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Things I learned from teaching (2023)

claytonwramsey.com

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Re: Things I learned from teaching (2023)

#51

Post by Tade0 »

photochemsyn wrote: post #4

Teaching is very difficult to do well, and if teaching isn't rewarded financially, well... would you want a 'passionate' doctor who was paid $50,000 a year and lived in a rented one-bedroom in the bad part of town treating you for cancer?

Y-yeah?

My cousin is an oncologist and despite the earnings prospects (or actually lack thereof in my region of the world) at the time, she decided on pursuing a career in medicine before she went to high school because she wanted to save lives.

I envy her drive and I don't think it's in any way related to how much she makes.

Re: Things I learned from teaching (2023)

#52

Post by bluenose69 »

I've learned that many students lose interest about 2 slides into a presentation. The solution is simple. Don't use presentations.

Spend your time with the students by talking with them. Use the board for sketches, mathematical development, etc. This forces you to go slowly enough that students can copy your work, which is basically how people learn. Since you will be talking with the students (with the lights turned on!), you can turn around see whether they are "getting" the tricky parts, and you can adjust easily. None of this works when you're sleepwalking through a slide deck.

This method also works for computing work. Students can learn a lot by watching somebody live-code a problem. Showing a slide full of code might be helpful to a few students in the class, but most will just turn off. Students can learn a lot by seeing a professor type code, building ideas from the inside out, and catching errors, etc.

So that's the mechanical part. On the logistic part, here's something else I've learned: almost anything can be squeezed into the last 20 minutes of a class, and almost anything can be stretched out to fill the last 20 minutes. Students and teachers are humans, after all. Your friend can tell you a story during an elevator ride, or stretch it out over a few drinks in the pub. Either works.

Re: Things I learned from teaching (2023)

#53

Post by ska »

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?

This is how typical courses in eg physics are supposed to work. You read the material before a lecture, the lecture gets everyone on the same page and hopefully answers some or all of your questions, then you solidify by a) doing all the exercises and b) attending the tutorial and/or office hours to resolve questions you still have.

Re: Things I learned from teaching (2023)

#54

Post by gavmor »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #44
watwut wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This dynamic is not impossible to overcome. It's often as simple as reminding students that we are responsible for one another's success by shifting the goal from "finish the exercise" to "ensure we've both learned how to finish the exercise".

"Lone wolves" and "lazy" students, I've found, often warm up when given 1:1 attention of peers.

Re: Things I learned from teaching (2023)

#55

Post by n4r9 »

markus_zhang wrote: post #49
catsabound wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They can sometimes become less busy in the face of a sufficiently lucrative offer.

Re: Things I learned from teaching (2023)

#56

Post by DarkNova6 »

bluenose69 wrote: post #52

I've learned that many students lose interest about 2 slides into a presentation. The solution is simple. Don't use presentations. Spend your time with the students by talking with them. Use the board for sketches, mathematical development, etc. This forces you to go slowly enough that students can copy your work, which is basically how people learn. Since you will be talking with the students (with the lights turned…

100 times this. All the best teachers and lecturers I have had all followed this methodology.

Re: Things I learned from teaching (2023)

#57

Post by cafard »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #47
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. :-)

The student typically spends most of his/her time with students of the same level of ability or interest. For the student who will someday become a college teacher, this general means able and interested students.

The teacher spends time with and on anyone who signs up. For the intro classes at least this will include a proportion of those who are neither interested nor able.

Re: Things I learned from teaching (2023)

#58

Post by jerf »

bluenose69 wrote: post #52

I've learned that many students lose interest about 2 slides into a presentation. The solution is simple. Don't use presentations. Spend your time with the students by talking with them. Use the board for sketches, mathematical development, etc. This forces you to go slowly enough that students can copy your work, which is basically how people learn. Since you will be talking with the students (with the lights turned…

I dunno if it's the biggest myth about education, but it's gotta be in the top 3: The myth that you can stand in front of someone, speak some words on some topic, and all humans will automatically absorb the words, retain them, correctly make all relevant logical deductions from these words, retain all of this for the next several decades, and no particular effort need to be put into the specific words used and no examination of the audience need be done because humans do all of this automatically for you, 100% reliably.

I do not know where we get this idea. Literally everyone knows from years of personal experience that it is false. I can hardly think of a claim that each and every one of us has had more thoroughly debunked, in the strongest possible manner.

Yet virtually all of us act as if it is true, and indeed, there's even a contingent of people who will attack you if you claim it isn't true.

Lectures can work if you do as described. There's some other ways to make them work too. But there's an awful lot of just standing in front of a bunch of people, flashing some slides, and reading them off, and then, I guess, expecting some sort of miracle to occur because they darned well ought to know what the result of that approach will be from personal experience.

Re: Things I learned from teaching (2023)

#60

Post by downut »

bluenose69 wrote: post #52

I've learned that many students lose interest about 2 slides into a presentation. The solution is simple. Don't use presentations. Spend your time with the students by talking with them. Use the board for sketches, mathematical development, etc. This forces you to go slowly enough that students can copy your work, which is basically how people learn. Since you will be talking with the students (with the lights turned…

This is the way I taught my math classes at two different universities while I was in grad school. I even used chalk. As I worked through the proof or problem, writing out everything in full meant we could have an interactive flow where if I lost them they could complain. And they did! I would get comments/questions even if I was writing on the board, with my back turned. I don't recall time management ever being an issue, and my practice was to just work through everything beforehand.

It was one of the most satisfying/gratifying experiences of my entire life.

(Dirty secret: I only deeply learned vector calculus/linear algebra when I taught it.)

(Edit: grammar stupidities)

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