Things I learned from teaching (2023)

    > Nobody goes to office hours

This is rough. I was a student who really struggled with some courses during uni. I would estimate that 75% of professors that I visited were incredibly unwelcoming, no matter how much prep I had done before the visit. It really turned me off from asking for help. That said, I do believe that most of my uni professors were not passionate about teaching -- they wanted to do research, and a modicum of teaching was required for their role.

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, they are more happy to ask for help. Interactivity and learning significantly increased! I realised quite quickly this was similar to pair programming which was a pretty new thing at the time.

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 than 'studying' it.) Once the students had their copies of the text, they would go away and read them, and then go to a tutorial where they would discuss what they'd read. This is where the real learning - and the creation of new knowledge - would happen.

The author mentions 'flipped learning': this is the modern equivalent of scholasticism. Read the text in your own time, and then have an in-person discussion or practical or workshop, depending on the nature of the subject matter.

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.

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.

funny to see this surface again! I previously posted this article in December, but it moved with me when I moved domains, so it’s at a different URL this time.

As discussed prior: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38558564

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?

> COLL 110 was a standard lectures-and-assignments college class - I lectured during our scheduled meeting time, then students did their projects on their own. Having tried this, I think that this is just not the future of education. This mode of teaching is designed mostly for the lecturer's convenience, but it's a terrible way to foster student understanding.

In this section I wish you would have mentioned the cost of teaching. Lectures might not be the best option for engaging students, but it’s quite effective when considering you can teach hundreds of students with one teacher. If 50% learns, that’s a good outcome.

I believe the fallout from lectures and university in general are just a part of the design. Not all people have the right motivation and opportunity to succeed at the university. One should work out how to maximize opportunities.

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 open-source. actually open-source is best taught in academia. * seniors, including professors you are assisting, very seldom are interested in your performance * the dean and the faculty is very seldom interested in my actual performance in my custom classes, which are complementary ones (even though are regularly frequented) * it takes years for teachers to start actually teaching, and not showcasing, retelling or just showing off their superiority * teaching without specific goal/task to solve is absolutely irrelevant and should not be practiced * academia needs to be rethought dramatically, this all makes very little sense now in the light of LLMs, Global Libraries and open-source

disclaimer: i have 2500+ teaching hours in the disciplines intro to programming, object oriented programming, data structures and algorithms, advanced ES6, db systems, db&er design, practical perl programming, piratical python programming and last 2 years we been giving a brand new R&D of GIS Systems. technically my role is of a teaching assistant, but I've almost never had the seniors come to review my classes.

Great article! Definitely agree that engagement raises like crazy when giving something students can do during the lecture.

In my case, it was a Data Science intro course, so having the theory together with Python Notebooks that I shared beforehand was a good way to get them interested throughout the full 3h of each class. As you said, when technical problems arise it's hard to keep an eye everywhere and patch all holes, so creating smaller groups/teams on that case helps, because even if not everyone can play with the code directly, they can follow things closer.

Main point as you said is that a teaching experience is a huge learning experience.

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!!!

Great article, thanks for sharing, as a recovering high school teacher (5 years ago I moved into tech after reaching full burn out in education) I must admit that I fantasised about teaching at the higher education level thinking that a minimal amount of student buy-in was what was needed to have a fulfilling experience teaching. But it's interesting see that in your class, students who wanted to be there still struggle to engage in a meaningful way for the most part. For me, the most difficult part of teaching was dealing with the broken feedback loops. It’s challenging to gauge your own progress and performance as a teacher and to identify which areas need improvement and what is actually working.

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 system is fundamentally broken.

Not only is lecture scientifically ineffective, but students can watch for free on YouTube or Khan academy the best lectures ever given on a subject, at their preferred speed, format, time, and location. Lectures that are animated, drawn, rewindable, and humorous. But I had to give the lecture anyway. Live. The same lecture three times a day to my three different classes. And we were graded by the administrators at how well we performed those lectures. We were even made to write them ourselves.

Imagine being an actor forced to write and perform a play three times a day that no one in the audience wanted to watch, and you knew for a fact was a waste of their time. But your bosses and the audience's parents demand it anyway. It's hard not to grow extremely cynical about the whole affair.

Then there are mandatory state exams which are even more cynical. All our funding came from the results of those, so we were extremely stressed about cramming all year for those. Cheating by teachers was rampant, so the school tried to have us monitor each other, which only worked if you wanted to be hated as a snitch.

If a student was failing, it was my fault. I had to justify any bad grade given to a student. If I did justify it, I was then blamed for their failure. There was no reason at all to give bad grades to students.

--Trauma dumping time--

If you happen to be male, expect students to act extremely inappropriately as a joke. They know you can't really do anything about it, so students will do it to stress you out. This is extremely stressful. I was constantly sexually harassed by older students, and was terrified I would lose my job over it.

My first day at one middle school in Texas I overheard several of the other teachers questioning why was I the only male adult on campus in tones indicating they thought I was a pervert. They could not believe a male would want to teach middle school for any other reason.

It became hard to show up everyday fearing that I would get assaulted by a student and thrown in prison over it. I was extremely careful to always have witnesses around, which wasn't always possible as there was no separate bathrooms for teachers. At one point I seriously considered wearing a bodycam every day just to have my own evidence of innocence.

Then there were the bomb threats, hallway fights, and the fact that quite a few of the male 10th graders were bigger than me and violent. At least once a week there was a hallway fight. At least once a month we had to evacuate for a bomb threat.

So as a teacher, I had to write and perform a play every day that no one wanted to see, that was a waste of everyone's time, to students who thought it would be funny to get me thrown in prison, a few of whom were bigger than me and violent.

The public school system is completely broken. I left it and never looked back. I would never send my kids to a lecture format school system in a million years. I would send them to a democratic free school, Montessori, unschool, or homeschool. But our public schools (and most private schools that rely on lectures) are cynical systems designed to stamp out creativity, critical thinking, logic, emotional intelligence, and empathy. It is designed to make incurious factory workers.

Don't take my word for it, see the words of John Gatto, the famous NY State teacher of the year: https://cantrip.org/gatto.html

He wrote this in 1990! This was long before cell phones, porn addicted students, mass shootings, and drug abuse. When students could still be given bad grades!

"some professors can be downright mean to their students"

I've had far too many teachers like this. They should be weeded out, fired immediately, and never allowed in the profession again.

Great article! From my own teaching experience,

> I'm not a hundred percent certain of the exact mechanisms of how, yet. 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. Somehow I need to make assignments which thread the needle between being too hard to solve and too easy to learn anything.

The academic theory is that for each learner, there are three concentric circles - the way I was taught them, they were called the comfort zone, the growth zone, and the danger zone. (https://commonslibrary.org/the-learning-zone-model/ calls them comfort, learning and alarm zones) Learning happens best when you push people beyond their comfort zone, but not into the danger zone (where the amount retained rapidly converges to zero). Of course, this is easier said than done, especially with a class of students with varying abilities, though I like your approach to the problem. It's even harder when you're teaching a 200-student introductory class and there's no way to really set individual assignments.

> [Lecturing] is designed for the lecturer's convenience ...

I personally really liked most of my lectures I sat in as a student - yes there was one guy who just read out from the textbook he'd published, so I skipped those lectures and just read the book. But overall, I liked most of my lectures; I might be the exception to the rule. I think the important thing is to make a lecture interesting with some of the same storytelling ideas that writers and TV/film scriptwriters use, and to throw in jokes and asides every now and then. Be a human being with personality. Worked examples, live-coding, experiments etc. are also useful, depending on the topic. (For more examples and scientific background, see Willingham's book "Why don't students like school?") Of course, that's a lot more work for the lecturer than designing for their own convenience. I've lectured like this myself before and students loved it. I've also heard from students at various places that, now the pandemic has died down mostly, "We're not paying fees just to watch some videos. We can do that on youtube. We want real lectures back."

The most important part, which one of my professors told me in the first week and was some of the best advice I ever got at university, was that you don't actually learn anything in lectures. That's not the point. You learn things by doing the exercises, and by studying in your own time. Lectures are just there to prepare you for the learning, because without the prep you wouldn't know what to do in the exercises.

> If you're on the fence about teaching, you should definitely give it a try, if only because interacting with students is such a rewarding experience.

Definitely!

>The easiest fix is to make office hours available on the same day that assignments are due, so that I can be available when students are working on the assignment.

Probably not a great idea. You're going to be overbooked when all of your students show up last minute.

This is helpful.