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Things I learned from teaching (2023)

claytonwramsey.com

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Re: Things I learned from teaching (2023)

#41

Post by watwut »

cjs_ac wrote: post #16

The lecture-tutorial pedagogical model used in universities is called scholasticism and dates back to the middle ages. Books were very expensive, so in the lectures, the lecturer would just read out the relevant text for students to copy down, word for word. (In the more prestigious English universities, lecturers are still called 'Readers', and students say that they're 'reading' History or Computer Science rather t…

Long time ago when I was a student, some teachers tried what now has fancy name "flipped learning". The usual result was that only few students done the reading and what not before the class. They usually put in only so much effort so that they can get point for participation, but not enough for discussion or workshop to not effectively amount to first encounter with the topic.

Re: Things I learned from teaching (2023)

#42

Post by watwut »

JackMorgan wrote: post #23

I used to teach at public middle school. The format of "lecture and assignments" is a big reason I couldn't keep doing it. Every trained educator knows it's scientifically the _least_ effective pedagogical method we know, but the school administrators, parents, and the entire system forced us to keep doing it. After years of learning that lecture is almost completely ineffective, I had to do it anyway because the sys…

Monthly bomb threats are definitely not a standard thing where I live.

Re: Things I learned from teaching (2023)

#43

Post by fn-mote »

The comments here are interesting. Read them.

On the subject of the article: the author was a senior undergraduate. They taught a single course. If you have taught once, you learned this much too.

Their course met one hour, once a week, in the evening. They lectured. This is an absolutely awful arrangement (and choice) from every viewpoint. Make no sweeping conclusions.

They only scratched the surface of what there is to learn about teaching.

Re: Things I learned from teaching (2023)

#44

Post by aleph_minus_one »

watwut wrote: post #39
robaato wrote: post #31

Something I discovered almost by accident when doing training for a larger group of "students" than had PCs available for exercises, was that the concept of "paired exercises" worked very well. So I then started pretty much mandating it for subsequent training where possible. If a single student has a problem with an exercise they tend to keep quiet. If 2 of them bounce ideas off each other and still have a problem,…

Paired exercises fairly often end up with faster student doing it all and slower student not knowing what is going on. I was sometimes that slower student and it just meant that I had to redo everything later if I actually wanted to learn.

Exactly. Additionally, there is the problem that one of the two pupils of the pair

- is lazy or

- is a lone wolf or

- has a very different style of thinking from the other, which the other one cannot make use of

Re: Things I learned from teaching (2023)

#45

Post by catsabound »

markus_zhang wrote: post #40
cjs_ac wrote: post #16

The lecture-tutorial pedagogical model used in universities is called scholasticism and dates back to the middle ages. Books were very expensive, so in the lectures, the lecturer would just read out the relevant text for students to copy down, word for word. (In the more prestigious English universities, lecturers are still called 'Readers', and students say that they're 'reading' History or Computer Science rather t…

I have always wanted a tutorial ONLY environment for my future Physics study. I believe I can grind through the textbooks by myself but I need some tutor, preferably a PHD to answer my batched questions and guide me through exercises I cannot figure out. Do PHDs of good universities do this kind of things? What hourly rate should I expect?

To grossly oversimplify, this is the teaching model of Oxford and Cambridge. The primary method of instruction is the tutorial/supervision, usualy one tutor to two undergrads.

Re: Things I learned from teaching (2023)

#46

Post by catsabound »

cjs_ac wrote: post #16

The lecture-tutorial pedagogical model used in universities is called scholasticism and dates back to the middle ages. Books were very expensive, so in the lectures, the lecturer would just read out the relevant text for students to copy down, word for word. (In the more prestigious English universities, lecturers are still called 'Readers', and students say that they're 'reading' History or Computer Science rather t…

> (In the more prestigious English universities, lecturers are still called 'Readers', and students say that they're 'reading' History or Computer Science rather than 'studying' it.)

Both of these are getting pretty outdated. Most of the top English unis have renamed senior lecturers/readers 'associate professors' because the North American naming conventions are becoming standard. I also haven't heard the "I'm reading X" way of putting it in at least a decade. It would be more common to say "I do X".

Re: Things I learned from teaching (2023)

#47

Post by aleph_minus_one »

larodi wrote: post #34

most important lessons from teaching...22 years now, a thing I didnt plan in my highschool: * you learn more than your students * students only effectively learn when they create/solve themselves * in 2024 there is little reason to use slides, or retell topics widely available on the net * students are not smarter than students 25 years earlier, but are much better informed. * people love publishing their results ope…

> students are not smarter than students 25 years earlier, but are much better informed.

In my opinion typically they are informed about the wrong things (and also sometimes in a wrong way). Yes, I grow old. :-)

Re: Things I learned from teaching (2023)

#49

Post by markus_zhang »

catsabound wrote: post #45
markus_zhang wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have always wanted a tutorial ONLY environment for my future Physics study. I believe I can grind through the textbooks by myself but I need some tutor, preferably a PHD to answer my batched questions and guide me through exercises I cannot figure out. Do PHDs of good universities do this kind of things? What hourly rate should I expect?

To grossly oversimplify, this is the teaching model of Oxford and Cambridge. The primary method of instruction is the tutorial/supervision, usualy one tutor to two undergrads.

Thanks, that's not feasible for me. I wonder if it's easy to find PHDs who are willing to do this. But I know good PHDs are generally very busy.

Re: Things I learned from teaching (2023)

#50

Post by F00Fbug »

Great article! I taught full-time for a while and progressed to program coordinator and eventually department chair. I hated the bureaucracy and ended up leaving. I hang on as an adjunct and still teach one or two sections a semester. My favorite is an intro to programming class using Python - I love to see the lightbulb come on when it all falls into place. That's usually a couple of students out of 25.

I don't get why students don't come to office hours - hardly anyone ever does. I see it as a critical part of my job as service to the students. Some of them are just flailing, yet they don't reach out.

I miss teaching in person. Since Covid, all my classes have been online. I would follow the lecture material, but would also demonstrate important aspects of each topic as we went through them and encouraged the students to do the same on their laptops.

My biggest challenge are these online learning platforms. We use ZyBooks. There are two components, the "book" part where the student reads and the programming part where they write some code. The second part sucks. It's not real programming; it's a padded cell where the student writes code and provides any input. The output is automatically evaluated pass/fail. The student has no interaction with the operating system or interpreter and in my opinion, it loses something without that context. They could have an extra CR/LF in the output and they'd fail the assignment. In the real world, who cares? The problems are often absurd; asking for things that nobody would ever encounter.

My final rant is student-focused. I get a lot of emails like, "I'm trying this and here's a screenshot of my code and I get this error message and I can't figure it out." Somedays I want so badly to tell them that if they pasted the contents of their email into google instead of sending it as an email, the solution would be one of the first three results!!!

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