Things I learned from teaching

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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. 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!

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.

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.

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.

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.