Things I learned from teaching
claytonwramsey.github.io
Things I learned from teaching
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Re: Things I learned from teaching
#2I went back to uni after a 15 year career writing software.
I attended the all the office hours for all my classes.
Instructors went from shocked to excited, and I learned so much!
Re: Things I learned from teaching
#3I enjoyed this article. A couple of points, if the interactive/handson way is the future, how do we solve the no-TA problem if that's a prerequisite? It's not really feasible to produce them for every class. Will it be chatbots?
Re: Things I learned from teaching
#4I would kill for a class like this at my college! All the seminar classes are very boring (Intro to C++ etc...). I wish they would have super specific and interesting topics like this!
Re: Things I learned from teaching
#5Nice read. What I like about teaching is that your always get a new chance to improve your own teaching: the next period you try better or try a different approach and see what works best. The frustrating part is that students have a veto over what they learn, because "you can lead a horse to the water but if they don't drink, they don't". If they don't show up, you can teach away whatever you want but no one learns anything.
Re: Things I learned from teaching
#6This really resonated with me. I taught computer science to middle/high school aged kids for several years, and had similar dilemmas on how to keep everyone engaged. There would always be a wide range of student aptitude, and it was always a bit discouraging to see how many students aren't ready to learn. But it's pretty awesome nowadays to get messages out of the blue from my former students entering the workforce and thanking me for the course.
I am sure one of your students will build something amazing with Rust some day, because they worked on a practical application and had the resources to "level up" on this very useful skill. Hopefully they send you a message about it :)
Re: Things I learned from teaching
#7I went back to uni after a 15 year career writing software. I attended the all the office hours for all my classes. Instructors went from shocked to excited, and I learned so much!
I think 18-24 is just way too young for most people to study at a university (at least math/physics-based ones). I don't have a better solution, but only about 6-7 years after graduating I realized I would then have enjoyed these classes and learned from them much much more.
Re: Things I learned from teaching
#8I went back to uni after a 15 year career writing software. I attended the all the office hours for all my classes. Instructors went from shocked to excited, and I learned so much!
I think 18-24 is just way too young for most people to study at a university (at least math/physics-based ones). I don't have a better solution, but only about 6-7 years after graduating I realized I would then have enjoyed these classes and learned from them much much more.
A big problem (from my experience) is the cultural shift from high school to university. Our high schools do a terrible job at preparing students for college. Just off the top of my head:
- High school classes are typically too easy
- So kids develop poor study habits which don't serve them well for college material
- And most high school teachers are bad at getting kids excited about the subject because they're exhausted themselves from babysitting and treat the work as a job. College professors can be bad at "teaching" but for different reasons (being researchers first and foremost). This disconnect in the reasons for bad education being different in environments is also not taught well to kids ahead of time (because who in this formula would? Requires good parenting or very self-conscious teachers at all levels).
There are definitely exceptions to this rule, but they are too few to solve the overarching problems.
Re: Things I learned from teaching
#9I went back to uni after a 15 year career writing software. I attended the all the office hours for all my classes. Instructors went from shocked to excited, and I learned so much!
I think 18-24 is just way too young for most people to study at a university (at least math/physics-based ones). I don't have a better solution, but only about 6-7 years after graduating I realized I would then have enjoyed these classes and learned from them much much more.
This is very re-assuring as someone that's been "taking a gap year" for as long as I wa in high-school
Re: Things I learned from teaching
#10I was lecturing software development for information design students.
Only 6 students signed up.
At least it was an optional class, so the students did it on purpose.
Still, it's hard to teach new people from the ground up. Skills, and motivation are just so different.
Some learn fast and some slow and in the end you need to define what constitutes a good grade.
I did online classes. They had to go through free code camp and every month, I would let them create a small project, to see what they learned. Some students built stuff that was way more than what I expected and some couldn't even do a basic form.
In the end, two of them even got a job as frontend devs, so I guess I did an okay job.