How Not To Teach

[lucky_otter]

My Algorithms professor is a fairly young professor. This class is new to him, and he often realizes things while teaching which aren't in his notes. He seems to know his stuff, and he's a pretty good teacher on the whole. This isn't an indictment of him personally; I'm just using that class as an example of a style of teaching which I see as very

Comments

[annodomini]

I've seen this too, and I think it's partly a matter of the professor not knowing what else to teach, and not having the time (or thinking they don't have the time) to prepare for more than what's in the book.

I prefer a teaching style where the professor actually guides the students through problems that aren't in the book; either alternatives to what's presented in the book that will show something similar, or expanding and building on what the students should already know from the book. Fundamentally, to be interesting, a class needs to be interactive. If it's just a lecture, I could learn it as easily from a book, and if it's just questions on the material covered, it should probably be office hours (unless it's stuff that's so confusing most of the class will have the same questions, in which case you should get a better book).

Where the real value can come into a class is when the students build off of each other's ideas, with guidance from the professor, to go beyond what's covered in the book, or at least to really get deep into it and truly understand it, instead of just nodding along with the proofs without quite knowing what's going on.