TITLE: Learn from the Bees
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: June 12, 2017 2:15 PM
DESC:
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BODY:
In
The Sweet Bees
[paywalled], Sue Hubbell writes:
Beekeepers are an opinionated lot, each sure that his methods,
and his methods alone, are the proper ones. When I first
began keeping bees, the diversity of passionately held opinion
bewildered me, but now that I have hives in locations scattered
over a thousand-square-mile area I think I understand it....
Frosts come earlier in some places than in others. Spring
comes later. Rainfall is not the same. The soils, and the
flowering plants they support, are unlike. Through the years,
I have learned that as a result of all these variations I must
keep the bees variously. Most people who keep bees have only a
few hives, and have them all in one place. They find it
difficult to understand why practices that have proved
successful for them do not work for others. But I have learned
that I must treat the bees in one yard quite differently from
the way I do those even thirty miles away. The thing to do, I
have discovered, is to learn from the bees themselves.
Even though I've taught at only two universities, I've learned
this lesson over the years in many ways that don't require
physical distance. Teaching novices in an intro course is
different from teaching seniors. Teaching a programming course
is different from teaching discrete structures or theory of
computation. Teaching AI is different from teaching operating
systems. I have learned that I must teach differently in
different kinds of courses.
In an instructional setting, even more important are the bees
themselves. I've been teaching Programming Languages every
spring for the last years, and each group of students has been
a little different. The course goes better when I have -- and
take -- the time to make adjustments according to what I learn
over the course of the semester about the particular set of
students I have. This spring, I did not recognize the need to
adapt quickly enough, and I feel like I let some of the students
down.
You sometimes hear faculty talk about students "back in the old
days". One thing is certain: the students we had then probably
were different from the students we have now. But they were
also different from the students that came before them. Each
group is new, made up of individuals with their own backgrounds
and their own goals.
It's nice when students are similar enough to what we expect that
we can take advantage of what worked well last time. We just
can't count on that happening all that often. Our job is to
teach the students in class right now.
(I first encountered Hubbell's article in To Teach, by
William Ayers. I gave a short review of it in
yesterday's post.)
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