most important lessons from teaching...22 years now, a thing I didnt plan in my highschool:
* you learn more than your students
* students only effectively learn when they create/solve themselves
* in 2024 there is little reason to use slides, or retell topics widely available on the net
* students are not smarter than students 25 years earlier, but are much better informed.
* people love publishing their results open-source. actually open-source is best taught in academia.
* seniors, including professors you are assisting, very seldom are interested in your performance
* the dean and the faculty is very seldom interested in my actual performance in my custom classes, which are complementary ones (even though are regularly frequented)
* it takes years for teachers to start actually teaching, and not showcasing, retelling or just showing off their superiority
* teaching without specific goal/task to solve is absolutely irrelevant and should not be practiced
* academia needs to be rethought dramatically, this all makes very little sense now in the light of LLMs, Global Libraries and open-source
disclaimer: i have 2500+ teaching hours in the disciplines intro to programming, object oriented programming, data structures and algorithms, advanced ES6, db systems, db&er design, practical perl programming, piratical python programming and last 2 years we been giving a brand new R&D of GIS Systems. technically my role is of a teaching assistant, but I've almost never had the seniors come to review my classes.
The student typically spends most of his/her time with students of the same level of ability or interest. For the student who will someday become a college teacher, this general means able and interested students.
The teacher spends time with and on anyone who signs up. For the intro classes at least this will include a proportion of those who are neither interested nor able.
academia is much much more than teaching also, and my post is about much more than web programming. tbh is not at all about web programming or web-anything.
(update: in fact, in my opinion, after years teaching web technologies, webdev is perhaps the most boring area you may decide to advance into... sorry, fellow webdevs, but i really believe it)
academia is not about programming at all.
but when people start consuming/exchanging academic thoughts via media, which the academia (itself) does not acknowledge, well then academia becomes just a road to universal income, rather than driver of technological advance.
besides, most significant research nowadays is supported/enabled by large corporations, no matter if you or myself likes it. meanwhile academia is ran the way it was ran 200 years ago when it was more a retreat for theosophy and contemplation.
fact is that students don't understand the very fundamental reason to be in academia - to collaborate. you may want to tell me why is that, i have several ideas most of them related to the fact that we all are so alienated with this constant man-machine interface that we forget the pleasure, the joy of exchanging knowledge live, staring at the same blackboard or piece of paper. we are in constant arguing on social media, forums, etc.
and finally - teaching a class to people is only possible in 2024 when you have a reversed classroom, where the teacher is a host/curator/enabler, and the people put their research abilities to work. otherwise ... well you lose them 5th minute into the class, because they all ADHD into X, FB or even HN...
* you learn more than your students * students only effectively learn when they create/solve themselves * in 2024 there is little reason to use slides, or retell topics widely available on the net * students are not smarter than students 25 years earlier, but are much better informed. * people love publishing their results open-source. actually open-source is best taught in academia. * seniors, including professors you are assisting, very seldom are interested in your performance * the dean and the faculty is very seldom interested in my actual performance in my custom classes, which are complementary ones (even though are regularly frequented) * it takes years for teachers to start actually teaching, and not showcasing, retelling or just showing off their superiority * teaching without specific goal/task to solve is absolutely irrelevant and should not be practiced * academia needs to be rethought dramatically, this all makes very little sense now in the light of LLMs, Global Libraries and open-source
disclaimer: i have 2500+ teaching hours in the disciplines intro to programming, object oriented programming, data structures and algorithms, advanced ES6, db systems, db&er design, practical perl programming, piratical python programming and last 2 years we been giving a brand new R&D of GIS Systems. technically my role is of a teaching assistant, but I've almost never had the seniors come to review my classes.