Comment by beej71
4 hours ago
After 20 industry years, I've been teaching CS for the last 7. I sincerely hope that I figure it out before I retire. :) Doing this job effectively is more challenging than anything I've done in my career. I've read a lot about teaching, and it's amazing how much of it doesn't resonate for me. What has been the absolute best is sitting in on other instructors' classes and learning from them. And being completely flexible in how I teach--there really is no single solution to everything. "Be like water".
As for the students who don't apply themselves, I know exactly who you are talking about, of course. And often they're among the most capable people in the class. There's also no single thing that works here. But I've had some success with asking them point-blank, "What's your plan for passing this class?" But that doesn't work with everyone.
Yeah, honestly if I were to do the lecturing again, I would probably get some training first.
I, like a lot of people, thought it would be relatively easy for me because I've always been relatively good at explaining things to people on an individual level. For example, at previous jobs I was the person who was there to help explain functional programming concepts to people from different backgrounds, and I was often tasked as being the "theory guy" for the junior engineers when they were having trouble optimizing.
But there were some problems with my thinking. First, sort of by definition if someone is asking for help they're kind of invested with paying attention and understanding the concept. Second, there's a pretty big difference between explaining something to a single person (especially a person you already kind of know) and an entire class of ~15-20 people, all of which are different humans with different histories and backgrounds.
I also think I took things a bit more personally than I should have. I didn't have any training or practice, and I just jumped right into the teaching part. I think I did "ok" given that, but that's not exactly reassuring..."My professor for the class I paid money for wasn't quite as bad as he could have been."