[Byron Weber Becker][1] is an instructor in Computer Science at the University of Waterloo. When I asked him for an example of a well-written lesson, he sent me the PDFs attached. The first is the slides for a lesson on polymorphism; the second is the instructor’s guide for that same lesson. Our existing lessons aren’t nearly this well organized, but I hope they will be some day.
Ok, I know It sounds ridicules. Right now, I live in an English speaking country (Canada) and study here, but believe me or not, I never finished any English classes (you might see that from my grammatical errors). My parents are bilingual so am I. They already speak two languages so they never try to learn English as their third language. I remember, my older sister once tried to learn English and it was so hard for her and she drop it. For me as a child learning English was so scary I never even tried it. During high school, since all my classmates knew english very well, I had this feeling that I am missing something really important and tried to took some English courses. It was horrible experiment for me, It turned out I am really fast learner and English classes were really slow. I remember we should repeat every word and sentences for many times, sometimes many days. I missed lots of classes because I read books in advance and spending time in classes seemed really useless. At the end, I dropped the class. I studied English by my own and then try the more higher level and again it was the same experience, the learning progress in classes was really slow and teachers never helped to make it more fun or more suitable for me. Therefore, I dropped it again and never took any English class in my life. During time, because I really needed to learn English for my studies, I learned English mostly by myself or my friend’s help. Though, it was after that, I had lots of problem because I did not know English.
This is a new blog post with image attached. Maybe.
The reason I have chosen this story is because although it happened during the very young stages of my life (up to the age of 14) it has shaped the way I think and learn up until this day.
I was a bit of a sponge at university, and every semester I exceeded the standard course load in order to study both biology and computer science. I love studying, and in fact it was a struggle thinking of a bad studying experience.
When it comes to experiences that have demotivated me, there are a couple of incidents that stand out. Some are rather recent in time and involve people that I still depend on, so I can not currently go public about them. I will instead choose a story which happened in my childhood which may seem innocent now, but the disappointment that I and some of my friends experienced changed us, and not for the better.
My graduate degree (masters) is in educational linguistics. My first semester I took an intro to linguistics class. That semester, the intro class was really big so the department chose to split the class up by whether students were enrolled in a masters or doctoral program. The doctoral section was taught by the regular professor while the masters section was taught by a doctoral student. I’ll call her Mary. This was immediately discouraging because it seemed like the university was basically saying that masters students were not worth being taught by an expert in the field, and that someone who seemed just a bit ahead of us was good enough.
There have been a few times I’ve dropped a course because I’ve been entirely demotivated by the teacher. Sometimes, it is as simple as the teacher saying just one thing wrong: one time a instructor proudly stated “compilers is a solved problem”, and as most of my interests in parsing were still open research questions, I decided immediately that there would be nothing I could learn from that class. However, sometimes the situation is much more involved.
I can post two discouraging but probably very general events, I could not recall any specific event that was discouraging. (My apologize for my rather late post.) The first one is about the general “that is an easy to solve problem” comment. I think the most discouraging comment to me that I had many times over the course of my academic path (and I still encounter it very often) is the comment that the solution to a problem I stated should be easy. I found it very discouraging when I hear that something should be supposedly “very easy” but I have not solved the problem after hours. I think there are two motivations behind this comment 1) people tend to speak “lightly” about things they have sometimes not really a clue about, 2) they don’t have any idea but want to encourage you to try, 3) they know what they are talking about but don’t know what your level is. My experience tell me that the first is usually more common. The second and third have a good intention but can be harmful.
The story I started my Masters in Computer Science after doing a Bachelor in Mathematics. I loved Maths, but I wanted to apply it to Computer Science. So, I chose a domain that seemed to bridge my two interests : Theoretical Computer Science. The supervisor that I chose worked on, what I still think today, are really interesting problems. Moreover, my wife just had a baby, at the beginning of it, and he was really comprehensive, by letting me a month off to be with my new family.