TITLE: Yesterday's Questions Can Have Different Answers Today AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford DATE: April 26, 2015 9:55 AM DESC: ----- BODY: I wrote on Twitter Thursday [ 1 | 2 ] that I end up modifying my lecture notes every semester, no matter how well done they were the last time I taught the course. From one semester to the next, I find that I am more likely to change the introductions, transitions, and conclusions of a session than the body. The intros, transitions, and conclusions help to situate the material in a given place and time: the context of this semester and this set of students. The content, once refined, tends to stabilize, though occasionally I feel a need to present even it in a different way, to fit the current semester. Novelist Italo Calvino knew this feeling as well, when he was preparing to be interviewed:

Rarely does an interviewer ask questions you did not expect. I have given a lot of interviews and I have concluded that the questions always look alike. I could always give the same answers. But I believe I have to change my answers because with each interview something has changed either inside myself or in the world. An answer that was right the first time may not be right again the second.

This echoes my experience preparing for lecture. The answer that was right the last time does not seem right again this time. Sometimes, I have changed. With any luck, I have learned new things since the last time I taught the course, and that makes for a better story. Sometimes, the world has changed: a new programming language such as Clojure or Scala has burst onto the scene, or a new trend in industry such as mobile app development has made a different set of issues relevant to the course. I need to tell a different story that acknowledges -- and takes advantage of -- these changes. Something else always changes for a teacher, too: the students. It's certainly true the students in the class are different every time I teach a course. But sometimes, the group is so different from past groups that the old examples, stories, and answers just don't seem to work. Such has been the case for me this semester. I've had to work quite a bit to understand how my students think and incorporate that into my class sessions and homework assignments. This is part of the fun and challenge of being a teacher. We have to be careful not to take this analogy too far. Teaching computer science is different from an author giving an interview about his or her life. For one thing, there is a more formal sense of objective truth in the content of, say, a programming language course. An object is still a closure; a closure is still an object that other code can interact with over time. These answers tend to stay the same over time. But even as a course communicates the same fundamental truths from semester to semester, the stories we need to tell about these truths will change. Ever the fantastic writer, Calvino saw in his interview experience the shape of a new story, a meta-story of sorts:

This could be the basis of a book. I am given a list of questions, always the same; every chapter would contain the answers I would give at different times. ... The changes would then become the itinerary, the story that the protagonist lives. Perhaps in this way I could discover some truths about myself.

This is one of the things I like about teaching. I often discover truths about myself, and occasionally transform myself. ~~~~ The passages quote above come from The Art of Fiction No. 130, Italo Calvino in The Paris Review. It's not the usual Paris Review interview, as Calvino died before the interviewer was done. Instead, it is a pastiche of four different sources. It's a great read nonetheless. -----