TITLE: Two Thoughts on Teaching
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: June 03, 2018 10:50 AM
DESC: 
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BODY:
 ... from my morning reading.

 First, a sentence from
<A HREF="https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/bryan-caplan-tyler-cowen-parenting-education-psychology-employment-579df84d4fc5">
   Bryan Caplan</A>,
about one of his influences, philosopher
<A HREF="http://spot.colorado.edu/~huemer/">
   Michael Huemer</A>:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
 I think what's great about this book, and really all of Mike's
 work, is he always tries to start off with premises that make
 sense to people who don't already agree, and then try to get
 somewhere.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

 I value people who take the time to construct arguments in
 this way.  It's surprisingly rare in academic discourse and
 public discourse.  Teachers usually learn pretty quickly,
 though, that the most effective way to teach is start where
 your students are: recognize the state of their knowledge
 and respect their current beliefs.  I try to remind myself
 of this principle regularly during a course, or I'm likely
 to go off track.

 Second, the closing exchange from
<A HREF="https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/the-rolling-stone-interview-stanley-kubrick-in-1987-20110307">
   a 1987 interview with Stanley Kubrick</A>.
 Kubrick has been talking about how the critics' views of his
 films tend to evolve over time.  The interviewer wrapped up
 the conversation with:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
 Well, you don't make it easy on viewers or critics.  You
 create strong feelings, but you won't give us any easy
 answers.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
 That's because I don't have any easy answers.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

 That seems like a pretty good aspiration to have for teaching,
 that people can say it creates strong feelings but doesn't
 give any easy answers.  Much of teaching is simpler than this,
 of course, especially in a field such as computer science.  A
 closure is something that we can understand as it is, as is,
 say, an algorithm for parsing a stream of tokens.  But after
 you learn a few concepts and start trying to build or
 understand a complex system, easy answers are much harder to
 come by.  Even so, I do hope that students leave my courses
 with strong feelings about their craft.  Those feelings may
 not match my own, and they'll surely still be evolving, but
 they will be a product of the student engaging with some big
 ideas and trying them out on challenging problems.

 Maybe if I keep reading interested articles on the exercise
 the bike and making connections to my craft, I can get this
 computer science thing down better.
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