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: "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 Thoughts:

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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