This method's success tends to work only on the best of the best, which is why graduate schools primarily recruit the best of the best. Those that are in the average range, not great, nor hideously awful, might do well to have inspirational teachers, but such teachers are in rare supply, especially at the college level, because teaching requires two parts: teaching and knowledge. And knowledge is a rare commodity.

The solution, which has generally been advocated, but rarely followed up on, is to get these smart folks to think about teaching. Train that keen intellect upon the problem of education. This act has benefits. The organization of knowledge in one's mind enhances that information. Thus, the adage that the one who learns most from teaching is the teacher.

The reason we should care to educate those that are already quite well educated? Because it's those at the top of the education heap that can make the biggest differences in society.

Consider a country like India, with a population soaring above a billion. The literacy rate isn't particularly high, but India is willing to educate its very best to the best of its ability. Were it to focus all its effort on educating the least able, it would be money partly wasted. That money, for a relatively peaceful country such as India, is better spent on the very top, so they can supply the brainpower.

Admittedly, such funding may lead to elitist among the educated, and eventually create a rift among the educated and not so educated, but if a country is to move into the 21st century, with its dependence on success firmly tied to technology, they must have hyper-educated citizenry, and so to educate the few so they may be the intellectual and technological leaders of today and tomorrow, as elitist as this may be, creates a situation where trickle-down may actually work.

So I applaud articles as the above that reward innovation in teaching, but I say that the innovation must come from all over, top to bottom, not just those in the greatest need of teaching, but to improve the average of the well-educated so their standards are pushed higher.

A country can only benefit if this attitude is taken.