“I do not claim that any of this will be easy. There is still much about teaching that I do not know and can only learn by more experience. I know that I will make mistakes; I know I will make plenty of them. But I also know that I will continue to grow and learn from each mistake that I make and, at the end of the day, I will reflect on what worked and what failed and formulate a different plan of attack for tomorrow. I will continually seek out opportunities to learn from my co-workers and others in order to improve my instruction. But I also know that teaching is something I was meant to do and I look forward to the daily challenges that it will bring.”

I think whether one is a first year teacher or a thirtieth year teacher, a PHD student or educational researcher, this is the spirit of the profession we need to hang on to…

Adam: So……After one semester away, What do you miss about the classroom? What don’t you miss?

Thanks for the prompt, Adam. That question deserves a lot more reflection than I can give it right now. Off the cuff, I’d say I miss most the daily interaction with students. Which is the sort of thing that I’m so obviously supposed to say it’s almost a cliché. I miss the kids for a lot of different reasons but one in particular is that it was spiritually healthy for me to be surrounded by people who don’t care even a little bit about the problems I care about and whose own problems are far outside my own experience also. They don’t care that I have twenty things to do before 5PM and I still haven’t returned my mom’s phone call. They’re worried about what the girl sitting across the room thinks of them or if she’s even thinking of them at all. Experiencing that diversity of anxiety was great for me. It helped me keep my own anxiety in check. Whereas now that my anxieties are shared by absolutely everyone I interact with, there’s no one to keep my assumption in check that my problems are the most important thing in the world to everybody.

I don’t miss the schedule of teaching, which was always monotonous (with its nine-to-five-ishness that I shouldn’t complain about) and at times dehumanizing (with the bell that tells me when I can go peepee). I don’t miss the lack of time for extraneous projects when I was teaching. Even in my last year, when I was 40%, there was time for a WCYDWT media project now and then but that was it. This year, I’m traveling, speaking, working with interesting people, advising startups, talking to publishers, etc. None of that will be any good to me if I lose track of the classroom experience, obviously, but I’m happy to have the time now for more projects.

But what I am here to say is not that! Since you are talking with Jo Boaler, can you ask her if she would do a Math Future event? I get a lot of requests to arrange that. She does not have to prepare slides (like you did) – we can just interview her. The benefit, compared to me emailing her, is that you can explain what a webinar is and why they are good for people, while you are at explaining the web.

Maybe I am being addicted to complexity here http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ComplexityAddiction

I’m still puzzled about their finding of a negative correlation between professor effectiveness (student success in follow-on courses) and student ratings. The paper hypothesizes that perhaps student ratings reflect grades: if the students get higher grades, they rate their prof more highly. That puzzled me. How do students know their own grade? Are students rating their prof after they’ve taken the final exam and after they’re assigned their course grade? After re-reading the paper, I noticed that it doesn’t really say very much about how or when student ratings are conducted. Or is it that students are rating profs more highly if the prof teaches to the test, and ratings profs lower if the prof deviates from material that’ll be on the test? I find hard to know what to make of these numbers without knowing more about the situation on the ground.

Do you have any insights on that paper, based on your in-class discussion?

On your heavy schedule: yeah, well, all I can say is, I told you so. My sympathies, and hope this quarter is more manageable for you!

The literature review basically exists to clear the field and create a raison d’être for your own research. It’s just a way of framing your claim that “Other combatants in this field have failed utterly to account for the insights that I — and only I — can provide to you.”

Unfortunately, it’s a prerequisite to getting one’s doctorate, which makes it a necessary evil. Heavy Sigh.

However I love that you were able to give Jo Boaler a fresh insight into the value of blogging! Way to go, Dan.

Elizabeth (aka @cheesemonkeysf on Twitter)

Incidentally, the archival conference tradition in CS is somewhat archaic now: in biology and bioinformatics journal publication delays (3 months) are less than conference publication delays in CS (6 months). The slow turnaround of CS journals is really not defensible any more. CS is no longer a fast-moving field.