Rambles around computer science

Diverting trains of thought, wasting precious time

Sat, 07 Nov 2009

Teaching despondency

I usually say I enjoy teaching---meaning supervising, since that's the main kind of teaching that I do. I certainly like the idea of teaching. When it goes well, it's satisfying. However, I've admitted to myself recently that I usually don't enjoy it in practice. It fragments my time badly, and as a result I usually don't prepare properly for it. It then puts me into the uncomfortable position of having the success of others dependent on my doing a good job, which would be fine if I was giving it my best, but it's really just a distraction from my main work.

To blame something aside from my own lack of conscientiousness, I also don't think the supervision format works very well for much computer science. I've already ranted here about how usually supervisions entail rushing through all the material, with students “sort of getting it” but mostly not gaining a visceral understanding. It's much harder to debug the students' mistakes and weaknesses in CS than in many other disciplines, particularly with on-paper exercises. It's doubly nerve-wracking when I'm teaching stuff that I don't fully understand myself, like a lot of concurrent programming material---my experience with concurrent programming is limited, and I've certainly never implemented a transaction commit manager or many of the other systems described in the course.

What's doubly disheartening is that there seems to be very little will to improve teaching in this department. The concurrent systems teaching has just taken a giant step backwards in reverting to a textbook-driven approach, whereas the previous course was much more a “look at the code, write the code”, and any new course should in fact have moved to something more practical, not less. The material could easily be made into something very hands-on, no more time-consuming, far easier to teach (running student code in test harnesses is far easier than trying to evaluate some jotted-down pseudocode) and far better for learning quality. There's just no will.As usual, support materials for supervisors are absolutely lacking, despite a decade-old resolution by the Head of Department (two heads ago) that every course should provide a supervisor's handbook. The very basic suggestion of a wiki for supervisors to share their original support materials, references, wisdom, was glibly rejected when I suggested it three years ago, and despite the promises that the department is “looking into ways” of improving things, hardly anything has changed. I will probably rant about this in the upcoming Teaching Committee meeting.

When I visited UMD recently, I caught the end of a first-year graduate-level class on type theory. It was a format that seemed like a far better compromise than our supervision system, and would work for a wide variety of courses. There were about ten students in the class---few enough to make the experience an interactive one, but sufficiently many to make it worth using an experienced faculty member rather than any old graduate student (including myself in that description). It was made very concrete by the use of the Coq proof assistant to mechanise the theory. Overall it just seemed to be offering a far better quality of learning. Cambridge needs to get over the complacency that results from attracting the best students---which it manages out of prestige and the peer-competitive admissions challenge, not because the quality of its courses is any better---and actually take seriously its moral obligations to provide high-quality teaching that answers the needs of the median student, not just the top five percent. Sigh. Rant over.

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