btilly clearly expressed a fine method for effective teaching. I was impressed when I read the HN post a while back, and I'm even more impressed with the blog post. I am incorporating the idea about homework divided into thirds into my own teaching. Many of his other ideas are already there, if in slightly different form.
However, I will gripe about his messianic tone. As far as I can tell from his blog post, he's taught only one class! Even if he taught a few others as a grad student, my point holds.
When I first started teaching nine years ago, as a grad student, I had miraculous success with my classes. I didn't have any grand scheme like btilly did; all I had were some commonsense observations from my father, a lifelong teacher.
But as a new teacher, I was really learning the material for the first time (that's the case with virtually all new teachers -- it has to do with the process of teaching), and so I could carefully observe the students' progress at every step. If they stepped into a pothole, I stepped into it with them: I felt that I had failed to explain something clearly if the students didn't get it. (btilly says the same.) The students loved the class, they became very competent, and their enthusiasm for the subject attracted attention. I was a star teacher.
However, as the years have ground on, I have taught the same subjects over and over again. I'm no longer on a journey of discovery along with the students. Instead, I know where every curve and pitfall lies. I can see a pothole a mile before we get there. You might think that this makes me a more effective teacher, because I can make the journey a smooth arc from beginning to end. But it doesn't: intellectual discovery is about stepping into potholes, not sailing by on a cruise ship.
I'm still sort of a star teacher (evals are very high, and my classes are always full, in part because word gets around), but I've never had a class with the same enthusiasm and brilliance as that first one.
(I'm an adjunct professor, so I get paid shit wages, and I have no incentive to do a good job, but that's a different story.)
So I gripe about the messianic tone in btilly's post because it sounds like precisely the sort of thing a successful new teacher would say. (BTW, not all new teachers are successful.) I wonder if with a decade of teaching experience he would see his miraculous method as the distinguishing factor in his early success. In fact, his early success may have been due primarily to the advantages of a neophyte, which are hard to sustain.
I absolutely agree. I actually taught several classes, but this was the only one where I had the freedom to choose the pacing, homework sets, and exams. I will never know whether my experience would have been easily replicated, or how important the factors you cite are. If anyone else tries something similar, I would be interested in hearing how it worked out for them.
That said, I was pushing students to use learning strategies that I have personally found to be incredibly valuable. I firmly believe that it is a good thing to read ahead before class, pay close attention during class, ask questions promptly and follow a regular review schedule later. This is both effective and takes surprisingly little time to do.
On a final note, I sympathize with your pain about not being rewarded for your teaching. The academic system rewards professors for research, not teaching, and teaching suffers greatly for it. Why the Professor Can't Teach is as relevant today as it was when it was 30 years ago. (You can find it online at http://www.marco-learningsystems.com/pages/kline/prof.html.) That was not the reason that I left academia, but it made my decision easier.
The job description of "professor" is certainly a strange beast: teacher/scientist. It makes about as much sense as actor/programmer.
The perverse incentives this creates are massive. Universities hire scientists rather than teachers in order to get their hands on half the scientist's grants [1]. Scientists waste their time masquerading as teachers because they can't get grants if they don't work for a university [2]. This is harmful both to science (I'm not doing research in class) and students. Of course, they don't put much effort into teaching because they are judged on their ability to get grants. Actual teachers are squeezed out, since there is no room for them.
My proposed solution? Completely decouple research and teaching. The NSF can subsidize science, the DOE can subsidize universities, and teaching institutions will no longer have an incentive to hire scientists as teachers.
[1] If a scientist gets a grant, the university will take about half as "overhead".
[2] Not strictly true, due to a few national labs, but close enough.
At some point though, you definitely want the teachers to be experts. This may not be true for most undergraduate curricula, true, but are not most undergraduate courses already taught by graduate students, lecturers and adjunct faculty? At the graduate level, you really want people who are active participants in their fields-- and this is probably true for the arts as well as the sciences.
I guess what i am saying is this: if all research moves to national labs and private institutes you will discover graduate education migrating there as well.
Teaching colleges do exist that have no research expectations of their faculty, but high teaching expectations. Although, the fact that the name "teaching colleges" exists at all says something.
But everything else you said: pretty much, yeah. Once, I was in a meet-and-greet between grad students an interviewing faculty candidate when it dawned on me that as a second year grad student, I had as much teaching experience as he did.
For the review schedule, while it is a good learning strategy, how many students coninue it after the course? It seems naturally as we get jobs we review by necessity, not out of habit. Do you think the students reAlly understood the importance of reviewing after taking your class or do they just forget it?
However, I will gripe about his messianic tone. As far as I can tell from his blog post, he's taught only one class! Even if he taught a few others as a grad student, my point holds.
When I first started teaching nine years ago, as a grad student, I had miraculous success with my classes. I didn't have any grand scheme like btilly did; all I had were some commonsense observations from my father, a lifelong teacher.
But as a new teacher, I was really learning the material for the first time (that's the case with virtually all new teachers -- it has to do with the process of teaching), and so I could carefully observe the students' progress at every step. If they stepped into a pothole, I stepped into it with them: I felt that I had failed to explain something clearly if the students didn't get it. (btilly says the same.) The students loved the class, they became very competent, and their enthusiasm for the subject attracted attention. I was a star teacher.
However, as the years have ground on, I have taught the same subjects over and over again. I'm no longer on a journey of discovery along with the students. Instead, I know where every curve and pitfall lies. I can see a pothole a mile before we get there. You might think that this makes me a more effective teacher, because I can make the journey a smooth arc from beginning to end. But it doesn't: intellectual discovery is about stepping into potholes, not sailing by on a cruise ship.
I'm still sort of a star teacher (evals are very high, and my classes are always full, in part because word gets around), but I've never had a class with the same enthusiasm and brilliance as that first one.
(I'm an adjunct professor, so I get paid shit wages, and I have no incentive to do a good job, but that's a different story.)
So I gripe about the messianic tone in btilly's post because it sounds like precisely the sort of thing a successful new teacher would say. (BTW, not all new teachers are successful.) I wonder if with a decade of teaching experience he would see his miraculous method as the distinguishing factor in his early success. In fact, his early success may have been due primarily to the advantages of a neophyte, which are hard to sustain.