Dijkstra: “You will be treated as grown-ups”
cs.utexas.edu
cs.utexas.edu
Sometimes there is a group that gets it right away, and runs with it, but it usually takes some time.
There are usually a few who think they are smarter than average (they usually are), that their intelligence will compensate (it rarely does), and that they don't need to make any extra effort. They usually figure it out after a semester.
I also had a class mutiny once. I had a couple of intelligent, but spoiled and opinionated students who were vocally critical of my/this instructional style. There was also a larger than usual number of dullards in the class, who were easily led (by the dissenters). The self-nominated leaders managed to turn most of the class' attitude sour. That was the worst semester I've had yet. Everything became difficult. I had trouble maintaining my own discipline.
The real trick that I would like to learn, is how to turn more of the middle and bottom tier of students into better students.
Though a chronically absentminded student in nearly every other subject, I excelled under his system and completed homework every night, an accomplishment I can say with certainty I never once again achieved in high school. While the knowledge acquired from other courses has atrophied over the years, those classes are still as lucid as ever in my mind.
It may take an initial period for students to become acclimated to this environment, there may even be some push-back, but I think a very formal, cerebral learning climate is beneficial in many cases.
It's certainly hard. I love to teach & help, but most students don't view other students' input as collaborative or helpful. I've frequently experienced cases where a student asked a question and it was obvious (to me anyway) what that student was missing or misunderstanding. Then, it becomes obvious that the teacher doesn't understand the miscommunication. But if I step in to synchronize, such that neither party is speaking past each other, then the student views me as a know-it-all trying to show off and the teacher views me as trying to undermine his authority.
Ultimately, I gave up trying to help unless I know both the teacher and the student personally.
Sure they can. I try to leverage the better students in exactly this way. We're often encouraged to engage students in this way (there is usually a seminar about it at least semi-annually).
>Why is it that the relationship between an engaged student and a teacher is an individual one?
FERPA, And I think that's mostly the right way to do things. Instructors shouldn't make direct references to other students, even though it is often impossible not to.
Why not? I hosted working sessions for everyone in my software engineering class to work on their projects. The number of people who ran into similar bugs and were able to say "Oh, yeah, you have it configured wrong. Here, let me show you" was actually pretty amazing.
Make sure to clear it with the professor, invite him to come by, make it clear nobody is straight copying or anything. But collaborative effort should be encouraged, not reprimanded.
This is entirely counterproductive. There is no good reason to have that attitude since the number of spoils (a grade of "A") are not limited.
One useful method is to remind them that they find the subject difficult not because they are stupid, but because the subject is hard, and that with some hard work, it will become easier.
In most European countries, your education is quasi free, and as a result students don't complain about professors not providing "customer service". You go to the university to learn from some of the most eminent figures of your field, people who have devoted their life to it, and you do as they say. If you're not happy, well you can just leave. And sure, some of them are quirky or do dumb stuff, but you're 19- you'll live. And TBH, even the professors I had in college who exposed me to the most BS are nothing compared to some of the BS I've experienced in the real world, with clients/bosses/etc.
If you're going to University of Phoenix, sure, feel entitled to some degree of "customer service". But if you're studying under Dijkstra, just suck it up and soak in as much as you can, even if the "customer service" leaves to be desired. Again, you're 19- you'll live.
Sorry, this is a bit abrasive, but I've been on multiple sides of the equation (student in EU university, student in US university, TA in EU university, TA in US university), and the students who say things like "I pay tuition, I'm a paying customer, professors have to do X/Y/Z for me" are rarely the ones at the top of the class (and rarely aspire to do so).
It should be that you do your basic degrees with people who are primarily teachers and then you go and do your more research based work with people who are good at that sort of research, if you want to get into that.
The other way around is just people wasting their talents and their student's time by being really inefficient.
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The rest of this just seems to be, 'oh they're 19, they'll live... oh we all have to put up with bullshit.' Maybe they will, maybe we do. It's a fully general argument for anything that's not going to kill you.
Life is shit - therefore don't go along with and keep quiet about the shit bits or it'll keep being shit.
IME, I've only had a couple of lecturers who are good researchers, and poor lecturers. They weren't that bad, they were just the guys who hated teaching and had no social skills. They were still pretty good at explaining things, even though they were dead boring and a little disorganised.
The worst lecturers are the ones who don't understand the subject well enough. They become massive assholes, and say things like "If you don't get it, that's your fault."
Look at Dijkstra's rules (excerpts that show he was not in any way an asshole):
> If I use a word you don't recognize or a sentence you cannot attach a meaning to, it is your duty to ask for clarification. If I go too fast, it is your duty to slow me down.
> Since first-class students can learn a lot from each other, I urge you to try to do the homework in little groups.
(Now, I think assessments should be individual, but at least he recognises that students will cheat so why bother stopping the ones who follow the rules?)
> At the end of the semester there is an oral examination for each of you, the principle being that, after having followed my thoughts for a full semester, you are entitled to two hours of my undivided attention.
God he takes a lot of responsibility. He can take a lot of responsibility, because he's not an idiot who has to hide behind excuses like "it's not my job to make sure you understand the subject".
I agree that researchers who don't want to teach shouldn't be forced to, but that's the extent of it. I've been to 3 universities in 3 different countries, and the number of bad teachers I've had is much lower than good or excellent ones.
(of course this post and my previous one refer to computer science/math academia, since that's what I'm familiar with)
The second key is the ability to use examples that pupils find relevant and introduce topics that might not fit directly in the class description, but enhance overall knowledge with the intended discussion's knowledge.
The third key is intangible. And that's the ability to make learning interesting, if not downright fun.
Dijkstra was probably the type of professor that aims to inspire/provoke students into teaching themselves.
I have a degree from a universities in Europe and one from the US and the European one had a much stronger emphasis on asking students to teach themselves (it was a Dutch university, Dijkstra was Dutch so I expect that's where he got the attitude), the US one had more "hand holding" in explaining what you needed to do.
As an aside, the drop out rate at the Dutch university was over 30%, while at the American university I think maybe 2 people dropped out in my year. So while there is some consensus that teaching yourself is better than being taught it's certainly not very efficient.
So under which conditions is expecting your students to teach themselves better for them exactly? It seems to me that there's some sort of selection bias going on here if the best students are the ones that successfully teach themselves, and then reflect on the fact that they were able to teach themselves as the cause for why they were able to learn so well. I'm pretty sure that if you stuck a self-learning student in a hand-held environment he would learn equally well, but might risk learning less due to the natural time cost such a teaching style has. The logical conclusion for this are the whole 'advanced placement' classes and such, because like it or not, not all students are going to be equally well-suited to teach themselves, and thus endure poor teaching. A self-learner meanwhile, will be able to endure such poor teaching, regardless of whether they're even aware of how bad the teaching is.
Teaching is not a fixed methodology, it's really an art that's quite broad in scope and requires honing in on each specific batch of students' needs. If you're going for 'mentor' style inspiration teaching, great -- but make sure you're applying it to a student that'll be receptive to it. If they're not, then maybe try to figure out how you can make them be receptive to it, but I guarantee you that it's going to require some level of hand-holding at the onset; and if you're a good teacher, you should be able to pick up on that.
I agree that not every student may be able to get into the self-learning mode, although the success of Montesorri schools show that most kids can at least be able to at some level. If you are smart enough to make it into one of Dijkstra's classes, and aspire to comprehend the subject matter he teaches, then you should not need to much hand holding.
Em, that's spoon feeding knowledge to a group of random people, with no expectations from them or their previous qualifications.
Might be OK for elementary school, but it's not a good definition for a university professor.
That said, the major part of a professor's job description is knowing his shit, and being able to convey it clearly.
This has nothing to do with whether the students can understand it easily or not. He could be communicating effectively (e.g as Knuth does in his Art of Computer Programming books) with the students still not getting it.
Science is hard -- you have to work up to it. Merely getting some high level view spoon fed to you because you cannot/don't want to study and understand the actual science is not "effective communication".
If the audience doesn't get it, then the communication is ineffective, period. You can't just send corrupt data to a server that doesn't understand it and say that the communication was successful -- same deal with humans. [1]
Maybe there are some topics that the students will need to 'sleep on' in order for it to really sink in, but that's not the same as them 'not getting it'. Being someone who's taught myself, I guarantee you that not only is there a difference between those two states, but that you can actually see them in action - as a teacher. If you get to know your students, you can tell when they successfully process enough of the information to be able to figure it out themselves later, from when they just don't get anything you're saying. If you leave things off thinking they could figure it out themselves when they actually got no meaningful data to work with off you, then it doesn't matter how long you give them, they still aren't gonna get it. That is faulty communication. Good teachers can sense this happening and correct for it. Unfortunately, a lot of teachers seem to rely on this idea as a crutch to prevent them from the work of trying to dig into their students' psyche, when the reality is that you really need to be able to do that to become a good effective communicator/teacher.
[1] There is also the fact that the audience may not be fully prepared to understand what you're telling them, but hey, prerequisite knowledge is part of communication too (like a server protocol would be). Fact is, if you're failing to communicate effectively as a result of some unmet prerequisite knowledge, that means some other teacher down the line in the student's life must've dropped the ball on communication too. As you might expect, this can easily snowball quite quickly and lead to a total communication breakdown by the time a student enters the higher levels of education. Thus, effective communication should be a hugely important part of a teacher's skill set, cause even the slightest communication screw-up can trigger a whole chain of breakdown events for a large number of students in the future, which only serves to bite all of society in the ass.
This is actually a fairly good metric for telling a good teacher from a bad one. Constant use of analogies without making things too convoluted is a pretty good strategy to become an effective communicator.
People love seeing/matching patterns, so if you give them patterns that they can associate with, that'll do like 90% of the communicating for you, then all you have to do is just fill in the blanks.
"""the ability to recognize that a student or class of students is not understanding an explanation, and generalize it further or change the example to make it more clear. Do that ad infinitum"""
You never examine the cases of students owning up to the work they have to do to understand in the first place.
It's like as you describe a world in which they do everything perfectly, and the only factor in getting that knowledge into their heads is the professor and his "further generalizing".
The communication in the sense of the end-to-end transfer of information might be ineffective, but that does not mean the professor's contribution to it was inffective, period.
You seem to only check the professor for failure. How about failure of the receiving end to parse the information. Because of lazyness, entitlement, easy grades acquired in other classes, and sometimes even pure stupidity.
>You can't just send corrupt data to a server that doesn't understand it and say that the communication was successful -- same deal with humans.
Only you had to use the "corrupt" qualifier for the data. Who said they are corrupt in the first place.
I can very well send perfect data according to some protocol to a client that is incompetent to parse them (e.g because he only implements a simplified and ad-hoc subset of the protocol).
To the particular student that doesn't get it, yes it was ineffective. In any given group of students, that'll yield different percentages of effective communication, but it should be the teacher's duty to maximize his communication ratio. As such, the teacher as an 'effective' communicator is purely a function of how many effective communications he actually establishes.
Like I said in my first post, it could be that the student isn't up on the prerequisite knowledge and communication could suffer because of that. The important thing to note here is that:
1) Teachers are usually the ones that trigger this chain of communication breakdown somewhere down the line in the student's career.
2) That effective communication is a verb, and stands on it's own outside of both the teacher and the student, but it should be the teacher's duty to maximize it as much as he can, because that's effectively what he was hired for, and if he doesn't, then other teachers that have his students later on will suffer because of it.
> You seem to only check the professor for failure. How about failure of the receiving end to parse the information. Because of lazyness, entitlement, easy grades acquired in other classes, and sometimes even pure stupidity.
There are plenty of things that could go wrong in the pipeline, and that's why it's impossible for a teacher to ever have a 100% communication success ratio. But let me say that 'laziness' and 'stupidity' are almost never gonna be the reasons a student fails.
First of all, there is such a thing as 'general intelligence' [0], and it should be the teacher's (or management's) duty to account for it, because by definition, the student may not always be able to.
Secondly, 'laziness' is actually the lack of motivation, and the lack of motivation as seen in students is usually a product of poor teaching. Not necessarily on behalf of the student's current teacher, but as an accumulation of bad qualities on all the teachers the student has had. And what could those bad qualities possibly be? You guessed it: bad communication.
If a student feels he's not getting what you're saying, and then he goes on to find the same thing from another teacher, and then another, what on earth is he supposed to conclude other than that he's just stupid? If he's allowed to come to this conclusion, guess what he's gonna do... he'll become lazy. Because why bother trying in a system that you've already been trained to understand you won't be successful in? 'Laziness' as a concept almost never appears in isolation -- nobody is ever lazy "just because", it's just not human to be so. The fact that this is ever used as a legitimate reason for anything is quite indicative of the current state of society.
Entitlement could be an issue, but at least in my experience, it's relatively rare for that to actually be a legitimate hindrance because it's usually a symptom of something else (see: 'laziness' above).
> Only you had to use the "corrupt" qualifier for the data. Who said they are corrupt in the first place.
Alright, I'll agree, but it was just an example. The flip-side of it would be that the data isn't corrupt on the sender's end, but that the server just hasn't been set up to understand the protocol yet. Same deal. Both are key components to effective communication, so if either one of them doesn't work, the action of 'communicating' isn't happening.
Sometimes I think the biggest problem with higher education is we're encouraged to go through it long before we're really ready for the challenge. I graduated high school at 17—I was a smart kid, but still immature. Now, at 28, I'd love to spend a semester studying under someone like Dijkstra, even if he did (hopefully accidentally) inspire a horde of programmers to hate on every use of a single language construct without thinking.
Chances are good someone like Dijkstra could teach me things a teaching expert with a cursory knowledge of the subject matter could never hope to. The only disadvantage is it might take more effort to learn from a subject matter expert who isn't as good at teaching, but I think that's a price worth paying.
It would seem so, but you have to be careful because too frequently the claim is badly false. Let's consider courses in your college major from junior year or later (and there can be other cases, e.g., for advanced students who get into serious material before their junior year). Reasons:
(1) It's a big, often bad world out there with a lot of dumb, badly adjusted, sick, injured, confused people. One way academics filters whom they let teach is by insisting on some research accomplishments.
(2) To do a good job teaching (in your major, junior level or higher) there can be challenges in understanding the material really well, that is, the details, done well, an overview, balance, judgment, synthesis, bigger picture, important connections with other parts of your major, applications, research, etc. So, for this level of understanding, it can be important for you to have the brightest, most knowledgeable prof you can get. That is, a less bright, less knowledgeable prof may not have such understanding themselves.
(3) One thing, on a good day, you might get in a classroom, face to face with a good prof is an example of how he thinks. There's a lot of junk that can find its way into thinking; it can be a real surprise to see, from a really bright prof, how he manages to filter out all the junk, set aside the not very good content, and keep the best content. Once as a graduate student I heard a lecture by S. Eilenberg, and afterward a junior prof said: "He sure doesn't waste time with little ideas.". That could be a good remark to hear. You typically won't get good remarks of that kind from profs who are able to teach the material but don't bring a lot more into the classroom.
(4) Actually, in some fields, starting at the junior year, you can begin to notice that "it's a small world". So, if you have a good researcher as a prof, then you can be surprisingly few connections from the best people in the world in the field; not good to miss out on that.
(5) Yes, it's important to learn, but, really, from the junior year on in your major, there's often some question about just what and how much you should learn. Or, yes, in K-12 and the first two years of college, the emphasis is on the student learning. By the junior year, the lesson, quite clear somewhere in a Ph.D. program and starting to become clear in the junior year, is that no one can carry all the research library around between their ears. So, a big question is, since you will be learning only a tiny fraction of everything in the research library, what fraction should you learn? One path to a good answer is to have a prof who has, from his research, a good view of the future of the field and can use that view to help select and weight what to present in the course. That is, it's easy to waste time on junk, trivia, less important material, dead end detours, etc., and a prof who does much of that can't be good at research.
(6) This stuff about bad teaching is not a small problem. Instead, it's far too easy for academics to fall into some rigid nonsense such as in some of the stories about teaching in Asia -- nose to the grindstone, shoulder to the wheel, ear to the ground, dot all the i's, cross all the t's, but still don't have even a weak little hollow hint of a tiny clue what the material is about. E.g., recently here on HN is a link to the famous Feynman description of teaching in a country in South America. It's too easy for the nonsense Feynman described to walk in and take over. The peer-review process in the better journals tends to cut out that nonsense.
(7) In some majors, it can be important for you to meet people, hopefully via your coursework. A good researcher well known around the world might give you some introductions that could prove priceless.
There's more: Broadly a big issue is quality, and there's no easy substitute.
One response, at one time common at Courant, is "If you just want to learn the basic material, then don't bother with classes and, instead, just get some books and study."
At one time the Web site of the Princeton math department said, (from memory, likely not exactly correct): "The courses given are introductions to research by world class researchers. No courses are given for preparation for the qualifying exams. Instead, students are expected to teach themselves such material.". So, by the junior year, a course should have more to offer a student than just the basic material a good student could just get from the books.
Education is about the future, preparing to do well in the future. As from character Yoda in Star Wars, "Always difficult to see, the future.". Yup, he was correct. Good researchers have some advantages in seeing what is more promising for the future.
Even in Italy everybody does university, even the ones that do not want to study: they find some subject like "political sciences" and lower down the level of the degree.
OTH It's true that a lot of people drop out or take way longer than they are supposed to graduate. In that I agree using a stricter admission we could let fewer people to get university education but there would be more funds to treat them better.
Or, better alternatives. How do you make skilled trades more attractive?
Really? Wow. How did that work out for him?
Good physicists don't usually get the respect of bad philosophers, and vice-versa. This isn't really a problem you can solve using the university system, as far as I can see.
> And as far as that goes, education in the trades often fails to prepare the plumbers adequately for say, running their own plumbing business.
This, on the other hand, is a very good point.
I'd like to expand on it, in fact: Beginning in grade school, there should be "Adult Living" courses that introduce kids to the kinds of things they'll be expected to know the first day they're on their own.
Think of it as Home Economics with basic law (family law, what abuse is, what mortgages and contracts are, rental property law), real practical economics (budgeting, not balancing checkbooks), basic home maintenance (stuff that's also useful for apartment-dwellers) and, generally, a lot of diverse stuff that you have to know to avoid getting ripped off and/or laughed at and/or killed when you're living by yourself.
You can say that the parents should be teaching this stuff. I agree, but you can say exactly the same thing about arithmetic and English, and we have the schools teach that stuff. More to the point, some kids kinda have shitty or ignorant or stupid parents, so they don't get the same education out of them others do.
I think you're probably right.
>Think of it as Home Economics with basic law (family law, what abuse is, what mortgages and contracts are, rental property law), real practical economics (budgeting, not balancing checkbooks), basic home maintenance (stuff that's also useful for apartment-dwellers) and, generally, a lot of diverse stuff that you have to know to avoid getting ripped off and/or laughed at and/or killed when you're living by yourself.
To be fair, my own high school did a fair job, they tried to address most of the things you mentioned, but there just wasn't enough of it, and a lot of the training I got (in maintenance, and not killing myself with tools) was extracurricular (FFA).
So, what parts of high school do you want to throw out?
Most of the traditional English courses, on the grounds that they're nearly always taught badly and have become jokes even in otherwise good schools.
Replace them with sections in the Adult Living course that teach how to do close reading on advertisements and contracts. The best, most practical part of a good English course is the close reading training, but it really needs to be applied to something practical, as opposed to languishing in a course most students and teachers don't take very seriously.
I don't care if eighteen-year-olds never read Hawthorne again if it means fewer of them get ripped off by unfair contracts or suckered by misleading ads.
Shop class should be folded into Adult Living in its entirety, and the 'make a birdhouse' stuff should be de-emphasized and replaced with 'fixing your toilet' and similar household maintenance tasks. Learning how to use a band saw is great, but other things are more important.
Beyond that, it would have to depend on what the individual school was doing and doing badly. There are general tropes but schools have a lot of local or at least state-wide autonomy, even public schools.
That's what I was thinking too. There's got to be some way to get them to understand their there and they're in less time than is usually taken. And, TBH, studying literature in HS made me hate it. It took years before I'd read again for fun.
>'make a birdhouse' stuff should be de-emphasized and replaced with 'fixing your toilet'
Agreed, but in my HS the wood-shop was where all the special folks went, it seemed to keep them busy.
You can learn this in any course which involves writing. It doesn't need to be the focus to be present.
> Agreed, but in my HS the wood-shop was where all the special folks went, it seemed to keep them busy.
This is something else again. 'Mainstreaming', as it's currently known, is probably better than just warehousing the less able, but the whole notion of everyone being in the same stream in the first place is damaging to everyone, because people typically have different aptitudes and will be at different levels in different subjects.
For example, I'd progressed beyond secondary-education-level English classes before I'd actually begun secondary education, but my math skills were sub-par and didn't really catch up until college. Therefore, I was coasting through AP English and struggling with math courses, indicating wasted time in both endeavors.
I know it isn't economically feasible to remove the lockstep entirely, but allowing people to pass or repeat subjects rather than grades would be an improvement.
1) Those who do an excellent job researching
2) Those who do an excellent job teaching
I don't know anything about Dijkstra's teaching abilities, but (1) and (2) are frequently an OR for each professor, not an AND.
"Edsger Dijkstra was a principal contributor in the late 1950s to the development of the ALGOL, a high level programming language which has become a model of clarity and mathematical rigor. He is one of the principal proponents of the science and art of programming languages in general, and has greatly contributed to our understanding of their structure, representation, and implementation. His fifteen years of publications extend from theoretical articles on graph theory to basic manuals, expository texts, and philosophical contemplations in the field of programming languages."
I think he may have borrowed that from the railroads, even if he didn't invent it independently though, he was smart enough to see its usefulness and apply it.
Crucially, this means C and C++, which means that Dijkstra's work is part of the foundation for most operating systems and low-level code in the world - indeed most software systems period, since the vast majority of these are somehow based on C.
The shortest path algorithm comes nowhere close to his other accomplishment. A significant part of computer science stands on its feet, because of the foundations he built.
Feel free to read one of the thirteen hundred things he published. Most relevant to you (probably) is that he championed the use of "structured programming" -- aka, if, for, while, and other narrowly focused constructs -- as opposed to GOTO: he's the author of "Go To Statement Considered Harmful ".
Also, remember also that many algorithms seem trivial once you've learned them.
He also spearheaded a compiler project which was made up of two teams where one part would check each other.
You should check out some of his work, in particular, his calling out computer manufacturers for making bogus hardware.
A paper describing THE: http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~zaher/classes/CS656/p341-dijkstr...
This paper here http://www.tomandmaria.com/tom/Writing/DijkstrasCrisis_Leide... has a worthwhile quote:
Dijkstra’s crisis was rather more idiosyncratic than has generally been acknowledged. He took up the language of crisis to convey the need to replace “Chinese armies” of badly trained and mediocre programmers with an elite corps of “mathematical engineers” modeled on himself.
Here is an article of personal reflections about a correspondence with Dijkstra: http://vanemden.wordpress.com/2008/05/06/i-remember-edsger-d....
Folks today don't seem to read much Dijkstra. I think the growing security industry is one side effect of that.
But in my experience teaching, the students who hold the "customer service" arguments are mostly the ones who are asking me if they can leave the lab early because it's half price Margarita night at the local bar (direct quote here, and not the only one of its kind). That's what I meant, sorry if it wasn't clear.
Regularly I get the impression that a lot of grading in the US is rank or curve-based, which seems like total bullshit to me.
The best performing student could still very well provide poor quality work.
A good teacher evaluates students individually and tries to take each of their levels and learning-speeds in to account.
Luckily I have mostly had university classes with 15-30 students, which gives the teachers a lot of space to approach students individually.
This is also a sweeping assumption that you shouldn't have made.
I hate watching others compete amongst themselves (e.g., sports) and I hate participating in all forms of competition, academics or otherwise. It just doesn't turn me on. Rather, it makes me feel uncomfortable.
With that being said, I graduated near the top of my CS class and now make over six figures per year, so I guess one can "succeed" (whatever the fuck that means) even when one finds all forms of competition reprehensible.
I did what I did to start and support a family. I didn't do what I did for the high one gets when one feels superior to everyone else on something that, in the end, is totally unimportant (pale-blue-dot, remember?).
It's all bullshit.
"I have never competed with Peter Naur. (I was raised somewhat puritanically: we had to try our hardest and give the most, but we were not allowed to compete. I am still grateful to my parents for this education.)"
We can't expect to be in the top 1% of achievers, because by definition everyone can't. So you end up with 99% of the population that has failed to live up to expectations and deal with the economic and psychological consequences of that. Always, with no exceptions ever, as a matter of statistical fact. That's just stupid and unhealthy.
People should be encouraged to go above and beyond, but making it an expectation of all students is just stupid. If all students could do it, it wouldn't be above and beyond.
We should be looking at absolute measures of competency instead. This eliminates the problem of the A student who didn't actually learn the material, as well as the C student who is perfectly qualified. I would love to see schools raise the standards for "Pass" to a useful level of competency, then grade everything pass-fail. The very best students could still shine on the basis of the quality of their research.
Similarly, striving to be the best doesn't mean you're trying to put others down, it means you're trying to improve yourself. That unless others do likewise you'll improve on a relative basis is not the important thing, rather that you'll improve compared to your old self.
tl;dr Compete with yourself.
I would suggest this is biased, since the top-rated students who understand their needs and are proactive about it won't be around to complain.
The only reason you can get away with providing a worse service to 19-year olds (as you mention twice) than you would to adults is because you have a naive, captive audience who have limited freedom of choice.
Anyway fuck that, customer service matters if the professor can't deal with that he can go back to typying out papers.
If you desire teachers to stoop to your level and explain things best left to self-reading in textbooks, you are probably in over your head and have no one but the overly lenient admissions department at your university to thank. University is a big business, that makes admissions easier to let in more students and make more money. Do not fool yourself into thinking otherwise.
Many lecturers are indeed less than ideal, and many instructors similarly fall short, but just because the students give them poor ratings, and complain about work loads, that does not mean that they are not being given exactly what is needed to achieve their stated goals.
You don't get physically fit by listening to work-out videos and watching people jog in the park. You have to go out and do it yourself. People hire personal trainers to devise a plan, and then to shout at them to make them stick to it and to put in the work.
Maybe that's a good analogy. Maybe to get good at math (and programming) you actually need to put in the work, and true learning is born from the effort and confusion you go through before enlightenment.
And he seems to really care about the future success of his students: "But what I can probably achieve is showing most of you how to become mathematically much more effective, because the other courses in mathematics may teach you mathematics, but rarely teach you how not to waste your time."
Also, from the point of view of someone paying for an expensive product, why would I want the provider of the service to be able to dictate the details of how I use it? E.g., if I don't feel I'm getting any value from a particular homework assignment that I paid for, why should I be penalized for not doing it?
When I was a student in college, I thought of myself as an adult and didn't want to be treated like a child either by my professors or by my parents. I would have appreciated a professor like Dijkstra.
"We" don't
> benevolent dictator of the classroom?
What do you suggest? Democracy?
> My last year in school the combined cost of tuition, books, and room and board hit $40,000.
I think that it has never been communicated well what it really costs to deliver instruction, labs, etc. At least at state funded schools, tuition is only a small part of the cost of running the place. Of course, that money isn't always spent optimally, but that's another story.
> At what point do you become not just a student, but also a fee for service consumer, with an appropriate set of expectations for some level of responsiveness and customer service?
Expect to pay a lot more for concierge level service. Also, I'm skeptical of the efficacy of that approach.
A considerable portion of each class was devoted to his lamenting the difficulties of an ongoing move in residence he was undergoing. He seemed quite preoccupied with this.
The course text was in C. He admitted to cribbing lecture notes from another faculty member -- I no longer recall whether these used C or C++. As a result, he often didn't seem to understand the lecture notes he was using.
He "decided" that the two languages were "close enough" that we should do our work in C++. Needless to say, for many of the students, this was more than a bit confusing.
I left that class partway through, as a thorough waste of time. And, as it turned out, of money.
Never again...
I am quite sympathetic to grievances with the position in which universities are putting younger, untenured -- nor even full-time nor insured -- faculty and instructors. It's downright abusive.
The other side, for all that there are many good faculty and administrators, is a level of arrogance and ignorance that... at a minimum, does not deserve the financial remuneration it is receiving.
The system is rotten, from both sides -- entitlement, and exploitation.
----
P.S. I'll add that, previously, I'd taken a maths course from that same university and campus that was taught by a part-time instructor / lecturer / I-forget-the-title-they-used. Despite the instructor's... "lesser rating", he was first rate and was really engaged in and with the class. It was excellent.
Schools are not exclusively populated by wonderful teachers. Not even close. As nice as it is to give power to those that are, it also gives power to those that aren't, probably disproportionately so due to sheer numbers. Should we be celebrating and continuing a practice that is a net harm? Is it a net harm?
Faculty and other teaching staff are not usually paid directly by students paying tuition. At larger research universities, tuition might not even make up a significant portion of their salaries (which are also paid by things like government grants, interest on endowments, etc.). They are paid to do research, and their incentives are aligned not toward better teaching but toward publishing and bringing in grant money. Teaching is time-consuming and takes away from those activities, so not all professors like doing it or do it well.
The people who in my experience are most responsive to undergraduates (and their parents) qua paying customers are administrators and "development" people. These people are paid to bring in money in the form of tuition and donations from parents and alumni. With them, you can expect to get some pretty special treatment if you're willing to pay for it, though of course that special treatment isn't supposed to extend to how you're treated in the classroom. And there are good reasons for that: not everyone can pay full tuition, and students shouldn't get more attention/higher grades/etc. just because they're paying more.
I'm not saying this is the way things are everywhere, and I'm certainly not saying it's the way things ought to be. I do think that many faculty need to take teaching more seriously, and their incentives should be better aligned in that direction.
Still, I'm not convinced that education would improve if faculty started seeing students as fee for service customers. In the extreme, I think that would tend to increase faculty's tendency to pander to students, instead of creating and sharing new knowledge with them.
I've gotten far superior instruction in math for example from dedicated instructors at community colleges than I ever got at my university. 30 people sized classes vs 300 sized and it was almost half price. These community colleges are only devoted to teaching and generally they do just fine. A dedicated 24/7 tutor lab and khan academy to be honest would of even been better in some aspects, since you can just tunnel through material, have a tutor help you in a spot you get stuck in and keep on tunneling.
That’s exactly what universities are intended to do: Educate the future researchers and front-edge users of a particular field. For the more practically oriented, there are universities of applied sciences (the difference in naming is much more obvious in German: Universität ./. Fachhochschule) and even the dual education system with its trade schools.
The idea that every lowly programmer who wants to learn ‘just enough maths’ should go to university is – IMHO – frankly bullshit.
That's just not the way research works.
I've gotten far superior instruction in math for example from dedicated instructors at community colleges than I ever got at my university. 30 people sized classes vs 300 sized and it was almost half price.
One of the best courses I've ever taken was a "300 sized" chemistry class. The lecturer was a master at lecturing, his classes filled almost immediately. He also put a lot of effort into meeting with students, despite having a dozen or so TA's to manage.
>These community colleges are only devoted to teaching and generally they do just fine.
I'm an instructor at a CC and I can tell you it is a mixed bag. Our math dept is weak.
Of course you are going to get mixed bag results in any institution. Sometimes you will get research professors who are good instructors like your I'm guessing 300 person intro chemistry course, but the incentives lead to weaker instruction than a pure instructor. Especially in entry level courses.
You get travesties such as people who have very thick accents and bad language skills teaching second year courses because it's a research university.
Well, often enough a prof may have several projects going. universities usually assign you classes to lecture based on how much research you have going on. It would be impossible to organize research activities on an ongoing constant basis for a department of researchers. Sometimes you have too much work sometimes not enough.
>but the incentives lead to weaker instruction than a pure instructor. Especially in entry level courses.
Yeah, I agree it isn't optimal.
>You get travesties such as people who have very thick accents
Oh, get over it. This is more urban legend than reality. Learn to work with people who aren't from your home town.
> and bad language skills teaching second year courses because it's a research university.
May be annoying for you if it isn't your field and you just need some science courses; but if you want to work with people who are doing interesting leading research in some field, there's a good chance you'll have to work with people who aren't native English speakers.
So it's filler work.
> Oh, get over it. This is more urban legend than reality. Learn to work with people who aren't from your home town. > May be annoying for you if it isn't your field and you just need some science courses;
I am talking from personal experience, not urban legend. It was the core operating systems / concurrency course. The person had marginal English language skills, and I've work many recent immigrants from his country who have far better accents and english language skills now. It was a common complaint on ratemyprofessor. It wasn't a minor difference such as a 1960s Boston or British accent.
> but if you want to work with people who are doing interesting leading research in some field, there's a good chance you'll have to work with people who aren't native English speakers.
I work with a probably %75 ESL workforce today, many of them recent ESL, and I went to an international high school. I work with many of them very well.
It's still no excuse, especially in any public speaking engagement to not be able to communicate decently. You NEED your audience to be able to understand %95 of what your saying or you might as well just communicate in writing with them. You should be doing more back office work until its corrected.
I highly admire the approach of prof. Dijkstra here, since the purpose of going to University is to learn the most we can, from people who know the stuff they're teaching very well, or have the ability to understand said things at a deeper level than the student currently has.
Thus, I cannot see how paying tuition entitles us to demand a professor to do X/Y/Z for us, we're paying not for them to be at our feet, but for access to their understanding of subject matter, which often (depending on the prof./University) is world class.
I also do not see how the professor comes across as omnipotent here at all, he gives students complete control, as can be seen in If I use a word you don't recognize or a sentence you cannot attach a meaning to, it is your duty to ask for clarification. If I go too fast, it is your duty to slow me down.
We pay for our professor's time, and very often the professors who treat the students as adults are the most effective, and are contributing not just to the knowledge of the student, but to their growth as independent thinkers as well.
We don't celebrate it since a long time.
Alas, we have lost it to the cry-baby, demaning consumer student attitude, you very well describe.
That's why university studies are going downhill. He is not there to learn. As a customer, he is, after all, always right.
And if the customer demands an A, he shall get an A. Or maybe a B, is the professor resists giving an A to a C minus student.
But I'd appreciate it if you didn't attempt to interfere with people who are looking to be educated, which is to say, guided to develop into proper humans, rather than serviced.
It has been two thousand years, and there is still no royal road to geometry, Your Majesty.
You have no idea how much I'd give just to 'hang out' in the classes of someone the caliber of Dijkstra.
If I go too fast, it is your duty to slow me down
Haven't we all met inexperienced TAs who mention the salient points but not what makes them salient, and when you call them out they hide behind their great self-confidence?
If I give homework, I give you tasks of which I believe that working on them is very instructive for you
I think everyone has had their share of ill-set or plain pointless homework at uni.
I will not use the overhead projector
A colleague had a student mutiny because he refused to put up his lecture slides for download. The students were complaining that they had to copy lecture notes from a friend if they didn't show up.
I am an educator:
It's important for accessibility and educational reasons to offer information in written form as well as lecture form.
When Dijkstra says "You will be treated as grown-ups" - this is precisely an example of where you must take this advice and assume that students are asking for genuine reasons.
It's entirely reasonable to offer freestyle lectures (as Dijkstra apparently did), but the only reason to avoid giving students full access to a complete set of written educational material for the course is through laziness/inability to do a proper job or a wish to inappropriately exert power in the student-teacher relationship.
The students were absolutely right to complain here.
Isn't that what the textbook is for? I mean, writing math problems on the blackboard to show how to solve them is dynamic and animated in a way you don't get from a textbook, but you also won't get that from downloaded lecture slides.
But, it's not always the case that recommended textbooks cover the complete syllabus of a course - in which case, they don't count.
Everyone has sick days from work. When you take a sick day, your work is sitting there when you get back. It hasn't moved.
Students don't have that luxury. The material keeps marching on without them. So not only are they having to learn material they aren't properly prepared for, they also have to go back and relearn what they missed.
Providing slides online in the 21st century is literally one of the most basic things a professor can do. Literally. Install dropbox, put the slides in the dropbox folder. Make the folder public. Done. This requires zero technical know-how, and maybe 2 minutes of signup?
The unwillingness to do that is indicative of a bad professor. Barring unreasonable requests, a professor should try to enable students to do well.
As far as saying, "just get them from a friend." This presents a few problems. 1. You need to have a friend in the class. Not always the case. 2. That friend needs to be there. Sickness travels through social groups very effectively. My friend is more likely to be sick than I am. 3. That friend needs to be at least on my level of competency for the notes to be meaningful. Not everyone's friends are as smart as they are. In fact, unless all the friends are of identical intelligence, this must be the case.
Just put the damn notes online. How lazy can you really be?
- professors have open hours
- professors can be found before or after the lecture
- professors respond to your email
- professors ever go to their offices
A good TA can help approach things from a different direction.
To be more specific, Dijkstra's organizational matters make him seem to me as somewhat cold and detached. Watching his lectures on youtube confirms this feeling. He also TEACHES in that way and frankly this is not the best way to get knowledge into students' heads. Nor will students ever feel like he really cares.
Perhaps such a person will be more engaged if he teaches a graduate course with topics from his research but from what I've seen, this is not always the case. In fact, the worst course I ever had was by a professor with numerous awards, who's also great at giving presentations and talks, but who taught his research topics like absolute crap.
> In fact I would probably fall
> asleep in his lectures.
Everything you say sounds plausible, but a recent paper[0] shows that two teachers delivering identical material, one in an organized and engaging manner, the other disorganized and unengaging, received exactly the evaluations you'd expect, but their styles resulted in exactly the opposite.
In particular, lecturer A was engaging and organized, and got excellent evaluations. Lecturer B was disorganized and unengaging. And yet in subsequent courses it was the students of lecturer B who went on to get the higher grades.
Thinking someone is an excellent lecturer is not the same as being taught effectively.
[0] HN submission[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6041803
[1] Direct link: http://www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/scarrell/profqual2.pdf
You see, Calculus courses are taught so much that the material has been developed and optimized to an extent that when I took my Calculus courses, I fell in love with math. Even somewhat more advanced courses like Linear Algebra and Complex Analysis are quite optimized for learning. Go in a little deeper into things like Real Analysis, Group Theory, Abstract Algebra and Galois Theory, and all of a sudden, everybody teaches these courses differently. Of course, these courses are taught less and they are not as optimized. THIS, I will argue is the reason for the decreased performance in the "deeper subjects".
Let me use an analogy. Let's say your first big relationship is with a really easy-going happy person and you have great times but eventually you have to part ways for some arbitrary reasons. Some time later you get into a second big relationship and this time the other person is difficult. They are battling through a lot of childhood issues and have problems with self-esteem. All of a sudden, you find yourself unable to deal well with this person, eventually you break it off.
Now, was your lack of "performance" in the second relationship due to the first one being so good or due to the second one being so crap?
Now, from the paper's conclusion:
> A final, more cynical, explanation could also relate to student effort. Students of low-value-added professors in the introductory course may increase effort in follow-on courses to help “erase” their lower than expected grade in the introductory course.
I have seen and experienced this all too often. Case in point - one of my friends got a C in Calc 1 but went on to get A's in the next few Calc courses.
This a thousand times. Most student evaluations are garbage.
>It's not his job to entertain you. It's his job to make the material available for you to study and assimilate, and to provide insight you would find difficult to gain simply by reading from a text. You falling asleep is your problem, not his.
No, but at the same time, we can and should look to optimize the ways in which we deliver material.
You want to look at the ratings that talk about the teacher's engagement in the teaching process, not in how difficult their material is. Case in point - I had an amazing Group Theory teacher and the assignments and final were really difficult. You'd expect that some people will not distinguish the two aspects of teaching and slap on a bad rating because it's so difficult. Others will see the difference and give a good rating for teaching and describe the course as difficult.
>ratemyprofessor
ROFL. If I ever get an overall good rating on ratemyprofessor, I will seriously start to question myself. That thing is a popularity contest. Some of the absolute worst on there have great ratings. Some of the comments might be useful, but that's about it.
Some instructors here ask how to set expectations so that students will be ready to take responsibility for their learning and work hard before giving up. This is a problem that consumes my attention as I offer advanced mathematics lessons (a prealgebra course using the Art of Problem Solving textbook
http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/Store/viewitem.php?item=p...
for third, fourth, and fifth graders). Many American elementary school pupils are not used to challenging mathematics lessons. I have to establish expectations appropriately to have any hope of success in class. (And I have enjoyed some gratifying successes with many of my alumni over the years.) To inform parents (and their children) in advance about what my classes are like, I have prepared some FAQ documents about mathematics learning
"Problems versus Exercises"
http://www.epsiloncamp.org/ProblemsversusExercises.php
"Repetition and Practice"
http://www.epsiloncamp.org/RepetitionPractice.php
"Links About Learning Mathematics"
http://www.epsiloncamp.org/LearningMathematics.php
and
"The Explorer is the Person who is Lost, or Courage in the Face of Stupidity"
http://www.epsiloncamp.org/CourageandStupidity.php
to help the learners get ready for the delight of taking on tough learning challenges. The last of the four FAQs is based on an inspirational speech given in various forms in various places by mathematician Paul Zeitz, a coach of the 1996 United States "dream team" to the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO), still the only IMO team ever to achieve perfect scores among all six team members. His key word from his speech is featured prominently in the FAQ and in first-day-of-class messages I give live to all my new students. It is now the "inspirational word" for many of my students as they grow up into adult life.
1994 :)
P.S. I do still have my edit window for THIS comment, so I'll add a (user-edited, alas) link to a description of the 1994 United States IMO team,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Mathematics_Competitio...
and a link with IMO results from 1994:
> 1994 :)
1992 :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_United_States_men's_Olympi...
The result? Most of the students decided that they didn't need to do anything for the class aside from take the final exam. Most of them failed, including almost half of the engineering students (who, as a result, couldn't finish an engineering degree in 4 years), and there was a university-wide outcry.
From this experience I formed the belief that a university lecturer can actually be counter-productive to the students learning the subject.
This is what is so good about being a student: You are for the first time allowed to take responsibility for your own results. Unfortunately you have to be lucky or extraordinarily talented to get similar conditions when you get out in the real world.
You must either be quite a good student or that was quite an easy/poor class. Personally, I try to make sure students have as close to a knowable outcome by mid-terms, so they can drop with a W.
>where the professor was an admitted bad lecturer.
Sometimes this is a ploy in attempt to get students to take some ownership in the process. To paraphrase "Don't expect me to magic this crap into your head with my gift of prose."
>From this experience I formed the belief that a university lecturer can actually be counter-productive to the students learning the subject.
No no no. Maybe those who didn't already know thermodynamics, or have the discipline to teach themselves felt it was important to attend lecture.
That sounds like an easy class to test out of. If the prof provides an entire semesters homework, and you can provably ace "class A amplifier bias circuit design" without attending the lecture that supposedly teaches you how, then don't go. I never skipped entire classes but I certainly skipped lectures where I could prove to myself I knew the material.
This works really well in most engineering classes where you can check your work. In fluffy stuff like English Lit being "right" means knowing the prof's politics and personal belief system, so its a bit harder to know if you're right or not, so you can't skip that lecture.
Think you know "integration by parts"? Already did the homework and got it all eventually correct? Then not much point in attending lecture that day. This has a bonus in that you get a lot more out of a lecture if you already struggled with the topic for a couple hours rather than walking in cold.
I would support that idea for quite a lot of the curriculum.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/College_Level_Examination_Progr...
They're like $80 now... in the olden days they were something like $10.
A truly excellent startup idea which no one has apparently tried (that I know of) is a MOOC focused on the CLEP "curriculum", basically a semi-continuous monster study group. There's a giant hole in the MOOC industry for testing and credentialism. Well, there you go, take your CLEP test and they handle all the testing and stuff.
This also shows the ripoff of some industry specific cert exams. Why did a Cisco CCNP Routing test cost something like $200 a decade ago for a total cost for a CCNP of about $800 but a CLEP test in 2013 is only $80? I know there's economies of scale but this is ridiculous. Outsourced reasonable priced industry certs is another MOOC startup ripe for massive disruption.
So how did I get that grade? Simple, I read the text book (and found it rather obvious and slow-going) and made many notes.
This sort of thing is also popular with students, since it means that the final exam isn't all-important.
For most professors this format would be terribly difficult. It is hard to teach. It is hard to listen and understand where students are and take them further.
Also, if I may, I'm struck by how similar pg's writing is to Dijkstra. Something about the rhythm of it and its directness.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNCAFcAbSTg
and here:
"Read Euler, read Euler.
He is the master of us all."http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD12xx/EW...
Dijkstra's dream was reducing mathematics to formal logic, Euler's approach was almost on the opposite end of the spectrum, he used a lot of intuitive arguments sometimes dabbling in areas that didn't get a solid logical foundation for centuries to come.
And yet he seemed pretty much always to be right. He didn't fall into any of the traps that await the unwary, and which are the usual reasons for formality being required. It seems clear that he really did understand what was happening at a deeper level, even if the arguments he gave were, in some cases, described now as "superbly reckless."
I'm not convinced Dijkstra would've considered Euler to have been a poor mathematician. Now I wish I'd asked when I had the chance.
It is hard to overstate the shock that came from a sum of nicely behaved functions turning into the pathological step function. If that was possible, what else could go wrong? And if infinitesmals could not be trusted, how could Calculus be put on a rigorous footing?
The question of how to put mathematics on a secure footing were central to 19th century mathematics, and the issues lead directly to set theory, and the unavoidable dead end discovered by Goedel. (Ironically the work in logic that came out of that eventually lead to nonstandard analysis, which in turn justified the infinitesmal approach and most of the infinitesmal arguments. But by then mathematics didn't much care.)
"While some of Euler's proofs are not acceptable by modern standards of mathematical rigour..."
Who is the most prolific mathematician? Either Leonhard Euler, if counting by single authorship, or Paul Erdös, if counting by collaborative publications. -- http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Who_is_the_most_prolific_mathemati...
The most prolific mathematician of all time, publishing close to 900 books. -- http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2010/apr/11/the-10-best-ma...
Euler's work in mathematics is so vast that an article of this nature cannot but give a very superficial account of it. He was the most prolific writer of mathematics of all time. -- http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Biographies/Euler.h...
He is considered to be the pre-eminent mathematician of the 18th century, and one of the greatest mathematicians ever to have lived. He is also one of the most prolific mathematicians ever; his collected works fill 60–80 quarto volumes. -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonhard_Euler
Students here are really passives and have weird expectations about course work. And teachers usually don't even show up at their classes leaving all the teaching to TAs.
P.S.: I'm not from US, in our country you could get education for free
This note could be the intro to a phenomenal learning experience, or a pompous self-important jerk. Given his impact to the field, it could actually go either way.
Can anyone here speak to personal experience with the professor?