TITLE: You Are Here → X
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: December 18, 2008 4:28 PM
DESC:
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BODY:
As I type, my students are taking the final exam in my
programming languages course. A couple might prefer to
be reading my blog than taking an exam, but perhaps not.
I always enjoyed final exams as a student. They marked
the end of something and offered a challenge.
My students can also rest comfortable tonight in the
notion that their duties for the course are behind them,
yet I still face grading the behemoth I am foisting on
them right now. Even still, I am already beginning to
put this course behind me, thinking back to what we've
learned and ahead to what comes next for a few us, the
course on programming language translation.
In my mind, I keep coming back to a
punch line
I heard on TV the other night:
All I'm saying is, if you keep living and dying on
whether or not a person changes, well... you're
not gonna make it as a doctor, that's all.
This is
Dr. Cox,
the "sarcastic, bitter mentor" of the protagonist on
the show Scrubs. I don't watch the show a
lot, but I have seen this episode a few times, and
it ends with a scene in which this line is the lone
heartfelt moment among Cox's typical schtick. His
protege is having a hard time accepting that one of
his patients, who had sidestepped a cancer scare,
lights up a cigarette as he leaves the hospital,
fully intent on resuming a habit that may kill him.
Cox wants the newbie to see that a doctor simply
cannot take personally the behaviors of all his
patients; all he can do is treat them and, as best
he can, try to teach them how to be healthy. The
rest is up to them.
Students are a lot like patients. They come to us
for help -- not treatment, but presumably education.
My role as "doctor" is, as best I can, to teach them
how to think and act like a computer scientist or
programmer. But not all students have the same
commitment, or motivation, or resources as the rest.
It's easy to get caught up our own desire to teach,
excite, and communicate and forget that not every
student will leave the room inspired or changed.
If a teacher lives and dies in his own mind on
whether or not every student in a class "gets it"
or leaves the room changed, well, he is going to
have a long and painful life in the classroom.
Every course will seem a failure.
The news is not all that bleak, though. Some students
leave the room inspired. That energy can carry me a
long way. And most students leave a course changed,
if only a little bit. For some, that may be all the
farther it goes. But for others, that little change
is a seed waiting for the right conditions to come
along some time in the future. At that moment, it
will bloom into something no one can predict.
I guess this week I'm feeling a bit like Uncle Bob,
who has been writing a lot of code lately -- hurray!
-- but is
disappointed in his performance.
Programmers think about what it is like to program
in an ideal world, just as teachers idealize what will
happen in the classroom. When they get into the
trenches, though, they encounter their own weaknesses
and frailty. I run into that as a programmer
sometimes,
and as a teacher, too. Like Uncle Bob, I can recite
a litany of how badly I do what I do: continually
fighting the demons that say, take it easy and just
lecture; they'll get it; the constant allure of not
grading an assignment thus not being able to give the
prompt feedback I know that some students need; do
what is expedient, not what's best; it will all work
out in the end. But does it?
Uncle Bob closes with:
There is much I have yet to learn about writing software
well. So, although after 56 years of life, and 43 years
of programming, I have achieved a modicum of success,
and even some glory, Chef Baglio is right. It is from
that point that you really start to learn.
You start learning _here_, at this point,
for whatever the current value of
"this"
is.
As I was thinking about my final exam last week, I started
to wonder what terms and concepts would be most on my
students' minds as they studied. So I created a
wordle:
This makes for an odd summary of the semester, a
flashlight onto my vocabulary, and an unusual piece
of art.
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