Writing
In a typical university, there are lecturers who wish they can simply spend 100% of their time doing research, and there are lecturers who are truly passionate in teaching. I think that NUS School of Computing is very fortunate to have a good proportion of faculty members who are really into teaching, or at least don't treat teaching as a duty that they rather not have. In fact, there is quite a sizable number of Lecturers and Senior Lecturers; these designations mean that their primary responsibility is teaching.1 Regardless of the designation, such passionate teachers that I know of include Aaron Tan, Zhao Jin, and Leong Wai Kay, just to name a few. Of course, my own advisor Kan Min-Yen is definitely included. Too bad I had not have the opportunity to take modules under any of the people I named above, except for my own advisor.
Associate Professor Ben Leong, is yet another of those passionate lecturers. To quote from his teaching page: "Research is cool, but teaching is truly meaningful." And he must have made very deep impressions in students to be a runaway winner of one ongoing popularity contest of sorts. Interestingly, Ben would write teaching statements every few years. One of these that strikes me is the 2015 statement, not so much about the teaching statement itself, but rather the afternote. I quote part of his endnote here (all emphasis mine):
I learnt something new today.
One of the reasons why I am writing these statements is that I believe in discipline and it seemed like an awfully good idea to take some time to reflect on what I have learnt periodically (and every 3 years seemed reasonable).
But I found it very difficult to write this statement. I have amended this teaching statement a number of times. But no matter how hard I tried, it never felt good enough. It always felt like the teaching statement I wrote 3 years ago was better.
But that did not make sense to me. Did I not get smarter over the last 3 years? Did I learn nothing over the last 3 years? Shouldn't I sound wiser now than before?
After agonizing over this for a couple of weeks, I had a Eureka moment during a random online conversation with a friend who is a writer: I realized that I can only activate my inner voice in my writing when I feel compelled to write.
Writing takes effort. When I write, there is always a reason. Most times I write to persuade. In these teaching statements, I write to force clarity on my thoughts and position on teaching. I don't write for fun.
The sad truth is that I really didn't feel like I had anything particularly interesting that needed to be said. I wrote this statement only because it is already December and if I did not write now, it would be more than 3 years since my last statement and that would violate my "discipline".
This reminds me of my own blog. I have maintained this blog at the current location since the first day of 2004, which is a long time.2 At that time, I was able to make posts nearly daily. As time passes, I found myself getting a lot busier, and now only write monthly posts.
There are many months where I felt like I had nothing interesting to write. As the end of the month approached, I had to rack my brains just to find a topic so that I can pen down a few paragraphs. It often takes me a substantial amount of time to organize my thoughts into something coherent, with varying levels of success in different months. All just for the sake of keeping this "discipline", so as to keep some semblance of maintaining my writing skills. Like the majority of the employed population, I spend most of my waking hours working. While my work is interesting overall, a good part of the work is mundane and very uninteresting, just trudging along and getting things done.3 And it is not unusual for me to find myself overworked and feeling very tired.4 Then as usual, a significant amount of my work is confidential, and then much of the work cannot be described without explaining a large amount of accompanying context. Besides, talking only about work is extremely boring. As a result, without something compelling for me to write, I struggle to make my monthly posts.
I do occasionally write at work, but all of them are technical documentation and hardly on anything else. Even though my boss considers my skill in technical writing to be good, sufficient for me to list this skill in my curriculum vitae, I consider my skills to be fairly average given the amount of training I received from my advisor. Additionally, I have the advantage of being English educated while many of my colleagues come from China. I told my boss, I do not write very fast - if he sees something short and understandable, then I would have expended quite a bit of time to make my writing concise and succinct, and paying attention to the flow of the entire document, otherwise he would be reading a core dump from my brain.
These days, I actually blog with no particular audience in mind. I do not care if nobody reads my blog, and I do not read the posts I made in the past either. However, I still try to write something monthly, and for over a decade I think I have successfully maintained this discipline.
1 A quick browse suggest that most of these Lecturers and Senior Lecturers are no longer active in academic research, with zero or very few recent publications.
2 Prior to 2014, I hosted another blog at my long-defunct School of Computing homepage, but I felt it more professional to decouple those emo posts from my academic front.
3 I believe this statement can be said for practically any work in any sector.
4 This is probably also a statement on my general health.
Associate Professor Ben Leong, is yet another of those passionate lecturers. To quote from his teaching page: "Research is cool, but teaching is truly meaningful." And he must have made very deep impressions in students to be a runaway winner of one ongoing popularity contest of sorts. Interestingly, Ben would write teaching statements every few years. One of these that strikes me is the 2015 statement, not so much about the teaching statement itself, but rather the afternote. I quote part of his endnote here (all emphasis mine):
I learnt something new today.
One of the reasons why I am writing these statements is that I believe in discipline and it seemed like an awfully good idea to take some time to reflect on what I have learnt periodically (and every 3 years seemed reasonable).
But I found it very difficult to write this statement. I have amended this teaching statement a number of times. But no matter how hard I tried, it never felt good enough. It always felt like the teaching statement I wrote 3 years ago was better.
But that did not make sense to me. Did I not get smarter over the last 3 years? Did I learn nothing over the last 3 years? Shouldn't I sound wiser now than before?
After agonizing over this for a couple of weeks, I had a Eureka moment during a random online conversation with a friend who is a writer: I realized that I can only activate my inner voice in my writing when I feel compelled to write.
Writing takes effort. When I write, there is always a reason. Most times I write to persuade. In these teaching statements, I write to force clarity on my thoughts and position on teaching. I don't write for fun.
The sad truth is that I really didn't feel like I had anything particularly interesting that needed to be said. I wrote this statement only because it is already December and if I did not write now, it would be more than 3 years since my last statement and that would violate my "discipline".
This reminds me of my own blog. I have maintained this blog at the current location since the first day of 2004, which is a long time.2 At that time, I was able to make posts nearly daily. As time passes, I found myself getting a lot busier, and now only write monthly posts.
There are many months where I felt like I had nothing interesting to write. As the end of the month approached, I had to rack my brains just to find a topic so that I can pen down a few paragraphs. It often takes me a substantial amount of time to organize my thoughts into something coherent, with varying levels of success in different months. All just for the sake of keeping this "discipline", so as to keep some semblance of maintaining my writing skills. Like the majority of the employed population, I spend most of my waking hours working. While my work is interesting overall, a good part of the work is mundane and very uninteresting, just trudging along and getting things done.3 And it is not unusual for me to find myself overworked and feeling very tired.4 Then as usual, a significant amount of my work is confidential, and then much of the work cannot be described without explaining a large amount of accompanying context. Besides, talking only about work is extremely boring. As a result, without something compelling for me to write, I struggle to make my monthly posts.
I do occasionally write at work, but all of them are technical documentation and hardly on anything else. Even though my boss considers my skill in technical writing to be good, sufficient for me to list this skill in my curriculum vitae, I consider my skills to be fairly average given the amount of training I received from my advisor. Additionally, I have the advantage of being English educated while many of my colleagues come from China. I told my boss, I do not write very fast - if he sees something short and understandable, then I would have expended quite a bit of time to make my writing concise and succinct, and paying attention to the flow of the entire document, otherwise he would be reading a core dump from my brain.
These days, I actually blog with no particular audience in mind. I do not care if nobody reads my blog, and I do not read the posts I made in the past either. However, I still try to write something monthly, and for over a decade I think I have successfully maintained this discipline.
1 A quick browse suggest that most of these Lecturers and Senior Lecturers are no longer active in academic research, with zero or very few recent publications.
2 Prior to 2014, I hosted another blog at my long-defunct School of Computing homepage, but I felt it more professional to decouple those emo posts from my academic front.
3 I believe this statement can be said for practically any work in any sector.
4 This is probably also a statement on my general health.