The author has the makings of an excellent teacher if they keep at it. I say so more because of the form of this reflection than the content: seeing things from your students point of view really is the core skill that makes everything else possible.
Things I learned from teaching
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Re: Things I learned from teaching
#52Thoughts on teaching students:
1. Nobody wants to admit they don’t know. Not in front of you, certainly not in front of their peers. Related, almost nobody that needs to goes to office hours.
2. Teaching the right way to do something is the minimum. Teaching how to avoid all traps; the appealing and intuitive but incorrect or inefficient ways to do something is better. Students will amaze you with all the ways there are to fail to solve a problem.
3. There may be steps you are not articulating, because you're not aware you're doing them. If one student gets it wrong, it's probably them, if most of them get it wrong, it’s probably you. As a new teacher, you will learn as much from their struggles as they do.
4. Related, there are steps you have mastered, like a tightrope walker, than can not be immediately emulated, despite the apparent simplicity of the instructions.
5. You chose this material, they may not have.
6. Related, you want to share the material and your enthusiasm with them, which is good, but they may only want to get the minimum they need to get by.
7. As a teacher, despite the lack of respect you may feel, they see you as an authority figure. You are the institution. You are not one of them, even if you are. They don't want to see you in the hall or at the grocery store; it does not matter your respective ages.
Re: Things I learned from teaching
#53> In my experience, I learn the most when I struggle; if a student can shortcut through all the hard parts on, for example, and assignment, they're not going to learn very much. On the flip side, when most students struggle, they just give up.
This. 100% this. How do you make someone understand that struggling is good? That - more than anything else - is what I want to be able to teach.
Any tips?
Re: Things I learned from teaching
#54Thoughts on teaching students: 1. Nobody wants to admit they don’t know. Not in front of you, certainly not in front of their peers. Related, almost nobody that needs to goes to office hours. 2. Teaching the right way to do something is the minimum. Teaching how to avoid all traps; the appealing and intuitive but incorrect or inefficient ways to do something is better. Students will amaze you with all the ways there…
Let me respond to a couple of your points, although overall I loved your comment.
1. This is absolutely true. But you can cultivate an environment where students feel safe enough to admit they don’t know. It takes time and effort. It requires you to be honest when you don’t know something. But it can be done. That said, I suspect that is going to be more difficult in a college environment just because you have class less often. I see my (high school) kids more often, so I can establish that safe environment in, say, a month or so. And then I have them for the rest of the year.
2. “Students will amaze you with all the ways there are to fail to solve a problem.” This is so true! And they will also amaze you with all the ways they misunderstand instructions or directions. You’ll receive back an answer that you just don’t even understand how they came to it and when you talk to them, you realize they read your instructions a certain way. Then you realize that you could write your instructions more clearly than you did. So I’d add to this: don’t assume that a bizarre answer that you receive is because the student is dumb or high or something. Ask how they came up with it. Listen to their thought process. And be open to the possibility that you could modify your instructions (or content teaching) to avoid a similar misunderstanding in the future.
3. Yes! Again, yes!!
6. I would only add this: enthusiasm is never a bad thing to express towards your material. (I mean, I’m a history teacher, so it’s going to look different when I’m teaching, like, the Industrial Revolution than when I’m on the Holocaust, but yeah.) Just realize that there will be plenty of students who do not share your enthusiasm and never will, and don’t be hurt or offended by it. But don’t be afraid to be enthusiastic!
7. This is one that I sort of just disagree with, but it could be because I teach high school, not college. Students always run up to me if they see me out and about. I’m not saying they all love me. But they do tend to take special pleasure in seeing you around. It’s almost like they’re surprised that you actually exist outside of the school building. (I’ll stop with that, although there’s a much larger discussion to be had around high school teachers being involved in community activities. If you want to maximize your impact, teaching in high school is so much more than just delivering content.)
Like I said though, great comment!
Re: Things I learned from teaching
#55> In my experience, I learn the most when I struggle; if a student can shortcut through all the hard parts on, for example, and assignment, they're not going to learn very much. On the flip side, when most students struggle, they just give up. This. 100% this. How do you make someone understand that struggling is good? That - more than anything else - is what I want to be able to teach. Any tips?
They have to have the experience of being successful on the other side of the struggle. And they have to have someone showing them the connection. Look at where you were before this. You struggled but persevered. Now look at where you are (in terms of either what you know or what you can do). That’s called growth, and it only happened because you stuck with it.
Also, frankly, positive reinforcement will get you a lot of mileage.
Re: Things I learned from teaching
#56The author writes about himself: > Hi! I'm a PhD student studying computer science at Rice University. This means that we are on the same career path (I am currently an assistant professor in theoretical CS in Europe). I wish you of course best of luck! Here is the harshest truth about teaching I learned during my PhD: If you are focusing on teaching too much, you are setting yourself up for failure. This sounds crue…
There are different types of universities. While R1 institutions are more focused on research than teaching, there are smaller liberal arts universities which revolve around the undergraduate student experience. These universities still have research expectations as part of tenure and promotion, but faculty aren’t required to crank out research publications. Teaching is hugely important at these schools, both during the hiring process and when evaluating candidates for tenure and promotion.
I have been fortunate enough to work at such a university for the past 20 years. We have a deep endowment, small class sizes, and extensive support for our faculty research projects. Undergraduates at our school are often engaged in research projects as well.
For me, this is like an academic utopia: a blend of teaching and research with a primary focus on teaching. There are many other universities like mine.
Keep it up, OP. This is a wonderful post!
Re: Things I learned from teaching
#57This 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 a…
Engagement is also very environmental, I think, when you’re teaching in middle/high school. Like, is there a schoolwide culture of students engaging in work? Is there an expectation that when you walk into the building you are a student, or is it just a place that you have to be because everybody says so? (Note: kids pick up lightning-quickly on whether teachers themselves give a shit. If half your teachers don’t, you have a problem in your building.)
Kids that age are still trying to figure out how to be their own selves. It’s very new. I mean we all try to figure that out throughout our lives, but middle school and high school are when you first start to emerge as your own person. And a lot of figuring that out is done in response to your environment.
Re: Things I learned from teaching
#58The author writes about himself: > Hi! I'm a PhD student studying computer science at Rice University. This means that we are on the same career path (I am currently an assistant professor in theoretical CS in Europe). I wish you of course best of luck! Here is the harshest truth about teaching I learned during my PhD: If you are focusing on teaching too much, you are setting yourself up for failure. This sounds crue…
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Re: Things I learned from teaching
#59The thing that breaks my heart is that we have a much better understanding of adult learning. It didn't need to be that painful. That's not the lecturers fault. It takes a while to learn how to teach. It is the fault of our education system which thinks "let's throw seniors into a teaching situation without any grounding or support". We can also, simultaneously, fault the education system for a high school system tha…
Our high school system doesn’t prepare students for college at all because the way high school works here (in America) clearly isn’t meant to prepare students for college. You have to go to high school. There are compulsory attendance laws everywhere. You don’t have to go to college. It’s a choice to be there. College professors expect students to have their own motivation, their own ability to study things, and so in. High school teachers have to deal with the fact that very often a very large percentage of our students would simply rather not come to school than be there. And if you just let them fail, you get everybody from the principal to parents to society at large, pointing their fingers at you as the problem. So we can’t approach instruction with any expectation that students will care, try, stay awake, or do anything other than show up in class. (And I live in a district with really profound truancy problems because our district attorney doesn’t give a shit and never holds truancy court, so I can’t even expect students to show up on a regular basis.) But everyone then pointed us like we are failing somehow to prepare students for college.
I put it in reverse: colleges are failing to understand what high schools deal with and what we have to do in response. We are the ones who have laws constraining what we can and can’t do (especially in public school), how we have to approach certain things, and even what content we have to teach. (I am required by law, for example, to teach the content standards promulgated by the state. If I wander outside my standards, that’s good cause for being fired. Now, fortunately, I teach a subject where our standards are extremely broad and loose, so I can fit almost anything under them. But history is a core subject that isn’t a focus of testing regimes, so they generally ignore us.)
By the way, I’m not saying it’s a good thing that high schools don’t prepare students for college. But literally the response from our administration when a faculty member points out that our policies aren’t helping prepare students for college is that “not all our students will go to college.” Maybe half-ish of our students do.
Re: Things I learned from teaching
#60I used to work as a teacher in a kind of bootcamp. Over the years my my view on teaching has changed massively. I think there are only two generic things and the rest is situation dependent. - There is just no way around the struggle. The students have to struggle. Your job is not to take the struggle away but to show them why it is worth struggling and instil the belief that they can do it. - The most important teac…
Your first point is the truth, although I've found that there are very few takers for this truth :)
In HN itself, I've argued with people numerous times on how challenge is a necessity for advancing in learning, but I've met with stiff resistance to this point often.
So just want to say, glad to see a practicing teacher state the obvious (to practicing teachers) in HN.