Spinning Yarns

Many years ago, in the rolling green hills of Lin Glóssa, the great Wizard Alfondo built an amusement park for the entertainment and edification of the people of that beautiful country. It sprawled across the wide and sun-dappled fields by the banks of the river, and was packed from end to end with all manner of diversions, from carnival acts and thrilling rides, to competitions, games, and diverse concessions of every variety and flavour. Any wholesome thing you could dream of to do, they say, could be found in Alfondo’s Park.

As Alfondo’s Park grew both in size and in popularity, however, he began to suffer some logistical difficulties. You see, the Park was so constructed that there was no fence or gate to separate it from the surrounding areas, and anyone could come and go as she pleased. The attractions cost money, of course, but each act or ride or show or concession had its own agent whose job it was to collect money from the patrons, and to insure that they were served in a fair and timely fashion. But because of the open layout of the Park, it grew difficult, especially at the more popular sites, to keep track of who had paid and who had been served. The agents were overwhelmed. On many a bright summer’s day, for instance, you could hear the grumbling of the people who had bought their tickets many hours before, and still not received their turn through the Cool Rapids Water Ride. The lines grew longer, the service grew slower, and the tempers of the patrons grew shorter.

The problems only got worse as the Park’s fame grew. Soon, the locals were so frustrated by the inefficiencies at Alfondo’s Park that they stopped coming entirely, and found their own entertainment at home. The Park and its surrounding area were overrun by surly and ill-mannered tourists from nearby countries, who littered copiously and drove up the crime rates in the nearby streets of Parda Lin Glós. Finally, after an enormous and protracted fist-fight that broke out in front of the Children’s Theater on Midsummer’s Day (something to do with a mishandled tray of hot Parmec sausages—imprecations were exchanged, though the details are lost), Alfondo threw up his hands in disgust, turned over management of the park to his friend Dr. Bethall, and went for a long vacation in the mountains, where he liked to practise a peculiar art form involved with strapping long smooth laths of hickory rubbed down with wax to one’s boots, and sliding down the tops of glaciers at high velocity.

Dr. Bethall was a scholar from the Department of Patterns at the University of Kaia Lin Glós, the capital city of that region. Unaccustomed as she was to the problems of administration, she had her hands full with all the problems that had developed, but she quickly came up with a plan to put things back on track. After the park closed for the rainy season near the end of the month of Longshadow, she hired an enormous crew of contractors to implement her new plan, and by the time the gates opened to the new Alfondo-Bethall Park, with great fanfare on the first clear day of Newleaf, she was confident that all the troubles that had plagued Alfondo’s original design would be resolved.

“Gates?” I hear you ask. “I thought there were no gates on Alfondo Park.” And indeed, that was the very first thing that Dr. Bethall changed about the old Park: Where the old park had petered out into the fields in a rambling and desultory way, the new Park was surrounded by a tall, brightly-painted and beautifully-wrought fence, in which access was only possible via one of four enticingly-decorated gates. And the differences did not end there! Inside, Dr. Bethall had rearranged all of the rides and games and concessions to make the popular sites more accessible, and had put down a series of attractively-paved paths to lead patrons smoothly and quickly to their favourite destinations. But the biggest difference by far was in how patrons would pay: Instead of having an agent stationed at each site, patrons would pay for everything up front, at the gate. When you arrived, a friendly agent showed you pictures of all the attractions, and you could choose which ones you would like to visit, how often you’d like to visit them, and the kinds of food you would like to eat. Once you’d chosen, you would pay for everything up front, and they gave you a special ticket that gave you admission to all the things you requested. If you changed your mind and didn’t visit all the attractions you’d paid for, they would refund the unused part of your ticket when you left the park.

Knowing how many people were interested in each of the various attractions, the staff of the new park was easily able to keep the lines from getting too long or too disorganized, none of the concessions ran out of food, and the carefully-organized paths made it impossible for a large-scale food fight to break out in front of the Children’s Theater. In many ways, the new park was an even bigger success than the old one—the crime problem went away, the patrons were happier, and the whole enterprise made an enormous profit. Dr. Bethall wrote and published a number of important papers based on her experiences in rebuilding Alfondo Park, was granted tenure with distinction at Kaia Lin Glós, and later was chosen as the Chief Organizer of the Pattern Society for her important contributions to the field. In almost every way, Alfondo-Bethall Park was seen as an improvement over its predecessor.

For many patrons, however, the fences and gates and the strict regimentation of the Park had destroyed the sense of openness and fun it had once held. Duan Igaul, a long-time resident of Parda Lin Glós, echoed the popular sentiment: “Time was,” he said, “when a bit of summer fun was as easy and natural as breathing. These days, it’s a hard afternoon’s work.” And it wasn’t just the people who said this—merchants and businessmen who used to set up shop within the grounds of Alfondo Park also found that the new Park had much stricter rules and requirements, and took a much bigger percentage of their daily profit in the way of fees. Over time, the park stagnated, as it was too much trouble for new acts and concessions to come in, and patrons grew more and more bored with the same old things over and over again. Profits began to fall, and some of the less popular attractions had to be closed in order for the park to stay in business. As wages fell, so did the smiles on the faces of the gate agents, and soon the whole place had begun to feel like a shadow of its former glory. Dr. Bethall was too busy with her own rising academic star to worry about these problems, however; so when she was approached by a quiet and unassuming Telonese gentleman named Mr. Kijama who offered some clever suggestions for improvement, she turned the whole operation over to his custody without a moment’s hesitation.

Mr. Kijama saw that both of his predecessors had some very good ideas, despite their difficulties. The freedom and openness of the old Alfondo Park, in which everybody could do whatever they wanted all the time, gave the park a dynamic liveliness and eccentricity that kept people coming back again and again—but it led to a lot of logistical nightmares. Dr. Bethall’s renovations had driven away most of the logistical problems, making the park efficient and profitable again, but in doing so, her renovations stifled the atmosphere of the place and left it feeling static and restrictive. But Kijama had spent several years previously working for the Telonai Consulate in Lin Glóssa, so he knew from painful experience that a straightforward compromise position was likely to have all the problems of both ideas, and few if any of their advantages.

So, when Mr. Kijama took over, he did not tear down the fences or the gates, nor did he pull up the paving stones nor turn out the gate agents. Instead, he made some subtle yet important changes to the way patrons were admitted to the park. Under the administration of Dr. Bethall, patrons had to stipulate in advance just exactly what attractions and concessions they wanted to visit—but in Mr. Kijama’s park, patrons could enter at will. They still had to pay at the gate, but their ticket granted them full admission to everything the park had to offer for the entire day. Such tickets were more expensive, of course, but they permitted people the kind of spontaneous and unrestricted fun they had always enjoyed at the old Alfondo Park. In order to keep lines orderly, the park staff was trained to keep very careful note of how these patrons moved throughout the park, so that the park could adapt to their behaviour throughout the day. But Mr. Kijama also created a system of subscriptions to the park. A patron who was willing to tell the park agents which attractions he wanted to visit in advance would be given a ticket with a lower price, and a higher priority for waiting in queues. Nobody was required to subscribe, but anybody who wanted to could do so, and it took so little effort that many patrons did.

In fact, Mr. Kijama’s staff were so good at their jobs that, even for patrons who offered to buy the full-priced general admission tickets, they could often predict in advance which attractions the patron would be interested in based upon careful observations of his behaviour. What’s more, it was Kijama’s strict policy that those patrons who behaved as predicted would receive the same reduced price and increased priority as those patrons who had come in via subscription. Only those patrons who behaved in a truly unexpected fashion ever wound up paying the full price of general admission—and as it turned out, such patrons were both few in number, and extraordinarily eccentric.

This idea was so simple and so elegant that its impact was not fully understood for a long time. Many years after Mr. Kijama retired, he wrote in his memoirs about the long-term impact of the changes he and his wife had introduced at Alfondo-Bethall Park:

“Many people were angry about the need to state your intentions before entering the park as [Dr. Bethall] had constructed it. The traditional view at the time held, however, that if you could not completely predict the behaviour of a patron, your only option was to check his behaviour individually at every attraction. What we discovered then, and which has since been put to productive use in many other areas, was that you could predict his behaviour, at least for many patrons; and Marija pointed out that we need therefore only check the behaviour of some patrons—those who deviated from the model. [Her observation], that we put to such fortunate use at Alfondo-Bethall in Newleaf of y.617, has since, to our enduring surprise, become the standard for all such parks throughout the North.”

To you, of course, all of this is very old news—but you must remember that at the time, Higiro and Marija Kijama’s ideas were viewed with a great deal of suspicion, both by businessmen and the people at large. Though their maintenance costs were greatly reduced by the Kijama plan, many of the concessionaires still felt burnt by their experiences under Dr. Bethall, and were reluctant at first to come back to the park. Patrons, likewise, still saw the fences and gates and paths, and assumed things were just as stiff and dull as before—even though, in many ways, the park under Kijama’s administration was less expensive and more fun than it had been when Alfondo had first started it in his brother-in-law’s disused bovash pasture. It took a number of years before the park flourished again, but Higiro and Marija were both patient and dogged in their efforts, and eventually—as you know—it grew to become one of the most prized destinations in all the Five Nations. It is difficult to remember, now that Parda Lin Glós has grown into such a lively metropolis, that it was a small and fairly isolated community back in Alfondo’s day, but it is always heartening to recall that the seeds planted in that fertile soil eventually grew into such a bright flower of our modern world.

The great Wizard Alfondo, it is said, lived out the remainder of his days in great contentment in his palatial home atop craggy Ar Liom, surrounded by attractive and adoring young women and perfecting the art of snowgliding. As far as anyone knows, he has never returned to Alfondo Park, and indeed no one has seen him at all in Lin Glóssa, except his niece Simaya, to whom he occasionally shows up with a tray of hot Parmec sausages for Sunday brunch.

Filed by Michael at 15:20 under Diatribe, Story, Technology
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Filed by Michael at 16:03 under Research
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My passion for teaching has its roots in the following simple idea: Beneath even the most common and prosaic situations we encounter from day to day, there lurk fascinating and challenging puzzles full of surprising revelations, profoundly stirring moments of truth, and a quiet, elegant beauty. It is from recognition of this fact, combined with a desire to share these experiences with other curious souls, that I derive the love and energy that I have for teaching.†

As a teacher, I strive to share with my students the interesting and exciting truths that hide within every topic—even those that might, on the surface, appear trivial or boring. In doing so, I hope that my students will come away from the experience better prepared to engage with complex ideas on their own, long after we have parted company. I hope for them to leave my class more powerful and more skillful than they were when they arrived. I see myself not as a different sort of person from my students, but instead as a more senior student who acts as an assistant and a guide, and I believe that an effective teacher must always return to what Zen practitioners call sho-shin, the “beginner’s mind,” the art of seeing everything as if for the first time, without preconception: When doing something again, approach it as entirely new, which it is.

I have been extremely fortunate to have a number of excellent teachers, both as instructors and as mentors. From their example, I have learned that good teaching is not a static skill that can be learned once and reproduced without change: The best teachers I have known are those who are always willing to adapt and grow and change with their art, to try new ideas and refine the old ones. Like any good scientist, an effective teacher must be open-minded yet skeptical, willing to look in a new direction, but also constantly probing and testing, keeping and improving the ideas that work, discarding what fails. At the same time, a good teacher should not lose sight of the fun and excitement intrinsic in the learning process—love of teaching and love of learning are but two sides of the same coin, and without the one, the other loses all dimension and becomes merely an abstraction.

The process of learning to teach others has taught me many things in return. We have, I think, a mental model in which a teacher is primarily a giver of information, while the student is primarily a receiver, like the relationship between a faucet and a jug. But in fact the relationship is not nearly so asymmetrical as this analogy would suggest—teachers “teach” less, and students “learn” less. A better analogy is of a thirsty traveller standing in a rainstorm with a cup: Like a rain-cloud, the teacher does not fill the student’s cup, but merely provides the raw materials. A student who is attentive and persistent can easily slake his thirst, whereas one who is apathetic and disengaged will go home thirsty and miserable. A good teacher tries to insure that it rains for a long time over a wide area, so that everybody has a chance to fill his cup; whereas a poor one might spend all her energy in showy displays of thunder and lightning, leaving all the students just as parched as before. But no one can teach well for long without the evaporate of knowledge and ideas; just as a storm needs water, a good teacher requires contact and interaction with his students.

As my silly rain-cloud analogy suggests, I believe that education is most effective when students participate actively and cooperatively in the learning process. When we study a complex problem, we attempt to build an analogy—a mental model that pulls out some kernel of truth, a useful generalization, from the problem. We may convince ourselves that our mental models are correct using a formal mechanism, such as a proof for a theorem; but it is also important to connect our abstract models back to our intuitive understanding of the world, and to learn how to communicate our understanding to others.

Here are a few of the things that I have learned while being a teacher.

• Don’t be afraid to make mistakes in front of your students. While you probably shouldn’t plan to screw up, embrace it when it happens. Students will often learn more from seeing the correction of a botched example than they would from a carefully-polished presentation. Finding mistakes is exciting and rewarding—it reinforces their understanding of the problem, and helps to engage their minds in active participation with the lesson.

  Story: Some years ago, I was taking a seminar in which the teacher had to present a tricky program derivation. He had obviously thought through his example carefully, but he’d not worked out the details in advance; and as any teacher can tell you, the devil is always in the details. On his first pass through the example, he got completely tangled up in the notation, and lost several important steps of the derivation. All of us became hopelessly lost and confused. But instead of just waving his hands and leaving it as an exercise for us students, he came back after the break and we went through the same example again. This time, having seen it before, we all pitched in and helped with the tricky spots, and eventually we did get the correct derivation. Having been in his position, I know how painful it must have been for him, but that example turned out to be pivotal in my own understanding of how those derivations work, and I think I got more from that one “failed example” than I did from many a carefully-worked textbook problem. I greatly admire my professor for having the courage to keep going in the face of an embarrassing mistake, and turn it into a valuable lesson.

• Tear down the walls. To be an effective teacher, you have to break down the walls we build between “teacher” and “student”. As students, we often think of teachers in a kind of us and them relationship. This is completely counterproductive. As a teacher, you need to find ways to knock down those walls, or at the very least to cross over it and stand on the students’ side. As I see it, the correct mental picture is of the teacher and the students standing all together, facing in the same direction, working together to figure out the answers.

  To do this effectively, you have to be willing to open yourself up to the rules of your students’ social sphere. You have to give up the protective aura of the “authority figure” and in some sense make yourself vulnerable to them, in order to earn their trust and true respect. A good indication that you are on the right track is if your students are willing to call you by your first name without a title, to mock you gently, and to joke with you about life outside the classroom. Not only will their minds be more open, but they will speak more freely and openly, will be less worried about looking foolish by participating in class, and will be more likely to actively engage in the learning process than students who think of you as being the stodgy representative of a faceless academic bureaucracy. In addition, this will help you become a better teacher, because it will be easier for you to communicate with your students when you see them as your friends and let their inquisitive enthusiasm infect you, giving new life to old ideas.

• No matter how enthusiastic and passionate you are, some of your students just won’t care. No matter how you rant and rave, sing and dance, cajole and plead, or carefully scheme to share your love and enthusiasm with your students, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, “You cannot fool all the people all the time.” You cannot take this too personally, or you will burn yourself out. On the other hand, you can’t completely ignore it, either, because as a teacher, you can have a big effect on how much your students care about what they’re learning.

  My mental model for a classroom assumes that each student can be in one of three general states or moods, as illustrated in this figure:

  

  Ideally, right, a teacher should try to keep students in the HAPPY state, sitting upright, paying attention, actively participating in the class, asking questions. However, there will always be at least a few students who are BORED (sitting back or slouching, gazing out the window, sleeping, playing on the computer) or CONFUSED (brow furrowed, shifting uncomfortably in the chair, frowning, no questions). By varying the speed at which you present material or ask questions, the teacher can move students back and forth between BORED and CONFUSED, but converting a student from BORED or CONFUSED to the HAPPY state requires a subtle alchemy that defies easy explanation.

  You can’t take it too personally if there are a few BORED or CONFUSED students in the room, but you should never ignore them completely. Are they the same students every time, or does it move around the room? The latter might be natural variability in mood and interest, but the former might well mean you’re not reaching some of your students. It pays to work on the BORED and CONFUSED students, because those moods can be contagious, and may infect your HAPPY students via social proof. On the other hand, you can’t afford to let your HAPPY students get BORED, or the whole mood of the classroom may be spoiled. Sometimes, I find it can help to get one of the HAPPY students to work with one of the CONFUSED students in the laboratory. Whatever it takes, you have to keep your eyes and ears open, and always be a moving target. Adaptability is probably one of the most important skills a teacher needs.

• No matter how run-down and burnt-out you are feeling, some of your students will care. No matter how good a teacher you are, and no matter how excellent your students are, you’re going to have bad days. You’re going to feel as if nothing works, all your students hate you, and who the hell am I to think I can be any kind of a teacher anyway? Sometimes those days can last up to a week. But no matter how bleak it seems, your students will never fail to surprise you. They’ll show up to your office with wide-eyed project ideas, and keep you talking for hours. They’ll ask you hard questions that give you deep new insights into ideas you thought you knew cold. They’ll teach you about what matters to them. They’ll tell you stories about how the things they learned in your class three years ago inspired them to do things that you now find amazing, and a thousand other inspirational things. In short, the bad times will never entirely eat the good ones.

  So, even when you feel as if it’s all coming unravelled, try to keep your chin up and your heart hopeful, because there’s somebody out there who needs you—or at least, who cares.

• A good way of teaching something is in itself a technology. A good way of explaining a complex idea, and breaking it down so that it can be understood, reassembled, and applied by someone new, is a non-trivial accomplishment. This is often overlooked, because done correctly, it makes the difficult seem easy and the complex seem simple. But such a feat is not easy to achieve, and good ways of teaching do not necessarily follow from one’s own understanding of an idea, however strong it may be. A good teacher must not only apprehend what she is teaching, but must also have a good way of making it accessible to others. Sometimes, this metaknowledge can itself be taught, as illustrated by George Pólya’s classic book How to Solve It, but ordinarily this is a kind of knowledge that can only be acquired by actually teaching difficult ideas to other people who do not already understand them.

  A corollary of teaching as technology is that it never suffices for a teacher to have just one good way of explaining something—a good teacher must have at least two, and preferably many good ways of explaining the same idea from different perspectives. When we first come to really understand a difficult idea, we can be overwhelmed with the beautiful cleverness of our own insight. Like many teachers, I made the early mistake of assuming that my clever insight would work for everybody. Well, it’s true, my way does work for some students—but no matter how clever your particular insight may be, there is somebody out there for whom that just won’t do the trick, and you’ll need to take another tack. In fact, I would go so far as to generalize this into a Law of Teaching, to wit: You will always need at least one more good way of explaining something.

• Grades are the enemy of learning. One of the most unpleasant aspects of being a teacher is the need to assign grades. I have ranted on this subject before, on more than one occasion, but it remains a difficult problem for everybody involved, both students and teachers alike.

  There are several problems with grading. For example, all grading is subjective: No matter how much we try to avoid it, all grading involves making personal value judgements about a student’s work. By assigning numbers to these judgements and performing statistical manipulations of them, we merely cloak the subjectivity in the guise of precision. Furthermore, by reducing a student’s learning experience to a single value, say a letter grade or a GPA, we replace a student’s intrinsic motivation to study a subject with an extrinsic motivation, the desire to maximize the grade values. Over time, this makes both students and teachers perceive grading as more of a milestone than as a diagnostic tool; in many cases, students see any grade lower than an A as a kind of “punishment” for some unknowable infraction, rather than a measure of their own understanding.

  Actually, though, grading is only the visible tip of a much larger academic iceberg. The real enemy of learning isn’t just grading, but the underlying goal of grading, which is the assignment of a degree. Degrees are, by their very nature, goalposts that convert the experience of learning from an adventurous exploration into an evaluative, ends-driven task. Grades exist to discern those who “pass” from those who “fail,” which is to say, those who have achieved the next milestone from those who have fallen short of it. Economic reality is such that we could not cure this problem simply by getting rid of degrees—teachers could not teach without students, and only the most practical subjects would attract any students if there weren’t a more abstract goal. But the fact remains that degrees, and the consequent need for grading, are one of the most miserable factors in any teacher’s life. I have several ideas as to how to make grading less painful and more useful, but that’s just an exercise in rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. The underlying problem is bigger than I (or you, or any of us) can easily solve alone.

  There are, however, ways we can improve upon the situation. For example, never assign point values unless you must. Instead, try to grade on a scale that has at most three or four distinctions, such as “Excellent”, “Good”, “Acceptable”, and “Poor”. The basic semantics are pass/fail, in that “poor” is “unacceptable” and everything else is “acceptable” to some degree. Among “acceptable” grades, there are a few coarse gradations to give some feedback about the quality of the student’s work, but no numbers. Instead of focusing on point-counting, this grading scale requires the teacher to provide liberal feedback in other forms such as comments, in-person reviews, etc. This means that both the teacher and the students will have to focus on what is actually going on with the learning process, rather than just adding and subtracting points.

  After twelve years of public school, most university students have learned to equate school with work, and therefore points with wages. You go class (work) and your teacher (your boss) assigns you some homework (a project). When you turn it in (finish the project), she hands you back a grade (a paycheck) and possibly some extra credit (a bonus). But if she doesn’t think you did a good job, she will deduct points (dollars) from your grade (paycheck). In this view, “losing points” is like being punished for doing a bad job, rather than a measurement you can use to improve your understanding. Far better to keep the points out of it entirely, if at all possible, and find another way to conduct assessment.

  Related to this: When you do have to assign grades, resist the temptation to grade in an ad hoc fashion. Write a grading rubric, and use it. You should do this even if you do not have other people to help with the grading, such as graduate teaching assistants or undergraduate graders. The reason writing a rubric is a good discipline is that it forces you to at least skim over all the assignments before you begin grading, so that you can identify the common themes of right and wrong answers that occur. Without a rubric, your grading will tend to be inconsistent across the class, even if you take honest pains to avoid such inconsistencies. Also, although I’m getting ahead of myself here, a written rubric helps you defend against grade-grubbing.

• State your policies clearly, and stick to your guns. When it comes to following rules, students can often be worse than personal injury lawyers. There is no end of the kind of sophistry I have heard from students attempting to interpret course policies to their own advantage. Whether it is a debate about when a homework assignment should be due, or a plea for an extension on a project, a tortuous argument about how many points a shotgun-answer to a test question is worth,* or complaints about why I didn’t get an A in the course despite not having turned in half the required assignments, I’ve heard an incredible array of nit-picking on almost every topic related to course policies and procedures.

  * See, there’s that business about points again. They’re just plain bad news, my friend—bad, bad news.

  The only way you can keep this kind of thing from getting completely out of hand is to make firm, clear policies, write them down in clear, unambiguous language, and stand by them as strongly as possible. So: If deadlines are strict, be prepared to enforce them. If certain kinds of collaboration are forbidden, don’t make exceptions. If a project requires teamwork, don’t let that one hotshot student work alone. But as a corollary to this, you should always write your policies to permit reasonable exceptions. For example, don’t force yourself to give a zero by policy to the hard-working athlete who broke her ankle on the morning before the exam; likewise, don’t intimidate somebody with mild dyslexia into hiding their disability rather than asking for extra time on exams simply because your policy says “no exceptions, period.” We should be fair and consistent, but also reasonable.

  On the other hand, don’t let a disingenuous misinterpretation of your policy force you into doing something counterproductive. You wrote the instructions at the top of the assignment, you wrote the instructions in the syllabus, and you told the students the instructions in class, but you didn’t write them out for each individual problem in the homework, so now you’ve got a student who claims he shouldn’t be penalized for turning in programs without test cases because the problem didn’t say to. Oh, yes, that’s a real example, and believe me, it’s not the worst I’ve seen. This is the kind of person who will try to sue Nikon after a celebrity beats them up for taking his picture, on the grounds that Nikon didn’t put a warning label on the camera about taking pictures of cranky drunken movie stars. Don’t fall for it; such behaviour should never be rewarded.

  You’ll probably hear a lot of flowery language about “fairness,” but to keep a level head, remember this: Nobody complains about fairness unless they stand to gain by it. I’ve never once had someone show up to office hours and say, “Gosh, Michael, you gave me full credit on this problem, and I know my answer was completely wrong.” Is it unfair that you gave them full credit for a wrong answer? If you grade “on the curve” it certainly is! It’s equally unfair to give someone no credit on a problem for which their answer was correct, for the same reason. But you’re only going to hear about one of these two situations, so you need to be prepared to evaluate such complaints with that bit of perspective in mind. You don’t need to be cynical about it, but don’t be naïve, either.

• What works for one teacher may not work for another. I learned this point particularly well the first time I taught a course I hadn’t developed myself, and which I hadn’t seen someone else teaching. Even if somebody gives you all their lecture notes, assignments, and exams from a previous offering of the course, you can’t just dive in and expect to do a good job teaching the same course. Probably you could do it with a good set of lesson plans, but hardly any college professors write such things down, so you are not likely to receive any, even for a well-established course.

  Instead, you need to dive in with both hands and a sharp, critical mind, and give each lesson, each assignment, each quiz, laboratory exercise, recitation section, puzzle problem, and exam question, something of your own. Good exercises are hard to come by, so you can’t afford to simply discard your predecessor’s work out-of-hand; but unless you really believe in it, you will not do a good job teaching it. The only way I have ever found to make this work is to incorporate something of myself into each piece. It takes an enormous investment of time and effort, but it’s definitely worthwhile.

There is no way I could possibly hope to describe everything I’ve learned in the years that I have been teaching; but now that my last teaching contract has run out, and I’m not going to be teaching again for the forseeable future, I wanted to put a few of the more important ones down in black-and-white, as a kind of reflection for the future. I can’t help but hope that at some point, I will be able to look back and expand upon these ideas, and possibly put them into some more permanent form, for the benefit of other teachers who will face the same challenges I have done. Elementary and secondary school teachers usually receive quite a bit of education in the problem of how to teach effectively, but most university instructors get little or none of this. Given that this is so, and because the challenges of university teaching are not the same as the challenges of elementary and secondary education I believe we must do what we can to help each other along as best we can.

† Some of this material is adapted from the Philosophy of Teaching document I wrote as one of the requirements of my appointment as a Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at Dartmouth College from 2002–2007.

Filed by Michael at 14:45 under Academic, Philosophical
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