Ok. I think we aren't getting anywhere. Most, though not all, of the things you brought up we have discussed before and frankly, I don't think I would be any more successful bringing up my point if we tried again. I'm having hard time expressing thoughts this abstract in English and simply don't have strenght to go on anymore. I spend yesterday three hours to reply to you, and didn't seem to gain anything.

I do wish to address your thoughts about teaching, just to give you some idea where I come from. It isn't MIT or Stanford you know :) . Feel free to not answer at all, if the subject doesn't really interest you.

AM (myname4rwt@jee.male) on 10/5/09 wrote:
---------------------------

>> Would I use those three statements
>> if I had to teach processor design
>> to freshmen? Certainly not. I would
>> tell my superior that I have no
>> qualifications to teach them about
>> the subject at all.
>
> That could well be suboptimal
> decision from the educational point
> of view.

I didn't actually mean that students should be left without exercises or just with exercises from text-book. I meant that I should be replaced with someone more proficient on hardware side :) . Anyway, what you say is mostly the basic stuff that can be read from any book about teaching, and what, unfortunately, tends to fall apart once you factor in the cost and less than perfect students.

The unfortunate truth is that by far the cheapest way to teach is to have a series of lectures followed by an exam. For that you need one person who still has time left for his research or other courses. Accountants love this way of teaching, so if no one fights the accountants, that's what you get. That's the norm, and quite significant part of the credits I got during my studies were from such courses.

They aren't necessarily bad courses. There was one, where the lecturer told us what to read from a book for next lecture and then lectured with the assumption that we had. It was great for me, since I did as he asked, and the lectures weren't wasted on basic stuff, but judged by the attendance of other students, many didn't.

> Think about it: many exercises "from
> the book" are simply uninteresting.
> Professor knows the answer from the
> instructor's guide, and students
> either have one or know there's one,
> or just look up equations and
> substitute figures (this is not true
> in general of course).

Yeah, we usually ignored the text-book exercises for two reasons: 1) the solutions are usually available and if not now, then next year, because we feel it is essensial to provide at least rough solution, so student knows whether his ideas were any good.

2) Not everybody has a text-book. Especially on elementary courses where some of the students are already familiar with much of the subjects, and where good Internet sources are plentiful, requiring them to buy some 80 euro[1] text-book causes great deal of complaining (though if we think text-book is actually very useful, we ignore the complaints).

[1] To put that 80 euros to some perspective, please remember that in Finland "tuition fees" for universities are in the ballpark of hundred euros per year. The text-books are by far the largest cost for a student apart from living in general.

> Now consider that you are indeed
> teaching CPU design, and offer
> these 3 questions to the class.
> To make things more interesting,
> let's say you don't make it a
> regular hw, but pose them for a
> workshop after your students
> have already learned what OoOE
> is and how it's implemented. If
> you have at least a bunch of
> fast-trackers (I mean this in a
> good sense), I'd bet this will
> do your students way more good
> than thought-out assignments
> you're proud of, no matter how
> well-worded they may be.

I presume fast-tracker here means someone talented and thus fast learner (my dictionary gave less than positive translation, but I hope I got your meaning).

What you suggest poses some problems: 1) you still have to make the exercise well-worded. Sure, if you have groups of four, you have four times less personal explaining to do, but it doesn't go away completely.

2) In a group of one fast-tracker and three less than perfect students, the fast-tracker is going to do all the work and three others will learn very little. This is one of the main reason (according to feedback from students) why students hate group exercises. It is less of a problem on more advanced courses, where pretty much every student is actually interested on the subject. Even then, there may be problems just because someone is having a busy semester and just can't invest as much time as others would want.

3) If you want to arrange a proper workshop, to address the problems above, you need to have scheduled meetings of students with course staff ready to offer help, explain the exercise etc. That's expensive.

4) You have to grade the workshop results somehow. If it is just something that must be done to pass the course, the less than perfect students will do, shall we say, a lot less than perfect work.

> And if you are blessed with having
> an opportunity to teach people who
> are natural learners and aspiring
> designers, then just don't bore
> them with lectures or well-worded
> exercises. Give them good sources
> to work with and do your best to
> show the gaping abyss b/w good
> designs and bad ones -- I would
> strongly argue this is the only
> thing that a mentor should do, and
> do it well. Don't cultivate the
> gospel attitude to the "good"
> sources either; instead, try your
> hardest to develop a healthy
> critical look at whatever they
> come across; help them see all the
> pros and cons and have conflicting
> opinions on the matter; divide
> them in groups and make them argue
> and defend their opinions, if not
> for personal value, then at least
> for course points.

I pretty much agree with this, but unfortunately, it is irrelevant because we aren't "blessed with having an opportunity to teach people who are natural learners and aspiring designers", at least not on basic courses. It is easy to teach such people. They seldom ask any questions and when they do, the questions are always relevant and interesting. Whatever homework you give them, it is easy to grade since you just need to read it through, add some praise and file it away.

The problem are those students who aren't quite as bright, or maybe just have too many gaps in their knowledge. Or who aren't that interested about that particular course. They are the ones who need help. The natural learners will do great even if you aren't, but the average students won't.

> By following this way, you have a
> much better chance to grow thinkers
> and *personalities*; people who are
> not afraid to speak their mind,

That's the job of the basic school and high school and believe me, Finnish students have no trouble speaking their mind[2], questioning text-books and course staff. And that's great I suppose, though sometimes one hopes a student would do a bit more research before asking the question :) .

> with a strong sense of pride for
> what they accomplish and able to
> admire good work done by others.

That's a more tricky part. Many students, even the good ones, follow the path of least resistance. For example, if the exercise is about subject A and includes a small, not too relevant programming problem, a large part of students will submit horrible spaghetti code because they know that when the exercise is graded, code quality isn't going to make any difference. It would be great to have more students that automatically do a good job for the sake of it, not just when credits are at stake.

The great ones, of course, always do a good job. But even many of those I wouldn't hesitate calling good (leaving average, mediocre and bad below them), take all the shortcuts they can when their grades aren't at stake.

> Or failing all that, simply
> better engineers, who will recall
> their professor with a sense of
> gratitude when they are old enough.

Yeah, well, I wasn't a professor (I was only undergrad student back then) and did most of my work behind the scenes so to speak. I did my thesis (http://aarghimedes.mooo.com/~jlarja/CV/Diplomityo/Final%20Cut.pdf) about a teaching system that had easy administration (= low cost) as one of its main goals and students loved it. But I don't think any of them is going to remember me after few years :) .

[2] To be more precise, Finnish students seldom speak their mind, but aren't afraid to write it. It is an aspect of Finnish culture, and computer science students especially, that we don't talk with strangers. If there are ten students attending a lecture, they are probably all sitting at different sides of the lecture hall, unless some of them are friends (and I mean friends, being just an acquaintance isn't necessarily enough).

[2]cont. It is actually somewhat painful to watch sometimes when a foreign lecturer ask students to form groups and discuss some issue for a few minutes. Groups form slowly, discussion is minute and large percentage of students will just sit there doing nothing (and probably stay away from next lecture). If you force the issue (for example, threaten to ask result from those that seem least active as one lecturer did) you get the discussion, and lot less students on the next lecture. The foreign lecturer of course thinks that there's something wrong with his lecture, although it is just a small clash of cultures.

[2]cont. By the way, the problem is being partly solved by more ubiquitous laptops. The courses I've been involved with all have more or less official IRC channels. Nowadays (some) lecturers will check the IRC channel during lecture break to see what parts of the lecture have raised questions. He can then address those questions during second part. Or the questions can be addressed on IRC by course staff, by other students (via discussion :) ), even by former course staff like myself.

Anyway, to reiterate my point in a way I don't like to do :) . Great students and good students will do well with pretty much any sort of half-competent teaching. I'm not worried about them, nor do I think we should spent too much resources for them. Many people disagree on this, but that's a different topic. The policy has never been in my hands anyway.

It is the masses of almost good, average and mediocre students that I'm worried about. They are the majority. They are the ones who end up doing most of the work (some of it so badly that it just ends up to be redone be great ones) anyway, just because there aren't enough of the great ones to go by.

Unfortunate fact is that resources are limited and applying your ideas that work great on paper, don't work for masses of average students. That is average 1st ot 3rd year engineering students in Finnish universities. I'm pretty sure situation is different in MIT, Stanford and many other more prestigious universities, and know the situation is different on more advanced courses, where people are generally speaking more motivated and the worst ones have already dropped out (or learned to be better).

You may notice that I left bad students out of the above. There's always some and the amount of work they would require just isn't worth it, at least if the total amount of work stays the same. It's just best to hope they improve on their own instead of dropping out and accusing us for it[3].

[3] Dropping out of Finnish university is in practise student's own decision. Only way to get really kicked out is to repeatedly cheat on exams for several years. I'm not sure if you get kicked out even then or just suspended for another year.

-JLarja