Spinning Yarns

The human ego can be a fragile thing, a fact I am sometimes prone to forget. Don’t get me wrong, there was a time not long ago when I knew it very well, and when my life was ruled by my insecurities. Over the past several years, however, I have grown very comfortable with the person that I am, to the point where it takes quite a significant event to shake my general faith in myself. That probably sounds arrogant — and I suppose it could be construed as such — but since it is accurate, I must let it stand as written.

One of the great joys of my life, as you are probably aware, is teaching. There are few things in the world that I find quite so challenging, so invigourating, and so fascinating as helping others come to understand new things. When you’re learning something, your mind is stretching, striving toward a goal that is currently beyond reach — but which you know is attainable. The fact, that the teacher may already have climbed this particular slope, should not in any way trivialize the accomplishment that the student is making. And, indeed, by helping others climb it, the teacher learns as much as the student — if not more. So, it should also be noted that my love of teaching is not purely based on altruism; I get at least as much out of the experience as the students do. What’s not to love about a job like that?

This past summer has afforded me a wonderful opportunity with regard to teaching. In particular, I was permitted to be a co-instructor for a course in my department entitled “Concepts in Computing”. This course is a kind of survey of fundamental topics in computer science, geared toward students who do not have any formal background in the subject. The introductory and basic nature of the material in a course like this might seem, at first glance, to be boring for the instructor; however, teaching these new concepts to students who have never seen them before is actually remarkably difficult. Indeed, I would go so far as to assert that it would have been easier to teach the upper-level undergraduate courses, where a certain amount of prerequisite background can be assumed.

In a time-honoured academic tradition, “Concepts in Computing” is structured using the familiar “carrot and stick” paradigm. That is to say, material we know the students want to learn is used as bait to get the students to sit still for the material they probably would rather not (but which we think is important if they’re to receive credit). In this particular course, the bait consists of teaching the students how to write interactive web pages using HTML and JavaScript — a topic of particular interest at a network intensive school such as Dartmouth. Around that matrix, we cover the fundamentals of algorithm design and analysis, a bit of binary arithmetic, how logic circuits can be built up into an actual computer, a little theoretical material about uncomputability, and a taste of cryptography for flavour. All in all, it’s a busy term, but it seems to hang together alright as a course.

Naturally, the way I may feel about how the course went need not bear any resemblance to the overall sense among the students in the class. That is perfectly unsurprising, of course. When I was a student, it seemed to me that the professor would just show up to class, give a lecture, and get on with his life. That’s certainly how we attended the lectures, so there was little reason to suspect that it was any different from the other side. In reality, though, a huge amount of preparation and thought need to go into even a single lecture — not only are you concerned with what to say from moment to moment, but also how the words you’re saying right now fit into the Big Picture of the course as a whole. This is complicated further by having more than one instructor, since you basically have to make your best guess about what exactly the other person is aiming for and work around that.

Fortunately, we are not entirely abandoned to surmise upon what the students might be thinking — there is a diagnostic tool called “course evaluation”, whose job it is to measure what the students actually thought about the course, its materials, and its instructors. Now, at Dartmouth, course evaluations are generally a sheet of paper filled out by each student on the last day of class. Most of the questions are of the general sort “on a scale of 1 to 5, how much time did you spend asleep in class?”, where (5) means you slept through the whole thing, and (1) means you didn’t attend at all. Nevertheless, between these and the more open-ended “free response” questions, you get a pretty decent overview of how the class’s heart was beating.

Course evaluations present a kind of “chicken-and-egg” problem. You want the students to fill them out on the last day of class, so that you’ll get most of their responses while they’re fresh in their minds. On the other hand, students don’t really want you to see their comments until after the final grades have been handed in, because sometimes they have something really scathing to say (or sometimes they have something really nice to say, and don’t want to be thought of as brown-nosing). To avoid this problem, evaluations are collected anonymously in an opaque envelope and delivered by a student volunteer to the Department secretary. After the term is over, and the grades have all been computed and handed in to the Registrar, the secretary tabulates all the results, and gives them to the instructors so they can learn from the students’ comments.

Now, I’d like to be really objective about the process of reading my comments, which were handed back to me this afternoon. You know, a priori, that some comments are going to be extreme, both positive and negative. You tell yourself, calmly, that you are going to look through them all and see “on average” what things you need to work on, and what things you’re doing well. Patient. Methodical. Scientific.

Yeah. Right.

No matter how patient, methodical, scientific, and objective you try to be, you really can’t help but feel like you’ve been physically slapped when someone has something really harsh to say about your teaching. It doesn’t matter if it’s only a few people — it doesn’t matter if your “average” is pretty good. Those individual comments really sting. Deep down, I really want to find those students, and apologize to them. I want them to help me figure out how I could have done better. But I can’t. It’s anonymous, and they never would have said these things to my face. All I can do is to focus on the statistics, tweak things a little bit this way or that way, and see what happens next time around.

Some people were really positive, too. I wish I could say that the positives “make up” for the negatives, in some way, but they really don’t. That’s totally unfair to the students who wrote positive comments for me, too, because I have no doubt they believed what they were writing just as much as the students who wrote the negative ones. I guess it’s just something about human nature that what’s wrong is somehow more important to us — emotionally speaking — than what’s right. (Evidence: Do you ever walk up to someone you know and ask “what’s right?” I know one person who might, but most of us don’t)

A master mechanic can tell you a lot about a car just by putting her hand on the engine and feeling how it runs. I’m not a master mechanic, or a master teacher for that matter — but if I had to put my hand on the engine of this class, I’d say their verdict about me could be boiled down to “pretty good, but needs some work.” Part of me says, “Hey! That’s remarkably good for your first experience at teaching!” But I can’t help being disappointed, too. I did the best I knew how.

But, then again, that’s what learning is all about. So I’ll see if I can do better next time. After all, the real teacher isn’t me; I’m just the student here. But … *shh* … don’t tell. It’s my best-kept secret.

Filed by Michael at 16:47 under Personal
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