A doodle is worth a thousand words
The Doodle
This doodle came into existence during a final exam review. Besides the doodle, the painfully-stretched review let me write down my recent insights into what makes a good class from a student's perspective.
The purpose of attending classes is to learn. Learning also entails some amount of work and time spent on the subject outside of class. While a strong work ethic and perseverance are critical character traits, they are just as easily developed outside of the classroom as they are inside of it. While admirable, hard work and perseverance are unpleasant enough that excesses of them in the name of education are despicable.
My central argument is that a good class should maximize the ratio of knowledge learned and skills developed to work done and time put in outside of class. This philosophy holds true for all classes, presentations, lectures, essays, films and other communication media. Students praise a succinct assignment.
Before this discussion gets any wordier, here are some lists of ways to make the ratio better and practices which make the ratio worse.
DO:
Comments welcome.
This doodle came into existence during a final exam review. Besides the doodle, the painfully-stretched review let me write down my recent insights into what makes a good class from a student's perspective.
The purpose of attending classes is to learn. Learning also entails some amount of work and time spent on the subject outside of class. While a strong work ethic and perseverance are critical character traits, they are just as easily developed outside of the classroom as they are inside of it. While admirable, hard work and perseverance are unpleasant enough that excesses of them in the name of education are despicable.
My central argument is that a good class should maximize the ratio of knowledge learned and skills developed to work done and time put in outside of class. This philosophy holds true for all classes, presentations, lectures, essays, films and other communication media. Students praise a succinct assignment.
Before this discussion gets any wordier, here are some lists of ways to make the ratio better and practices which make the ratio worse.
DO:
- Repeat central or generative points in the slides, on the board and by speaking. 80/20 rules are your friends.
- Maintain consistent syntax for all variables and formulae.
- Work through instructional problems and solutions using the new lesson in addition to repeating relevant key points already taught.
- Trick students into deriving formulae on their own.
- Have a hook from the previous lecture to the current lecture, and end your current lecture with a hint of the next lecture.
- Reinforce concepts with short, daily assignments. Projects are an exception.
- Have appropriate in-class discussions.
- Cite your sources. Let the students know what textbook section you're lecturing on, what you Googled to find this information, etc.
- Provide your students with a course outline with all major topics. Keep this outline at 3-4 levels. Stick to this outline.
- Know what your students know coming in and what they don't know coming in.
- Force in-class discussion. It's pathetic.
- Get attached to overly complicated examples. The longer an example will be used, the more complex it may be. We usually call these "case studies."
- Make open book/note/supplemental material tests. The temptation is to great to make test questions by opening to a random page or diagram and saying, "Aha!" rather than by considering how best to check for mastery of what students should know at a certain point in the course. Also, anything worth learning from the course should be testable without bringing reference materials. Relevant formulae and figures can be provided for a test, and a 1-page "cheat sheet" isn't a bad idea either.
- Leave lab manuals to fall into disrepair. Few things are more damaging to this ratio than an unclear lab, a lab requiring pointless repetition, or both.
- Assign long homework assignments.
- Assign homework problems that require several glances back at figures earlier in the book.
- Assign problems without checking them for clarity and correctness.
- Ignore the fundamental principle of counting while making labs, tests and homework assignments.
- Incorporate relevant comic strips into the lectures.
- Assign a relevant novel to read during the course. Be careful about how you verify whether your students have read it.
- Discuss current events having to do with course content.
Comments welcome.