Hacker News Reader

I love Brian Harvey. He sits in on my compilers class and gives Prof Bodik a hard time. Seems like every other class you hear Harvey yell, "Nooo" from the back of the room. Its hilarious.

View on HN

Sometimes, at an advanced level of teaching, these kinds of 'interventions' are pre-planned by teachers to put two sides of a question. Students love it.

Unplanned interventions can make it harder to present hard ideas. Quite often in maths you have to present hard stuff as a process of 'diminishing deception' or as a move from concrete things in the world through procedural routines to abstract concepts, see

http://homepages.warwick.ac.uk/staff/David.Tall/themes/how-h...

and the sample Chapter 1 for one model of that process.

I'd imagine a colleague who has a different way of unwinding the ideas jumping in part way through a presentation like that might reduce the clarity of the presentation.

Just wondering...

That's actually exactly what I'd imagine he'd do (it would be even funnier if he was chucking potstickers at him...for those that don't know that's an inside joke from his Simply Scheme book...I can't remember if it was also mentioned in CS61A too :-).

Thanks for sharing!

Brian ... likes potstickers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com