- There is just no way around the struggle. The students have to struggle. Your job is not to take the struggle away but to show them why it is worth struggling and instil the belief that they can do it.
- The most important teaching skill is to level with them. Talk about how difficult it was for you to understand it, what helped you. Never put yourself above them. I honestly believe this is where most people fundamentally fail. Respect them. Don’t treat them like babies. Forced attendance is imo the worst symptom of this.
I taught in an inner city title one school. While it would have made teaching those who showed up easier, I'd bet that over half the students would not show up without forced attendance. We had under 2% of students who would go on to graduate a four year college and something like an 80% transitory rate (meaning 20% would complete all four years at the school - this might have been up to 95% transitory, it has been a while since I was there). Gangs, violence, and poverty and no examples of school helping anyone in their lives.
What do you do with kids in that kind of situation?
If you are teaching k-12 and especially if some of the kids have a rough situation outside of the school, at least mandatory attendance puts them in an environment insulated from those outside pressures.
However, here's a few things I'd be trying:
1) Stories. One of the best uni professors I had was always breaking up his lessons with Stories. The time some people exploded a whale with dynamite, the Lawnchair Larry flight, the time he was held at knife Point while travelling. It just made the lectures more fun and made you feel good for having showed up.
2) Inspiring examples. I'd be inclined to work to find people who had been in their situation and gotten out. Bring them to class, get them to tell their stories.
3) Relevance. Making teaching examples that are edgy and somewhat relevant to their interests. If you're teaching English, use street slang in your examples. If you're teaching math, make examples about making money etc, getting creative and meeting your world with theirs.
Probably something different and specialized compared to kids in the other 80% of schools. Like residential boot camp.
What's a good example of this? :)
Perhaps it's just the wording, but I really disagree here.
Yes, there's a natural stress process we go through while learning where our boundaries are expanded, but to struggle... it's often a sign of bad teaching.
I say this as a best selling Udemy instructor and having been a university CS tutor. Your job IS to take away the struggle. You do this by being the student, leading them to confusing situations and then overcoming that situation with them in a series of steps that are built up over time, and then having them apply that knowledge to build skill.
The thing is, that teaching a subject well takes a lot of time and effort. There are very few really great teachers out there.
No matter how good the teacher is, there's almost no student in the world that can learn effectively without actually putting in the effort of working through problems on their own. The best teachers and curricula are the ones that dose out the hard work to maximize learning.
In HN itself, I've argued with people numerous times on how challenge is a necessity for advancing in learning, but I've met with stiff resistance to this point often.
So just want to say, glad to see a practicing teacher state the obvious (to practicing teachers) in HN.
1. The students are not like you. For you, the topic is fascinating, and something you've pondered for much of your adult life. For the average student, the topic is moderately interesting, and likely quite confusing, in the first exposure that is this class.
2. Teach to the middle of the class. Be aware that the weakest students will be perplexed much of the time, and the strongest will be bored. This range is hard for you to comprehend, given your path. Note that the range is not something you can alter. It is established by the university Registrar, not by you and also not by the students.
3. Expose the students to your enthusiasm for the material. Be direct, and be personal. "The next topic is" will not motivate students as much as "Now we ready for the exciting part" or "This next bit is what I like best about this topic", etc.
4. Make the decision to enjoy your time with the students.
Personal excitement for the material is one piece, but it’s not enough. The most important thing a teacher should do is help the students internalize *why* they’re learning the material. What they can do with it.
Baking shows don’t start off telling the history of the maillard reaction, they show you the delicious cake you’re going to make. Then you make the cake. Then (if it’s a class and not the food network) you learn the important details.
Teaching is storytelling. The main character is the student. What challenge will they overcome? How will they grow as a result? If the teacher makes them hungry to know the answer, then students will not just tolerate the information, they’ll seek it out, challenge it, and ask for more.
Depending on the topic there is often no "why". Most classes a student takes are required and they have absolutely zero interest in them and they will willfully forget them as soon as the semester is over
Or if you're pre-med, it still may never be useful to you to learn all the different ways atoms can arrange themselves into molecules unless you're going to someday do novel drug research, but medical school admissions and clinical licensing boards have not yet figured out a way to craft pre-requisites based on the specific unknowable future paths of individual applicants and they have to require everything that might be needed by any kind of doctor.
If the honest answer is that of the few students that every do anything with the material, those will be academics who go on to just study the material more, that should be articulated too.
"In this course we will be descending into a branch of mathematics that hitherto has found no practical application. Perhaps some of you will go on to find some."
True for the weakest students, but it's always possible to give harder material/exercises to the strongest students. And it doesn't even take much time for the teacher because these students are more autonomous. I only taught CS and maths, but it's very easy to keep the good students busy.
I personally like teaching CS lab classes. The key is to design projects with gradual difficulty. Even the weakest students should manage to complete a few tasks.
But overall, I think that heterogeneity makes teaching much more complicated that what it could be, especially when basic pre-requisites aren't met. It's a bit heartbreaking when you get students which are obviously losing their time and money.
I sneak in advanced things into lectures and preface it with "for students that are more advanced or have more prior knowledge in the subject..." I usually see the more advanced students perk up and the other students exhale and zone out a bit to rest their brain. Seems to work fairly well.
This makes a huge difference to me. There were subjects that were exceedingly boring and difficult to me at first but I managed to find joy in them because teachers were so enthusiastic about them it was like they were filled with childlike wonder and it inspired me to give it a chance instead of just going through the motions.
I've had teachers who seemed to be there just for the paycheck and it made me be there just for the grades too, thoroughly depressing.
I would add: Let them see you sweat a bit. When they see you are working hard to make a great class for them, they too put in more work.
- High school classes are typically too easy
- So kids develop poor study habits which don't serve them well for college material
- And most high school teachers are bad at getting kids excited about the subject because they're exhausted themselves from babysitting and treat the work as a job. College professors can be bad at "teaching" but for different reasons (being researchers first and foremost). This disconnect in the reasons for bad education being different in environments is also not taught well to kids ahead of time (because who in this formula would? Requires good parenting or very self-conscious teachers at all levels).
There are definitely exceptions to this rule, but they are too few to solve the overarching problems.
The UK based O/A system, which is used in many of the former colonies, is not as easy as the North American high school system. O levels is easy. But A levels content is almost as difficult as a typical first year university course.
Yet, students from those systems also face an equivalent huge shock when they switch to university. The reason is fundamentally different. In school, students are infantalized and their own education is not considered their responsibility. In university, nobody used to care whether you sank or swam. So students struggled. But that has changed quite a lot now. Many universities have almost a "no child left behind" policy - yes they do think child not adult who chose to attend university.
So even if students in the past used to attend office hours (I don't know), today they don't because it is no longer their responsibility to learn.
We leave our children in a weird bubble where they don't get to experience the world much beyond school during primary and secondary ages, and those who go on to university typically don't deviate from that bubble until graduation. Better life balance through youth, perhaps especially with more involvement in the workplace, seems like one potential solution.
The only reason I wouldn't recommend this approach is that working full time and going to school was brutal.
Note that in the US, it can be easier to get federal financial aid after age 25 (parental financial assets are no longer considered).
A type of maturity that develops much more slowly while being in the education system.
i have met (okay, seen eyes of) ~12y old kids with probably "35y-old"-grade experience behind... And i have met a few 38 or 43y old human exemplars that barely pass for 6-7-10y old at most.
yeah, teaching is hard. You have to learn more than them, about them, in no time, in order to build the (different) bridge to everyone. Takes... time. And gumption.
Why are professors made to teach the same subject each year? Why not create a set of lectures by the best in the field or even setup a committee of professors on how best to craft a particular lecture and create a video, freeze it and distribute it. So many professors spend time in writing an equation on the board, hey why not latex it? I believe each university should hire a powerpoint / slideshow person who can translate professors material into modern format to avoid repeating of work.
Once the foundational material is out in the open, the real fun can begin with discussions and other storytelling activities which incorporates philosophy, history and how the topic came about to be and future open-ended problems.
A few things:
- Professors, even best in the field, may disagree. In the first lecture for my AI course I talk about how cognitive scientists still can't agree on a definition for what intelligence IS. Extend that to other domains and I'm willing to bet there'd be similar opinions in deciding "best"
- Not every domain can be distilled into a lecture. While I can (and have) recorded videos for martial art techniques, they still need to attend class to drill technique.
- This builds on the above point, but 'time on task' is still one of our most identifying features for determining student mastery. This doesn't mean we should revert to drilling endless worksheets, but rather 'learning' takes time to occur and can't be achieved via watching videos
- Building on the prior point, Mickie Chi's ICAP framework labels "watching lectures" as a passive activity. While learning can happen, more learning gains can be made with more engaging activities (drilling [active], self-explanation [constructive], and revising drafts [interactive]).
- I don't mean for this point to make me sound like a miser, but the majority of students just won't read or watch the material. Again, not an attack on 'the youths', none of us read TOS and user agreements. Even in flipped classrooms, if not well designed then you'll have students that need to review the material and miss out of the in-class discussion.
- "I believe each university should hire a powerpoint / slideshow person who can translate professors material into modern format to avoid repeating of work". That's sort of what some professors do with textbooks
I do agree that once you establish a student's foundational knowledge, then you can "play" (as I've described it). The issue is that establishing that foundation is hard and how do you do it in less motivated students? One option is to say they need more self-regulated learning, but how do you build THAT up?
I'm a firm believer that lectures should never be necessary, give me the recorded lecture which I'll watch if I want to, I'll read the content myself, and I'll ask the teacher questions over the time where lectures would usually be given, and it will be easier since not everyone has to be there at once.
Another trick that worked for me: If there are high-quality lecture notes, download a note, set a timer for the length of the lecture, and aim to read through the entire note within the time period that it took to deliver the lecture. Being on the clock creates a little pressure that helps me focus. It's OK if I don't achieve 100% comprehension; I basically never achieve 100% comprehension during a live lecture anyways.
The only problem with these techniques is that it's easy to fall way behind if you don't discipline yourself to consume lectures at about the same rate they're being delivered. Cal Newport's book How to Become a Straight-A Student has good tips like blocking out chunks of time during your week in advance to do study specific topics or do specific assignments.
But yeah I think the idea of preparing quality content (and potentially reusable content) and using the class time to instead get interactive feedback is the flipped classroom idea, which is popular.
> Hi! I'm a PhD student studying computer science at Rice University.
This means that we are on the same career path (I am currently an assistant professor in theoretical CS in Europe). I wish you of course best of luck!
Here is the harshest truth about teaching I learned during my PhD:
If you are focusing on teaching too much, you are setting yourself up for failure.
This sounds cruel, and in fact I am much like you, I love teaching and I love self-improvement and it is quite easy for me to invest time into my teaching prep, presentation, and more and see measurable results in class quality and usually also student feedback.
However, at least in my neck of the woods (i.e. Europe), almost all gates and gatekeepers for you as a PhD student, and later postdoc, are checking your research. At some places they really do expect you to have K publications in the top 3 CS conferences or you will not be considered at all -- and it seems these thresholds are only getting higher. Here I mean for example invitation-only workshops, postdoc positions with top advisors, and later also permanent positions.
On the other hand, if you are a talented scientist, they usually only care that your teaching skills are at the bare minimum -- have you taught something? Yes? Great.
Now orator/presentation skills are critical and presenting a coherent lecture plan might be useful for a final presentation at an interview for a permanent position. But even there, it is more about you knowing what you want to teach and how it complements the department than about your past achievements (i.e., how much you have put in a course previously).
My PhD advisor usually said that he likes to dig into teaching when research is not going well. I agree with that -- teaching really is fulfilling to me and I love to improve my class and see people happy with it, and research is all about global ranking (which is tough on anyone's psyche) and generating progress which is the fun part but sometimes takes a long time. However, at your stage of your career, the research really can't go slow.
---
PS: If the author reads this, since it is a self-post, your class sounds really nice and it is actually one I would have loved to attend. My research is in online algorithms -- a field which you can rephrase as seeing some theoretical problems as two player games between a solver and an adversary -- and among other things I would like to consider utilizing all the techniques of chess solvers (which cannot evaluate the game fully, but "almost") and transfer it to other areas of online algorithms.
You spent 5 years teaching a class that, judging from your words, you probably prepared and improved very thoroughly. That is a lot of hours of work. Are you sure if you devoted all those hours to reading textbooks, papers, doing experiments, etc. on your field, you wouldn't have achieved an even deeper understanding?
Maybe yes, but if so, I honestly think you're in a minority. As an academic myself, I like teaching and I do learn things from it, but it's far from the most efficient way to learn a scientific field. If I had a pure research position I'm pretty sure that my research productivity would be better.
This is good advice. And this is true even once you become a professor. All time spent on teaching will go against your career progression. Even if you're tenured and don't care about promotion, you'll feel like an imposter in your department if you're not somewhat competitive research wise.
Generally speaking, there's no recognition in teaching in general, and at university level it's often not even considered as a job by itself.
Maybe it's different in Asia, but that was my experience in the western countries where I worked.
While I'm also in Europe, my bet is that this is universal and won't change in the foreseeable future.
The reason is that teaching is practically impossible to evaluate. How do you quantitatively measure which professors provide high-quality teaching? By grades? No, easiest course wins. By employability? No, it depends a lot on the field, a philosophy professor can be amazing but that won't create jobs in philosophy. Student polls? Correlation with actual quality is really weak, and I say this as someone who has good polls - there is a strong influence of difficulty as well as the subject itself (a CS student will almost always prefer programming to physics, and it's not the physics professor's fault), apart from gender bias.
In my country they try to give an equal weight to teaching equally with respect to research in applications for positiosn and tenure, but since there is no realistic metric, the bulk of the score ends up being about "years teaching" or "number of hours taught" which is the only objective number that they can come up with. So it becomes basically a seniority factor and since your seniority is what it is and preparing high-quality lectures won't give you more hours or years, the outcome is still that focusing too much on teaching is bad for your career.
[0] https://acoup.blog/2023/04/28/collections-academic-ranks-exp...
/me not an academic at all. I had no idea it was such a struggle.
I have been fortunate enough to work at such a university for the past 20 years. We have a deep endowment, small class sizes, and extensive support for our faculty research projects. Undergraduates at our school are often engaged in research projects as well.
For me, this is like an academic utopia: a blend of teaching and research with a primary focus on teaching. There are many other universities like mine.
Keep it up, OP. This is a wonderful post!
Yes, I'm fully aware of the fact that teaching isn't really a priority in academia - for that reason, I probably won't be reviving my class in the near future. I really do like teaching, but it doesn't get me much closer to any of my current goals.
Sure glad we spend a lot of money on football coaches, though.
I put it in reverse: colleges are failing to understand what high schools deal with and what we have to do in response. We are the ones who have laws constraining what we can and can’t do (especially in public school), how we have to approach certain things, and even what content we have to teach. (I am required by law, for example, to teach the content standards promulgated by the state. If I wander outside my standards, that’s good cause for being fired. Now, fortunately, I teach a subject where our standards are extremely broad and loose, so I can fit almost anything under them. But history is a core subject that isn’t a focus of testing regimes, so they generally ignore us.)
By the way, I’m not saying it’s a good thing that high schools don’t prepare students for college. But literally the response from our administration when a faculty member points out that our policies aren’t helping prepare students for college is that “not all our students will go to college.” Maybe half-ish of our students do.
We as a society just don't seem to give a damn about that outcome. (Cf teacher salaries, the truancy issue you mention, standardized testing, content standards as strict prescription instead of a minimum,....)
And you're right, maybe colleges need to adapt to that reality as well. Or maybe there's a step missing between high school and college. But, again, we don't seem to particularly care about fixing that as a society.
First of all, I explicitly signed up to teach. At my university, fewer than ten undergraduates per semester teach a class, and typically it's for students who want to hang out and teach something they like. In order to teach, they have to take an introductory class on pedagogy first, which mostly covers assignment and syllabus design.
The student-taught-course program at my university exists far more for the (undergraduate) instructors' benefit than to teach students; its job is to give students a chance to experiment with teaching early on.
Again, this isn't your fault. This is a massive failure of the education system in general. We pretend that as long as somebody knows the subject, they're decent teachers. (We pretend that because it's cheaper, and we pretend it because otherwise established faculty would have to admit that a large number of their members are extremely bad teachers)
There is no shortage of material available. Then again, as you say, without the proper support to get you grounded and pointed to the right entry level resources it is difficult to all figure out.
This. 100% this. How do you make someone understand that struggling is good? That - more than anything else - is what I want to be able to teach.
Any tips?
It's something I usually mention to my students during the later part of the semester - humans are one of the hardest problems out there! We're irrational, something that works for one person won't for the other, even if we know something's bad we'll keep doing it.
[1] https://busynessgirl.com/better-to-be-frustrated-than-bored/
Also, frankly, positive reinforcement will get you a lot of mileage.
1. Nobody wants to admit they don’t know. Not in front of you, certainly not in front of their peers. Related, almost nobody that needs to goes to office hours.
2. Teaching the right way to do something is the minimum. Teaching how to avoid all traps; the appealing and intuitive but incorrect or inefficient ways to do something is better. Students will amaze you with all the ways there are to fail to solve a problem.
3. There may be steps you are not articulating, because you're not aware you're doing them. If one student gets it wrong, it's probably them, if most of them get it wrong, it’s probably you. As a new teacher, you will learn as much from their struggles as they do.
4. Related, there are steps you have mastered, like a tightrope walker, than can not be immediately emulated, despite the apparent simplicity of the instructions.
5. You chose this material, they may not have.
6. Related, you want to share the material and your enthusiasm with them, which is good, but they may only want to get the minimum they need to get by.
7. As a teacher, despite the lack of respect you may feel, they see you as an authority figure. You are the institution. You are not one of them, even if you are. They don't want to see you in the hall or at the grocery store; it does not matter your respective ages.
1. This is absolutely true. But you can cultivate an environment where students feel safe enough to admit they don’t know. It takes time and effort. It requires you to be honest when you don’t know something. But it can be done. That said, I suspect that is going to be more difficult in a college environment just because you have class less often. I see my (high school) kids more often, so I can establish that safe environment in, say, a month or so. And then I have them for the rest of the year.
2. “Students will amaze you with all the ways there are to fail to solve a problem.” This is so true! And they will also amaze you with all the ways they misunderstand instructions or directions. You’ll receive back an answer that you just don’t even understand how they came to it and when you talk to them, you realize they read your instructions a certain way. Then you realize that you could write your instructions more clearly than you did. So I’d add to this: don’t assume that a bizarre answer that you receive is because the student is dumb or high or something. Ask how they came up with it. Listen to their thought process. And be open to the possibility that you could modify your instructions (or content teaching) to avoid a similar misunderstanding in the future.
3. Yes! Again, yes!!
6. I would only add this: enthusiasm is never a bad thing to express towards your material. (I mean, I’m a history teacher, so it’s going to look different when I’m teaching, like, the Industrial Revolution than when I’m on the Holocaust, but yeah.) Just realize that there will be plenty of students who do not share your enthusiasm and never will, and don’t be hurt or offended by it. But don’t be afraid to be enthusiastic!
7. This is one that I sort of just disagree with, but it could be because I teach high school, not college. Students always run up to me if they see me out and about. I’m not saying they all love me. But they do tend to take special pleasure in seeing you around. It’s almost like they’re surprised that you actually exist outside of the school building. (I’ll stop with that, although there’s a much larger discussion to be had around high school teachers being involved in community activities. If you want to maximize your impact, teaching in high school is so much more than just delivering content.)
Like I said though, great comment!
I am sure one of your students will build something amazing with Rust some day, because they worked on a practical application and had the resources to "level up" on this very useful skill. Hopefully they send you a message about it :)
Kids that age are still trying to figure out how to be their own selves. It’s very new. I mean we all try to figure that out throughout our lives, but middle school and high school are when you first start to emerge as your own person. And a lot of figuring that out is done in response to your environment.
The author is describing precisely what ever video game designer learns to do: build the right scaffolding at every step so people can be in Flow [1]
I've always enjoyed this symmetry between teaching & video game making. They both try to do the same thing in that way. (after all, video games are really just "voluntary work" when you think about it)
[1] See figure 1 https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/cognitive-flow-the-psyc...
Only 6 students signed up.
At least it was an optional class, so the students did it on purpose.
Still, it's hard to teach new people from the ground up. Skills, and motivation are just so different.
Some learn fast and some slow and in the end you need to define what constitutes a good grade.
I did online classes. They had to go through free code camp and every month, I would let them create a small project, to see what they learned. Some students built stuff that was way more than what I expected and some couldn't even do a basic form.
In the end, two of them even got a job as frontend devs, so I guess I did an okay job.
To me this is just formalising what students do anyway: namely, help each other understand and complete tasks in a course. The difference is that the instructor is actively giving students access to other students' code. I found the process motivated me to get stuck into a task, rather than leaving it to the last minute.
My Physics I class in college was a bit of both. First part of class was lecture, then we did practice assignments in class as groups, then there was out-of-class lecture videos and assignments. The out of class lectures weren't very long, I'd say under 20 minutes per lecture day if memory serves. Just long enough to cover a small topic in enough detail.
"all physical theories, their mathematical expressions apart ought to lend themselves to so simple a description 'that even a child could understand them.'" - Einstein, to deBroglie [in Clark, 1972, p.418]
I think most teachers would consider half the students paying attention to be a roaring success.
First, a course is there to convey knowledge and skills, not to please students. I'm not fond of hard rules in education, but some are simply right. Rule number one is: set the levels in advance: determine prerequisites and end goals. You may accept students outside the range, but it's their risk to take a class that's too easy or too hard, not your responsibility to overcome. You could always split it into multiple classes (basics and advanced), but that's already setting yourself up for more work.
Second: try to use literature, books or articles, for material that takes too much time in class. It's better that they come with questions than that they leave with questions. However, I'm aware this doesn't work well, since students don't read before class.
Third, I'm not teaching anymore, but my former colleagues and friends who teach and even direct programs, tell that the flipped classroom isn't only a nebulous concept, it also doesn't work. Covid has shown that. Developing a technically complex class that actually works is going to be very, very time consuming, and not rewarding at all. Cynically: when the department finds out you're not actually physically teaching, they'll assign you to something else. Or give your class to someone else.
Fourth, try to be interactive in class: explain, then give short, direct assignments. Your topic is unfortunately too complex to do anything meaningful during class, but perhaps you can ask them to look at some code and write down what it does, compare two different position evaluators, find out why a certain move can't be returned by a certain algorithm, etc. The trick is to get them to actually work out and write down answers (and it can be wrong; there should be no scoring for these exercises), not wait for someone else to tell them, whether it's you or the bright, interested student who's going to pass anyway. Everyone should apply their full attention to the problem for a short time.
Another cynical remark: it seems you're interested in knowledge transfer. You don't get high ratings for that. If your school evaluates teachers based on student feedback, it's a losing game. The only thing left, if you want to stay in that game, is to make it "fun."
