All Teachers Were Once Students
At the university that I attend undergraduate students are allowed to be on course staff. As far as I know this is not common among most colleges, since they usually only allow graduate students to be on course staff. This has been amazing since it has allowed the department to build and deliver great courses, but it comes with an interesting phenomenon. You have students that are only a few semesters apart where one has been given the title of teacher and another the title of student. It is also not uncommon for undergrads on course staff to be younger than most of the students who take the course. In the rare case you have undergrads who ends up becoming their instructor’s instructor in a future course. This divide in title sometimes makes people feel inadequate. They feel embarrassed struggling with the material and asking for help from a person who appears to just be naturally talented. They feel that maybe they weren’t cut out for this major, since it seems to come effortlessly for others. They feel that there must be something wrong with them, since clearly there is an entire staff of people who succeeded with the material. They “conflate experience with intelligence”.
What students tend to forget is that their teachers are good with the material, because of experience. Your teacher has literally taken the class before and has been teaching it for sometime now. Working with the material has given them the experience and intuition they need to solve those types of problems and that is exactly the opportunity they are trying to provide you. The point of school is to learn and grow through experience. Spending time to master a craft is exactly what your teachers did when they were students.
Photoshopped Models of Academia
Teachers are like photoshopped models on the cover of magazines in the sense they sometimes cause insecurities and image issues. As an outsider all you notice when a see a model on the cover of a magazine is how great they look. It never really crosses your mind the number of hours that model spent in the gym. The number of nutritious meals they had to eat over chips and donuts. The amount of sweat, blood, and tears that went into obtaining the body they have. You never think about the fact that the model probably cut out carbohydrates four days before the shoot, went on a liquid diet 2 days before, and eventually only had water the day before. You probably also forgot about the really good lighting and angles the photographer put into the photo. Finally you never really think about the fact that a graphic designer spent hours photoshopping that image. This is not to say that most models weren’t probably gifted with great genes and bone structure, but they only got that cover photo you see through hard work and determination.
There are a lot of parallels to be drawn here. As a student you have probably spent some time admiring how “smart” your instructors are and how good they are at solving the problems you struggle with. This is like admiring how great a model looks on that cover. But when was the last time you thought about how many hours your teacher spent toiling away in a lab? When was the last time you thought about all the parties your teacher missed to study for their exams? When was the last time you thought about the number of problems they tried solving to gain the intuition they have on the material that they are trying to teach? In fact the main difference between a student and a teacher is that a teacher has failed more times than a student has tried.
To be honest teaching is a bit of an act. When I teach discrete math discussions I will receive a lot of praise from my students for being very good with the material. What they don’t know is that 30 minutes before discussion I took some time solving all the problems that we would go over. I even go as far as to practice solving those problems on a whiteboard and explain the steps out loud exactly the way I want to in discussion. So every now and then I remind my students that a lot of what they see is rehearsed and came with practice. On top of that I put on a persona when I teach. I am no where near as confident, elegant, patient, and kind in real life as I am during discussion sections. In fact I have seen the glass shatter for a lot of my students when they get to know me outside of the classroom; when they get to know the real me.
Close My Eyes and Think Really Hard
One of my friends went to an office hour for an algorithms course and asked for help with Dynamic Programming. He asked “How should I go about solving dynamic programming problems”. The TA said a very memorable answer. He said, “I close my eyes for 30 seconds, think REALLY hard … and it comes to me :)”. So not only was this answer not at all insightful, but it is also belittling to the student. It makes the student feel inadequate and that there is something wrong with them for not thinking the problem is as simple as the instructor makes it out to be. It should go without saying that if the material was actually that trivial, then the professor wouldn’t bother assigning homework on it. What that TA has forgotten was the fact they were a student at one point and there probably was a dynamic programming problem that they initially thought was difficult if not impossible. It was only after solving hundreds of dynamic programming problems over the years that he has been a TA (literally years and literally hundreds of problems), did he find these problems to be second nature.
I originally thought that only a few gifted people could do what that TA does. It was only until I took the advanced algorithms course that I could do the same. At this point I can read a problem and recognize that it’s dynamic programming problem before I even finish reading it. And I have done so many of them that I usually know the solution by the time I am done reading the problem. Those problems have essentially become a test of how fast I can write out the solution. However I only got there, since I had an amazing instructor who recognized that students, students like me, struggle with dynamic programming and took the time to formalize it. He spent an entire lecture just explaining the steps to approach a dynamic programming problem and how to apply those steps. He didn’t just solve a bunch of problems thinking that we just had to see it done a bunch of times. It was after years of effort that a problem became an exercise.
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One time I covered a lab and I saw that there was a student who looked really frustrated. They couldn’t log into the machine that they were doing their work on. I knew that it was a fork bomb, since it happens every year with that particular lab. We ask that the students to call fork() in a while loop and every year we have a couple of kids who don’t check that their loop terminates correctly. I told the student that they fork bombed their VM and they we needed to restart it for them. The student was extremely embarrassed that they fork bombed their machine. I told the guy with the right privileges to restart that particular VM and all should have been good. However the student looked defeated and couldn’t focus on their assignment. I asked what was wrong and they told me they feel really bad that they made that type of mistake. I told the student that it’s not a big deal and that I fork bombed my machine when I was a student. At that exact moment all of the typing in the lab stopped. I heard an awkward silence and the whole room was suddenly focusing on me. I realized that these students were surprised that at one point I was just a student learning system programming who fork bombed their machine. These students have an unrealistic expectation of me, since I teach material that they find difficult if not impossible. They assume that I don’t ever make mistakes even though they have never seen me write a line of code. It was at this moment that I learned that the image some instructors put forward is not healthy for the learning environment. I led students to believe that things came naturally to me when in reality I struggle so much when learning new things. So I knew what I had to do. I repeated what I said, “Yeah I fork bombed my machine. I was a student like most of you at one point. It’s all part of the learning experience.”. I saw a lot of confused faces on a lot of those students. I think they came to the realization that I came to after teaching for a little while. They realized that teachers were students at one point. That was something unorthodox for me, since I spent most of teaching career thinking that teachers needed to be perfect, so that their students would put faith in them. But that is only valid to a point. I learned that day that teachers need to be human and part of being human is making mistakes. As an instructor you need to remind your students that even you make mistakes. If they believe that you never make mistakes, then you have lost an environment conducive to learning and mistakes are part of learning, since we are all human at the end of the day.
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Email: bschong2@illinois.edu