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Posted on: November 3rd, 2009 by Famous Phil
This topic came up in a CSE 505 (programming languages) lecturer last night and I decided that I’d share the truth with my readers (you). If you didn’t know, I am a teaching assistant for the 2nd part of the introduction to Java course at UB. When I took CSE116 originally (the course I now TA for), I didn’t really grasp the material well and I admittedly was quite lost. Now that I teach the material (and assist students with the material), I know the material quite well. What happened?
Last night in CSE505, Dr. Jayaraman was giving a lecture and came to a power point slide that had a typo on it. Naturally during the lecture, a student corrected him, and he admitted that he does make mistakes. He then went into an aside how many professors want to learn new subjects and the other staff members suggest they teach a course on that subject. He said that it is very true that professors end up teaching courses on material that they’ve never learned before. Furthermore, many of the professors will admit (especially to their TAs that they are only a week or two ahead of the students who are learning the material). Off the top of my head, I can name off two professors at UB that can fit this description to a tee! I’m sure that if I thought, I could name off a few more.
So now onto my case. Being a TA has really re-enforced this concept of learning the material thoroughly. I often have to review concepts a week or two before they come up in the lab that I formally teach the concepts to. I firmly believe that if I cannot do the material thoroughly myself, I have no business in teaching it or expecting someone to do it for me. This is why I often do the work before the students and figure out exactly where I fail so that I can warn my students of what they will run into.
In addition to being a TA, I also offer a lecture series on website development. My original reason for wanting to offer a web development series was to improve my speaking skills which aren’t up to par (see my blog from last April…). I must say that since becoming a TA and Lecturer, I have become much better at speaking to audiences and my shaking has definitely dropped to non existent.
With my website development series offering, I expected to get over the anxiety of presenting, what I didn’t expect to learn was that I really sucked on terminology in website development. Sure, I made a great famousphil.com over the course of 6 months, and sure, I got everything working flawlessly and securely; but could I teach how I did it formally. i quickly found out that there were so many pieces that I take for granted.
If you would like an example, here is one. In XHTML Strict development, there is always the same header that should be placed on every page. This is: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN”
“http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd”>. Other than knowing how to copy paste this line of code specifying the document type, I never actually knew what any of it meant (other than it required that I program in Strict XHTML). Giving a lecture on this line really made me spend a half hour researching what everything meant and why it was necessary.
It isn’t that I don’t know web design, but formally, I needed to learn a lot to give lectures that made some sense. Normally I’d just assume that the HTML specifications I’m writing are correct. This lecture series has really taught me a lot about how to formally develop websites. I’m also finding that I’m a whole 2 days ahead of the students who are attending the lectures! Fortunately, it has met my original goal of improving my public speaking skills to groups of students. Hopefully I can get some feedback from the students and perhaps offer the same series again next semester, but a bit more organized and a bit easier to understand.
That is all I have to say. Feel free to leave your two cents. Oh, and that blog on Exchange gateways is coming, I just need to update it. Ubuntu 9.10 was released and I’d like to have it current for this new update to Ubuntu!
After discussing this further with a professor, I completely overlooked one point. That is, normally professors have many years of experience in related topics. For example, prior to teaching website development, I have been in the field for about 7 years and I understand what most HTML tags do. I can use the knowledge that I have to research information that might not be that clear to me. I know for a fact that I couldn’t teach an art history course because I just don’t have the background in that field to know where to begin. So teaching the material does require some background in the subject matter, it just doesn’t necessarily mean that you know that subject explicitly.
Tags: Lecturer, Series, TA, Teach, teaching, Website Development
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Posted on: April 16th, 2009 by Famous Phil
I suppose a good place to introduce this topic is that I am a computer science student at the University at Buffalo going onto my 4th year of studies. I have formed many opinions of professors which are both good and bad, and I have an idea of who the good professors are and who are bad, but I have rarely asked myself why the professors fall into good / bad on my list… that is until a lecture yesterday by a possible future UB professor.
This person was well dressed and came in to lecture about Graham’s scan algorithm for solving the Convex Hull problem. Our normal professor went over this algorithm the prior class and this made perfect sense. Unfortunately, the candidate didn’t make much sense. Unfortunately, if I didn’t already know the algorithm, and his power point slides would be a start to understanding the algorithm, nothing more. This candidate had an Asian accent, although I understood what he was saying, I was still clueless, so I don’t blame the accent.
So what do I blame, the excellent slide show, the professor, or the overall teaching style? I believe that I can blame none of the above, and rather blame the teaching techniques. I have had many professors here at UB, and the professors that I have always understood use a chalk board and / or overhead projector (for writing). These professors often set goals for each lecture and end up following through on every goal. They prepare practical examples and work through them step by step in class. This is a research university, so theory is a necessary evil in class. I am the type of person that can understand the theory behind the answer only AFTER I see a practical example specifying a specific case of the theory. Professors who tend to be good for me always go through an example, then provide the theory and background into why the example worked.
The professors that I rarely (in some cases never) have understood use a PowerPoint slideshow, premade lecture notes, and/or read directly off from a sheet of paper. I also should add that these professors seem to rely on their notes and just end up reading off the slide, which makes class seem pointless and useless. I now understand why many students end up not going to class (something that I still do, although it is normally useless). These professors often forget to include practical examples, and prefer to refer their students to homework assignments that are nearly impossible to complete without first learning a lot of background information on their own. At first, I didn’t go and learn the background information that these types of professors seem to expect, and this is what I blame many of my first year bad grades on.
There is one professor that has used both of these above methods. This professor has a slight egyptian accent, and this proves to me that accent does not hurt understanding the material. The professor for the first 5 weeks of class used a projector and a writing tablet to give a lecture with PowerPoint / pdf slides. He would often write over these slides with his tablet. Unfortunately, the tablet wasn’t very good at allowing him to write, and this is why his written notes on the tablet were nearly impossible to understand. I would end up following exactly what he said as he wrote on the slides to get decent notes. He would also end up reading directly off from the solved example slides (Most of the time, this was the case and he’d never write on these slides). His slides mostly focused on theory, there may have been a few practical examples. For this part of the tested class, I did very poorly. Then he switched to a chalk board (at the suggestion of the class). The following lectures had many more examples and were much easier to follow. He always made his thoughts known on each part that he wrote and went from step A to step B … to the final step instead of skipping steps. I ended up doing much better on the test that focused on this material.
Another similarity that I have noticed (although not as noticable) is that the good professors don’t use the microphone that is provided to them. I have found that the microphone (even for big 400 person lecture halls) often cancels and turns into white noise, especially in the middle of the lecture hall. The students who attend lecture halls to learn typically sit in the front row and the people who sit in the back often are there just to be present and end up surfing the internet when they could easily sit in the front of the lecture hall if they wanted to learn (there ARE ALWAYS open seats in the front). I prefer professors who don’t use a microphone and just speak up a little bit (or keep the same level like many professors that speak up AND have the microphone on). I do understand that there are a few professors who cannot raise their voice (these are very soft spoken), and for these professors, I have found that the mic does help somewhat but they have to speak very quietly with the mic on.
So, you might ask, what made me write a blog like this, I must be mad at someone who can’t teach (*laughs*). Well, that isn’t the case at all. A few weeks ago, I was asked to give a 10 minute lecture on what a Java Constructor is. I knew a little bit about what I said above (I am a certified peer tutor through the CRLA), but I didn’t give it any thought. I thought that I would do a practical demonstration directly in a Java environment and play with the code until I ran out of time. I figured that I would have a lot of thoughts to say during the 10 minute lecture. I also had sample code written because I was afraid that I couldn’t squeeze enough material into that 10 minutes. I have to admit that I was very wrong at doing this approach! I should have either taken a piece of chalk or an empty compiler and worked with that. I now know for the future to do that if ever asked to again. I also know that I’m very nervous when I get in front of a group of people who I believe are much smarter than I am, and therefore, I’m sure that nervousness also aided in making me not state what exactly was on my mind.
Although I doubt many of my professors and teachers will see this blog, I really hope that someone who educates reads this blog and picks up some tips that I have found can make or break a good lecture on a good topic!
Tags: comprehension, computer, cons, education, lecture, professor, pros, science, teaching, understanding, university
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