[Novalug] Teaching & CS

Clif Flynt clif@cflynt.com
Tue Jun 21 00:38:35 EDT 2011


On Mon, Jun 20, 2011 at 11:40:19PM -0400, Jay Hart wrote:
> When I made the comment that tenured profs have no incentive to update
> skillset, I should have provided an example.
> 

Hmm, I guess I should have caveated my "prof's keep current" as
"the ones I've worked with keep current and change the class emphasis
every few years."

The kinds of projects that are hot and can get the average student
interested change over time.  In the early '90s, a quick HTML lesson
and writing a CGI script would get interest.  A few years later, doing
something with games or multimedia was the hot topic.  What you expect
to use as an major exercise will affect what order you cover topics,
so the whole class changes with a change in the exercise.

> While at Case one of my Comp Sci classes had a large programming component to
> it.  On opening day of class with 200+ students and a tenured prof the
> question comes up which lang to use.
> ...
> 
> So naturally the prof followed suit and said that all programming for the
> semester would be Pascal.  Saved him having to update his class notes he'd
> probably been using for the last 15 years or so.

If the class was 200, that might explain a lot.  Nobody in academia
gives a $#!# about a cattle-call lecture (except Richard Feynman,  and
he was a bit of a maverick).

  There's no contact between professor and student.  When there's no
feedback, there's nothing to give a teacher any incentive to teach.  I
can get as much satisfaction talking to a wall.

I've never taught a class of more than 30 students.  Usually I teach
10-20 students at a time.  At that size you know each student and you
can taylor your teaching accordingly.

The schools I've worked with all have 20-30 student classes.  Maybe 
that's because I've worked with schools that don't specialize in CS,
so they don't have hundreds of CS majors to funnel through a system.

Clif

-- 
... Clif Flynt ... http://www.cwflynt.com ... clif@cflynt.com ...
.. Tcl/Tk: A Developer's Guide (2nd edition) - Morgan Kauffman ..
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