Slashdot Mirror
Who Were Your Best Teachers?
sachachua asks: "I'm sure most people have a story about terrific teachers they have had at some point in their life. You know, the kind of teacher who gets you really excited about subjects like computer science or physics. I credit my fascination with Linux to my first year high school teacher, who let me play with being a sysadmin while trying to figure out how to set up a Linux BBS. Then there's one of my college professors, who was really approachable and let me ask all sorts of Java-related questions outside class - even gave me extra projects to work on. There are countless professors and teaching assistants who make learning computer science fun and exciting for students. Would Slashdot readers like to share a couple of great stories?"
If you define the 'best teachers' I've had by the amount I've learned from them, then the two best techers I've ever had I hated. As a matter of fact, everyone hated them, they were evil and nasty. (In class)
The first was my AP Biology teacher in high school, whose tests were questions winnowed from all of the prior AP tests, just the questions that happened to be on the present subject matter. The curve in her class was 60% was an A, to fail you needed to get below 15%. The class was torture to live through, but I learned more about biology in that class than I learned in any three other high school classes. (And I took LOTS of AP classes.)
The second teacher was in college, and he also wrote evil tests : true and false, if false explain why. Mutliple choice, select the answers that are true, don't select the ones that are false, if all are true select all of them, if none are true select none of them. The curves for his tests were take your score and add about 41. Again I learned an immense amount in the classes he taught and hated his guts. He would stalk students that were not paying attention and pounce nasty questions on them. But you learned...
My second teacher who was really inspiring was my English teacher. I had never really liked English until I had him. Whether I now love it because he liked my style and thought I was good at it, or because he was just a great teacher I don't know. I certainly remember striving away to get an A in every prep I did, desperately unhappy if I did not achieve it.
Then was my piano teacher. I come from a highly musical family, with my father owning Howarths, the top oboe manufacturers in the UK. I'd always loved the piano, and always wanted to learn it, and finally I had an amazing teacher too, who has pushed me forward and inspired me to work hours each day. I went from Grade 3 to Grade 8 in three years. But she is a different kind of inspirational teacher. She will shout at me, tell me I'm crap, tell me I ruin my pieces by my weak fingers and lack of control, and completely demoralise me. Yet she does this because she knows I am musical, and she knows what I am capable of. She gets just as frustrated as I do when I don't do something well.
So my favourite subjects have been music, latin, and english. However I am not doing Music for A level, nor Latin although I would very much wish to. For I am inspired by interest as well as a great teacher. I am studying Maths, Further Maths, Physics and Chemistry for A level and English Literature. I have never had an inspiration teacher in any of my science subjects, but I love them so much I have still continued to learn them. English I am doing partly due to my love of the language and of our literature, but also because my teacher has inspired me so much to study it. It breaks my heart not to do music for A level, and keep it just as learning the piano and violin. Perhaps then I should have studied music over English.
Then of course comes computers. My teacher? Myself.
So what does comprise a good teacher? Someone who is inspirational, and opens your eyes to their subject? No, it is someone who opens your eyes to the very concept of learning, beyond that of their own subject. It is someone who inspires you to go far in whatever you do. My latin teacher told me once "Aut Caesar, aut nihil". (Either Ceasar, or nothing, implying you go for everything, or nothing). And that is something I've always kept to, and always will. A good teacher is someone who inspires you to become compassionate about something wider than their own subject. It can't be limited just to learning about geography, it has to be learning itself.
A passion for learning about a subject comes from within you, and teachers can only show you what is already there inside of you. For me, I have a great compassion to learn about everything I possibly can. I love the concepts of quantum physics, I love the idea of computers just going down to 1s and 0s, I love music just being different sound frequencies. A teacher can only show you what is already inside you. And if it is truly there, you will follow your insticts despite terrible teachers, as I have in my sciences and maths. I am inspired by a willingness to learn I created myself. Yes great teachers along the way have helped me want to learn, perhaps have shown me a wider spectrum than their individual subject. But ultimately a teacher doesn't matter. If you are destined to follow a particular career, you will get there through sheer determination regardless of the quality of your teachers.
The point is not that you should, but that you can...ie., in real life you're not likely to optimize your instruction count that much. But you are going to have to solve optimization problems with clever algorithms. The thought process is the same.
Now, on the bad side, there's the man who leads up our School's technology divison, which we all lovingly refer to as "Mr. Dick". This is the guy that told one of my friends that Linux was based on Windows NT. Our school is set up so that all a student can do on the network is browse the internet. That's IT. So, the HS T.A.G. program decided to put down some of our funds from a grant we had gotten to buy a Computer that we could actually do things that we were interested in. (Programming, Video Editing, Music Creation, etc.) We wanted to do all the setup ourselfs, so that it wouldn't be set up like the other "drone" computers in the school, so that we could actually use it for what it was intended for. We come into class the next day, and, lo and behold, he's sitting there with some guy from R&D (A company which is contracted by the school for tech work...they pretty much do his job for him) he's setting it up just like all the other computers. So, we jump the BIOS, format and do a dual boot w/ Linux and Windows 2000. He takes it, reformats. We do the same. He does the same. And so on. This cycle is still going to this day.
Another wonderful tale of Dicky's wonderous deeds is when some stupid script kiddie in our school had a disk w/ a keystroke recorder, and left it in the library. The librarian asked him if it was his, and he said it was. So, he got pulled down to Dickmeister's office, and he tried to interrogate him w/ the whole "I can have you arrested for this!" thing. He lied and said he got it from some other kid (Who I don't really like in the first place) who helped us set up some stuff on the T.A.G. Computer. So, Mr. Dick uses this as an excuse to try to take said computer out of the T.A.G. room because it might be "evidence". That's how he found out that we formatted, etc. So, he threatened this kid w/ Arrest n' whatknot, and he made up all kinds of laws he could get him on....until he got a lawyer. He stopped bothering him after that. It was still 2 more months after that before we got the computer back. They also tried to tell us that the grant we got specifically for the T.A.G. program were not T.A.G. funds, and the principal said that "We put all the grant money the school gets into a pot, and then we divide it up to the different programs at the school."
I hate my school.
I'll stop ranting for today. I've got a couple dozen more stories that I could tell, but, I'm getting all pissed off again from remembering this.
~~plungerhead
I think that's a valid gripe; unfortunately, it seems that moderators never read anything below +2 these days... *hint* *hint*
I don't understand why they don't make sure that teachers can teach before they let them loose on a real class. I've got a teacher right now who told us all that he's taking speech therapy classes right now--and he is impossible to understand. Fortunately, this is an online course, but forget about going to the Q&A sessions...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Why is this unfortunate? All the underlying principles you've been tought still hold true for other languages, such as C or Java. Sure, you'll need to learn a new language, but you should be able to get very comfortable with a new language in a couple of weeks. Personally I think Pascal is a great language for teaching programming principles. Languages such as C or Java (not to mention C++) have too much overhead for people new to programming; just look at the number of lines a minimalistic 'Hello World' program needs...
Best teacher -- Larry Smith, macroeconomics, the University of Waterloo, Canada. Without comparason, the most inspiring, intellegent and witty teacher I've had. Economics is *not* a dismal science.
-Stu
Since I am going to be graduating in May and going into teaching (high school math):
1) My sophomore/junior year math teacher for Trig/Pre-Cal/Calculus. I went to a Xavierian (Catholic) high school and Brother John was... well, a brother. Super nice. He got to school about an hour and a half before school and stayed about two hours afterwards just to be there for questions. He expected everyone to be paying attention at all times, and seemed to know the answer to every question you could imagine.
2) My Calc II TA my freshman year in college. Man, that guy was weird. He mostly just goofed off and did really strange things. One time he stopped in the middle of a discussion and punched the wall. One time he explained to us that whenever he asked "Well, what do *you* think we should do here?" actually meant "I do not have a clue what to do here and I am hoping you have some idea." He also never complained when I never turned in homework. Never, even though homework was 20% of our grade. He realized that I knew my stuff and that was what was important.
3) My Linear Algebra/Number Systems/Moder Algebra prof. I am not sure what was worse - the fact that you could not read a single thing he wrote on the board, or the fact that he just seemed to never be explaining things very well. Three semesters with him, though, and I caught on to his style. Everyone in the classes had to work thier asses off to figure out what he was talking about (and writing on the board), but that extra work helped me, at least, figure it out. He also gave me A's despite the fact that I never did homework.
4) My stats/probability prof. He only gave two homework problems a week, and gave ten "suggested problems." No ten-page problem sets here. Most test problems were very similar to the "suggested problems", though.
Homework always was a killer for me. I never really liked doing it. I always appreciated when a prof could see that, despite me not doing homework, I actually knew the stuff. I realized that convincing them of that meant showing up to every class and making sure to participate in class (a sure way to show profs that you know what you are talking about).
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
Hands down, the most influential teacher I had with regard to computers was my sixth grade computer teacher, Steve Ray.
He taught middle school computer classes in the mid to late 80s. The school had a lab full of Apple IIe computers. In a later class they obtained an Apple IIgs which was the desire of many a student.
A primary goal of the class was to teach the students how to type. There was an interactive Apple program that took the student through a series of lessons and then allowed him to practice until he became proficient with that set of keys. Mr. Ray immediately recognized my potential when I consistantly topped the list of typing speed.
The challenge of becoming the fastest typist was second only to beating the typing games. Before I knew it, I was typing 40wpm. My parents had already recognized that I possessed a natural musical ability and some piano lessons may have paved the way for my typing success.
While my typing abilities gained his attention, it was the algorithms I wrote in LOGO that convinced him I had "the knack". I remember sitting in other classes writing LOGO routines on paper and anxiously waiting for computer class or visiting the computer lab at lunch and after school to try out my creations.
At some point, he moved me to the AppleIIgs which was connected to a large TV monitor for demonstration purposes. During class, I would type in what he was teaching the rest of the class. He loaned me an IBM compatible version of LOGO so I could install it on my XT at home (which never did quite work as well as the apple version).
The ultimate gift from this teacher, beyond his innate ability to challenge me and keep me interested while other students struggled with the primary assignment, was a recommendation to NCR that I be given a scholarship to a summer computer camp. This act singlehandedly paved the way for my thirst for knowledge and understanding.
I traveled to the NCR Headquarters in Dayton, Ohio every day for several weeks in the summer of 1988 where I learned BASIC, core principles of logic, and how to approach problems to be solved programmatically. We were given tours of fault tolerant computer centers that had swipe cards, concrete walls that could withstand natural and manmade disasters, and computing resources that boggled the mind at that time. A general comradarie flourished among me and the other young people there as we discovered the magic of computers.
My future was given a push in the right direction. Where I am now, not only as a respected programmer and systems/network administrator, but life as a whole, is a direct result of the mind expanding, think out of the box mentoring I received at this camp and in Mr. Ray's classes. I feel that as I began to question how things worked and comprehend what, at first glance, seemed intractable my thought processes and perceptions about everyday life changed as well.
Many teachers are disillusioned and downright apathetic. I've had my share of teachers who teach out of the book and offer nothing to guide and gently push a student who shows promise. Mr. Ray truly cared not only about his student's understanding of the core lessons of the class but also made extra efforts to provide encouragement to those who quickly grasped the basic concepts and sought to explore more. While I'm sure his love for computers was deep, his actions, and my immediate recognitition of his presence in my development, suggest that he was an overall top-notch and generally nice guy.
Mr. Ray was an Air Force reservist and was called back to active duty at the end of my 8th grade year. I believe he went to an Air Force base in Colorado Springs. My attempts to locate him about a year ago failed. While I have been unable to thank him personally, maybe some day he will stumble upon this message and have a sense of satisfaction of the role he played in my life.
Thank you, Mr. Ray. You inspired me and surely countless others.
Me [14 years old, short, lots of hair, granny dress, enormous breasts, hyperventilating]: "I um, understand you've got a computer here? Like from the DoD? Can I see it?"
He [short sleeved dress shirt, real pocket protector, slide rule case, half specs]: "Sure. Want to try it out?"
Me: "Wow!"
He: "Sign the log, and here's a book..."
Me: "Gee, a TeleTYpe and everything! And a WATER COOLER! Wait until I tell Mom...I look like that groovy chick in Cosmopolitan!"
[Next day...]
Me: "I wonder what this does?"
Book: 10 PRINT "GOOD MORNING ALISSA"
20 GOTO 10
RUN
GOOD MORNING ALISSA
GOOD MORNING ALISSA
GOOD MORNING ALISSA
GOOD MORNING ALISSA
Me: EEK! That...that computer! It's got a mind of its own! It's not responding to SCR or NEW or even t\n! What do I do now??
GOOD MORNING ALISSA
GOOD MORNING ALISSA
GOOD MORNING ALISSA
[I drink a conical cup of water, try to remember some SF...]
Me: I know!!! It's in Isaac Asimov! I'll turn it off!!
[I switch off the TTY, and walk casually over to Dr. Berger, sitting under a chalk board with allocation of core memory...]
Me: I'd like to report a malfunction...
Hacker chorus in background: Berger!! You gave her the wrong book again!!
He: Um, I forgot to tell you, break is ^C. And by the way, you passed the test....
THE END.
teleny, friend of cats.
Apparently you're a student of nothing; even the most small-minded psych students I knew at university wouldn't disagree with "it's BOTH nature AND nurture". Few *learned* individuals disagree with this, and you've said nothing to indicate that you're anything but unlearned.
For myself, my best teachers were my grade 9 science teacher, my grade 10 history teacher, and one of my CS profs at UNB. (Mr. Rose at CCJHS in Truro, NS; Mr Brown at CEC in Truro, NS; and Dr. Jane Fritz at UNB Fredericton.) From Mr. Rose I learned a method of teaching of which I highly approve - make the students give you their answers. From Mr. Brown I learned that history, and by extension any subject in school, can be fun. And from Dr. Fritz I learned that students can be people too. (You'd have to have been a student of hers, or somebody with a similar style, to really understand, and nobody will read my explanation anyway.)
I had Bill Watson for 1 quarter in 1972 at University of Washington. Which got me hooked for life to Differential Geomery, and Mr. Hulot's Holiday for life.
You can read about this wonderful teacher at:
http://facpub.stjohns.edu/~watsonw/
Of course it would help if I could spell Differential Geometry right ( or at least the same twice in a row....)
Sorry....
Sinan
While not a school teacher, this guy started a small computer club when I was about 14. Got a bunch of kids together, and started talking about computers and Ham Radio. Pretty decent about it as well. Spent a lot of time and bought lots of Pepsi for us as well :) The world needs more people like this, and I probably will do the same when the kids get a little older, and the time is there.
We started by doing simple programs in Basic on the Apple ][ machines. This led to games, and the need for speed. At that time it meant assembly language. So we learned that on the 6502. Built little routines that we could call from the basic.
The assembly language stuff was probably some of the most important learning that I have ever done. Granted today there is little use for it, but having written full programs in it made for an understanding of things in a way that would have not been possible given just higher language tools.
At the time I owned an Atari 800 machine. Cool graphics chips. He basically taught me assembler the hard way. We wrote all the tools needed in the Basic language at the time, then sped them up with code generated from those same tools. The 6502 is fast, but very limited in its capability. I remember him teaching me what self modifying code was, and how wierd of a concept that was, but on that chip, it made the difference between night and day. Later on I got a macro assembler with intergrated debugger (Mac 65 --I still have it!) and was in heaven.
He owned a couple of TRS 80 color computers. They had probably the worst graphics around (some motorola thing), but they also had a 6809 CPU. After cutting my teeth on a 6502, the 6809 was awesome. Very nice instruction set, and probably as powerful as you can get for an 8 bitter. More important was at the time I was maybe 16 years old, and I could tell you which CPU's sucked, and why I thought they did. (Die Z80 Die!) The number of kids in my school that could do that was maybe 5. I lived also in a small town where you worked with what you could find.
On that chip we wrote code that was reentrant, and relocatable. Making code readable, small, and fast at the same time was an art that I am very glad to have learned to appreciate. Also ran Os/9 multi user with a few terminals setup on the serial ports.
Using the Atari with its very nice bi-directional game ports (6520 I think) we also did some input output control stuff. One project was to send and receive morse code using the computer as a teletype. This ended up working, and I was able to converse with someone else using the setup, and they had no idea.
All this nice stuff before 1986! and on consumer hardware.
Kind of interesting these days when the memory required to hold a full color icon on the display can require more memory in user space than those systems did, yet much of the knowledge still applies.
We also went and got our Ham Radio License. I have since let mine lapse. (should not have though) This involved early radio ethics, basic AC DC theory, and antennas. Mix this with the computers, and technology becomes a toy, and and an enabler. Want to fix something? Start reading. How about make something new? Used all of this stuff to get one of my first jobs, and also repair and enjoy some great stereo equipment that I would not have otherwise been able to afford.
Today I look also at computing with an eye toward what should be possible. I spent about 10 years working with PC hardware, and M$ OSes and was kind of missing something. Now I run SGI IRIX, and Linux, and it's back! Computing environments that are mallable, and yet still have some structure that matters, and that you can count on.
All I have to say to this guy is Thank You! Those early days of bit-mapped graphics, look up tables, and CPU level math are not forgotten. Wonder if he reads SlashDot?
End Nostalga mode...
Blogging because I can...
My senior year in high school there was a new computer lab being installed and they needed student assistants to help the other kids with Word and Excel and the like. They also wanted to get the lab connected to the Internet. So I signed up.
When I got there they had about 15 PCs and a phone line. The hubs and the server were in the mail and the network cards were in a box in the corner. They also purchased 5 Mac's that were delivered later.
Once the server was delivered I basically setup the lab. They wanted NT, so I installed NT server and set it all up. In the process I totally learned how to do a lot of things with profiles and policies that I never would have known about. We also used services on the NT machine to create a shared drive that the Macs and the PC's could both see to help move file between them. I even setup the Proxy server at first so that 5 of those PC's could share the one modem. Before I left they had ISDN installed and all the computers were then online. We even wired the library, a couple other computer labs, and a few of the other rooms in the building. It was the best lab in the entire school district.
I never would have been able to do it without the lab supervisor. He gave me a lot of room to do what I wanted and usually I was able to fix most of the problems on my own. We used to discuss problems that we had in the lab with studets that tried to "hack" the 98 machines and generally we solved most of the problems or found solutions online.
I still to this day go to lunch with him whenever I'm in town and I occasionally help him with any problems he may be having with the lab. I guess they still talk about the "guy that installed the first NT network in the district."
I can also say that after working in the lab I can totally see why teaching is so difficult. The students aren't the problem either, its the administration and all the hoops that constantly have to be jumped through to get anything done.
I don't know if this is a "best" teacher or a "least bad," but seeing as every other comp sci teacher I've ever had has been an arrogant asshole, my favorite was the Russian who didn't speak a word of English. Nor did he know C++, the language on which the class was designed. Aah, gotta love public high schools. :)
You obviously don't live in the South. :) Teaching positions south of the Mason-Dixon line are desparate; I know for a fact Houston ISD hires teachers who don't even speak English, because they're so hard up. As for the substitutes, (I'm seriously not making this up,) I've had: a hobo (though he preferred to be called a traveler), a Rwandan refugee, a man who reeked of marijuana and a woman who was later convicted of killing her mother. This is the state of education pretty much anywhere in the South.
The best teacher I had was mr. Castelli - english teacher. He was a hippy looking guy, long hair, multiple bracelets, etc. He was notorious for using the F word - it wasn't uncommon for him to use it 4-5 times during the lesson. I know this sounds pretty bad, but it worked - he used it as if he was talking to a friend and describing a book he really loved, and using strong words because he was overwhelmed with awe. He was also a huge fan of Oprah - he said that if he got to Oprah show, he'd stand on his knees (he immediately demonstrated it) and made a tirade about how great she is. I should watch her sometime.. He was also very articulate and had a very decent vocabulary (expletives notwithstanding). I think he later got transferred for the f-word, or maybe fired - and I really think that it wasn't fair because perhaps the only way to be taken serious by students there (mostly black in one of the worse neighborhoods of brooklyn) was to use their language. I'm really quite sorry I never tried hard there
cause of the general fucked up school attitude of 'slacking along' that I conformed to, but he made an influence on me still. Cool guy, and a great teacher! There was *never* any droning in his class - at worst you were in for quite a show, and at best you were a part of it..
-- ATTENTION: do not read this sig. It doesn't say much.
I've had several teachers that I would rate as excellent, but the one that really stands out would be Eugene Lawler. He taught (among other things) CS 170 which was the basic undergraduate CS Theory class at Berkeley. Turing machines, computabilty, NP Completeness, etc.
Professor Lawler was one of the most approachable professors I ever met. One of my favorite memories from his class was that each week he would appoint one student "The Dummy." It was the job of "The Dummy" to ask at least three stupid questions per class session. The thought was that when one person asked a stupid question other students would be encouraged to ask questions that they had, but which they thought were "too stupid" to ask.
As we were going through the class and I'm doing the reading and checking the bibliography I see that it was Professor Lawler along with Richard Karp that had originally proven quite a lot of the basic theorems presented in the course of the class. I remember being amazed that this fun, approachable, interesting man was at least partially responsible for real groundbreaking research.
I learned a year or so ago that Professor Lawler had, some years since, died of cancer. It makes me sad to think that his light has gone out in this world.
My best teacher was a high-school history teacher. He was hard core and didn't take crap from anyone, but he made history *fun*.
He was an ex-Ranger and everything else (we were sure he was also DB Cooper).
If you asked a stupid question, he told you it was stupid -- a trait missed, I think, today.
Unfortunatly he, like many of my high school teachers, simply gave up. They were old and even the best teachers finally burn out. I think every generation finally gives up on "the kids today" which is too bad.
My $.02
My HS band teacher was an arrogant, pompus bastard, but he motivated our music program to perfection. While our sports teams faultered and floundered, our bands (Wind Ensemble, Marching/Concert/Stage Bands) were winning awards and praise from the community and school.
Some of us were motivated out of fear, but we knew that just making him proud and happy was worth all of the trouble. Everybody that had him as a conductor owes him something.
Even though my involvement in music since HS is much less, I still strive for perfection and excellence in much that I do. He always asked 110% of us and he got it.
One phrase from him sums up his philosophy:
"Practice doesn't make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect."
--Bernie
Bob Cooke, at secondary school, for recognising at entrance that I could be good at Maths if given appropriate challenges. Up to that point, I was failing badly because the maths work wasn't challenging enough; I'd learn how to do something early enough, but couldn't be bothered with all the endless repetitive practice exercises when I was getting them 100% right. Thanks to Mr Cooke, he placed my in the top stream and I ended up taking maths a year early. Incidentally, he picked up his maths degree from an Open University (UK TV-based distance learning) course, or so I heard.
Also at secondary school were Mr Moore, teaching Physics and Chemistry and Brendan McLoughlan teaching English Lit. Both had such enthusiasm for their subject that you couldn't help but work hard. I was doing OK at the sciences, but Mr's Moore's encouragement helped greatly. Particular praise goes to Mr McLoughlan though, as English Lit was yet another course I was failing badly. Thanks to his efforts, I can't help looking for deeper meanings in any book, film or song I experience even today!
College was a bit dry, but university had a number of stars; Dr Vic Callaghan, Dave Lyons, Mike Sanderson all stand out. Mr Lyons stands out for introducing me to the concepts of "Keep It Simple, Stupid" and "Never use a computer when a coathanger will do". He also made me aware of the need to consider usability by people with disabilities when designing interfaces, something I'd never considered previously. Mike Sanderson's Abstract Data Types & Compiler Construction course was a real trial-by-fire. You either flunked it badly or came out a much better, cleaner programmer than before.
Thanks to all these teachers (and the ones I haven't mentioned!) for helping me to make it to where I am today.
Ken Shrum and Madam Theisen were the two best teachers I've had in my educational experience.
Madam Theisen was my French teacher when I was in Jr. High school. Most foreign language teachers did the conventional thing: They taught the grammar, taught vocabulary, had us do assignments to drill the vocabulary, important things to learn, but I got bored with the drills and lectures and didn't get very much out of those classes. Madam Theisen was about the craziest woman I've ever met in school (the perfect thing for a French class :) ) She would wear outrageous outfits, including a big chicken hat. She had us sing songs, she brought in food and had us recite the names of food and utensils as we ate, she taught us French nursery rhymes. The class was incredibly silly, but we learned French well. During the summer, she also organized and chaperoned trips to France, which both I and my sister went on. <ramble> We saw Paris, the Louvre, Notre Dame, the Pompidou Center (also known as the Inside Out building). I spent a week or so living with a French family. I visited the D-Day beaches at Normandy. I visited the Cote D'Azure, I saw the Bastille Day celebrations, and had a blast!</ramble> She taught us not only French, but a deep appreciation of other cultures which I carry to this day.
My other truly great teacher was Ken Shrum, who taught my Object Oriented Design class last fall at Colorado State University. He was one of those teachers who bucked against the normal way of doing things at CSU. The first thing he did in his class, before we got to object oriented design itself, was teach us how to be better programmers in what he called his "Boot Camp," which covered good programming style, and threw in some Extreme Programming concepts including unit testing, test-first programming and pair-programming. He was concerned about some of the things that were left untaught in the CS Dept., and that put him at odds with the rest of the department and the friction forced him to leave. Nevertheless, it is clear that Ken cared a great deal about his students and went out of his way to help them.
To both of you, thanks for everything, you don't know the difference you've made in people's lives.
Meldroc, Waster of Electrons
I'm now a computer science teacher myself at a high school near Austin, TX. Here's the story of the teacher that influenced me to become a teacher.
As a freshman at the University of Texas, I had the pleasure to learn under Susan Loepp as my assistant instructor for the Emerging Scholars version of calculus discussion section. She was a graduate student in mathematics and was responsible for filling the gaps between calculus lectures and exams for two semesters. I have had no better teacher.
As a graduate student, Susan was fairly young, probably still in her mid-twenties. Accordingly, she had an excitement for learning and for her field that is rare in mathematics. When introducing a new topic, showing some unusual or especially interesting application for a concept we had learned, or when some student was on the brink of understanding, she often grew visibly excited and would hop up from her perch on top of her desk and fly around the room or pause by the chalk board to make her words concrete. Her passion was contagious; I often found myself smiling at or surprised by the elegance of some new theorem.
Not content to merely provide us with the information we needed to complete homeworks or pass tests, Susan also tried to show us the "Why?" of what we were learning. Rather than using simple repetition or memorization (although these methods were used), Susan drew on her deeper knowledge of mathematics to show us the principles that made our techniques work. For example, instead of just stating that integration of a function gives the area under a curve, she used numerous diagrams and example problems to show why it does so. Such minilectures in number theory and higher math gave us a taste of the joy in truly knowing a subject.
Susan was tireless. Although as a graduate student she no doubt had plenty of work to be done, and though our class met three days a week for two hours each day, she was always in class. And not just present; she had a new worksheet of problems for us every day, with examples, explanations, and several exercises of increasing complexity based on the previous day's lecture. She was always prepared for the day's topic, and though flexible, never had to "fly by the seat of her pants", as she was ready for the questions we would ask and anticipated what we would find counter-intuitive. All this she handled almost casually, yet with characteristic intensity, as if she had no other concerns.
Even though she knew more mathematics then than I will probably ever learn, Susan seemed to consider us not students as much as co-laborers. That is, one got the impression that she was just one of us, that she did not consider herself better because she had learned more. She was very down-to-earth, and understood that school often took a back seat to real life. Before exams, there were always pizza and pepperoni rolls at study sessions. She held a superbowl party at her apartment to which we were all invited. Similarly, she came to an end-of-the-year party that another student held. She knew our names, our phone numbers and more, and made sure we knew the same about each other. We were not merely her students but her friends.
Finally, Susan tried to show that there is no better way to learn than to teach. Each student had to do a project showing the solution to some interesting problem. It was presented before the class and we had to defend ourselves and present the material in a way that was understood by others. In addition, before every exam, we were responsible for making up study sheets, which had to be completed early and in sufficient detail so that someone who had never been exposed to the topic in question could learn it and further understand. Predictably, whoever had made the study sheet for a particular type of problem would perform flawlessly on them on the exam. She showed us that the axiom "those who can, do; those who cannot, teach" could not be farther from the truth.
Susan showed me by example what a great teacher should be. She sparked my interest in teaching by allowing me to get a taste of it for myself, by allowing me to see that I can have a similar passion for my field. She taught me calculus better than my professor because she told me the "Why?", and convinced me that it was important to know, that it made a difference. Susan made me want to be a teacher, and I hope that I am for my students what she was, and is, to me.
Graham "Teach" Mitchell, computer science teacher, Leander HS
I didn't only learn the subjects and sports from him, though. I learned how to teach, how to modivate someone to help them achieve their goals. I learned that you can be in a position of authority without having to be a dictator or tyrant. That having and keeping a good sense of humor can help you through hard times. I learned that nothing is more important than family. That being a man does not mean you can't feel and show those feelings. I also learned that knowledge is a gift that should be shared. Learn everything you can about anything and pass it on to someone. There are many more things he taught me. How I live and who I am is, in a large part, due to him.
Last Feb. 2nd, he passed away after five years of illness. It's hard seeing the man who was your strength being eaten away in front of you. But even in this he taught me something. No matter what happens or how bad it gets, nothing can defeat your spirit. Never give up.
---
--
If I actually could spell I'd have spelled it right in the first place.
--
A mind is a terrible thing to taste.
"A mind is a terrible thing to taste."
... believe it or not, was the best teacher I've had for any subject.
I was taking night classes at a tech school. By day he was the DP manager (what would be a CIO these days) for US Pipe in Chattanooga, TN. Why he chose to teach night classes I don't know... maybe just for the love of teaching. Whatever the reason was, he was damn good at it.
He told one story that still makes me laugh. This was 1979, when most of the smaller shops were just weaning themselves from the old punch cards. US Pipe was made the leap, and he was trying to find someone who wanted his old card punch. Not only would no one buy it, but the only people who had any interest wanted to be paid for carting it away. So he got some of his workers to help him load it in the back of his truck, and he used it to anchor his floating dock at his lake house.
Garg
Garg
Alumnus, Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters
Number one for me has to be Don Pederson, 6th-7th grade English/reading from Inglewood, CA. I had him for half a day during 6th and for English/reading in 7th.
:(
What does this have to do with Slashdot? Aside from glib comments that many CS/CE graduates can barely spell, this was my first experience with complex structures and organization.
Bear in mind that this is for 11-12 year-olds:
- Poetry examination including the standard fare of onomatopoeia, alliteration and rhyme. Branches out to include the major styles of meter: dactyl, anapest, iambic and trochee. Examples drawn from Shakespeare, Edger Allen Poe (his favorite), Frost, etc.
- Works of literature including _Lord_of_the_Flies_, _The_Crucible_, _The_Martian_Chronicles_, most of the works of Edger Allen Poe (I told you he liked the guy) to name a few.
- English grammar. Yes, that's right, there were some renegade teachers who defied the decree from on high that teachers should not teach grammar. I have a theory that teaching grammar didn't make a significant effect on test scores because most teachers don't know the rules of grammar themselves. Subject-verb-direct object? P'shaw! That was a quick primer on the first day in sixth grade. I'm talking about infinitives, participles, prepositions/prepositional phrases, adverbiable clauses, noun clauses, independant clauses, relative clauses, gerands, etc.
- One of our working textbooks was Strunk & White's _Elements_of_Style_.
Its funny. I want to be a teacher but can't without a degree and credential.
Don't let this be relection of this teacher. I rarely did homework -- a source of great consternation to my parents and teachers to be sure.
Back to the subject, I want to be a teacher, but it was not Don Pederson that put that (masochistic?) desire into me. It was the teacher I had in the eigth grade who expected subject-verb-direct object from her students and not much more. I was disgusted! I knew that there was so much more that I had learned in the last two years. There is nothing, in my opinion, that an eleven-year-old can learn that a thirteen-year-old cannot.
I still have my class notes to this day. After him, english classes were just a few more books and writing practice. I had to re-read _Lord_of_the_Flies_ and _The_Martian_Chronicles_ again in high school. Not the worst thing in the world but isn't education supposed to be exposure to a wide variety of material so as to teach a literary roadmap? Just my humble opinion I guess.
Again, what does this have to do with Slashdot? My knowledge of grammar and sentence structure helped my ability with foreign languages (i18n & l10n). I illustrated to me the value of clear and concise writing even in technical documentation for my code. I'm not so willing to skimp on comments. The poetry training specifically helped in translating the abstract into a logical structure. Yes! Poetry taught me how to program!
Much props to you Mr. P.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
Lutheran School. Taught 6th grade. He made learning FUN, got me into computer science. He stands out as my best teacher.
Also, Dr. Lawrence Kugler from the University of Michigan, Flint campus. He teaches math, and does it VERY well.
You mean being a nerd isn't an automatic defense against a sexual harassment action anymore? You know, like driving a Pinto would be a defense against a charge of driving 90 in a 55 :).
Glad everything's turned out OK. Don't answer this if it will cause you problems, but I'm curious as to whether the student who levelled the false accusations faced any disciplinary action and if reference to the incident has been expunged from your student record, or is available to anyone to whom you have a transcript sent.
I don't know if there's any scientific proof to this or not. But, all of my really good proffessors have had really messy offices, and all my worst proffessors have had really clean offices. My best professors have always had to "clear off a place for me to sit" when I'd go into see them. In fact, who most students consider to be the best prof at my school has two offices...both completely filled with junk!
Offhand, I'd say I had about 5 or 6 great teach throughout my career as a student. Without making this a book, I'd like to note two of them:
:-)
1) My highschool Psychology teacher, Mr Campagnoli.
Noteworthy first for giving me an 'F' in the class and forcing me into Summer School for the first time ever, and second for my having learned more in that class than virtually the entire rest of my high-school career. In the strictest of terms I deserved the 'F' - I wasn't into doing homework/busiwork and that accounted for enough of the point in the class. However it makes a great irony of how learning and grades have nowhere near the 1:1 relationship the grading advocates would like us to believe.
The supjects of learning were varied and almost universally engaging. Mucho classroom discussion, mostly free-form, but substantially structured at times as well. I wish I would have taken the time to thank him before I moved from that town.
The biggest impression he made on me (to note, I was quite the geek at this age, not with the in crowd in any sense) was during an early mornig classroom discussion. In usual fashion, he nailed me with a question for which I had no immediate answer - I didn't do the reading homework - but could think about and answer very reasonably. After half a second of silence from my while I thought, some others in the class began to heckle.
Much to my surprise, Mr. Campagnoli actually shut down the noisy students and essentially orderd me to think about it as long as needed and then answer. This was such a stark contrast for me to how everyone around me operated - from teachers to friends to politicians. Everyone! People always engaging their mouths without regard to their brains. People always seem to push for an instant answer.
I really took this to heart. Even apart from the rest of the great learning that happened in that class, this stood out for me as a seminal life moment.
2) My undergrad Philosophy 101 prfessor, Julie Eflin.
Talk about getting someone interested in learning and thinkning! I still don't know how much credit I'd give her or how much for me just being ripe for it - certainly both are to blame!
It was a survey course covering the range of prominent philosphers. The beauty of this class for me was the uncovering of David Hume and the arguments against Free Will. What made it so beautiful was how much I was able to (even encouraged to) dig into it beyond the scope of the 1 hour class time. By the end of that semester I'd probably spent 10 hours or more in her office with her just going further into it, bouncing my ideas for valid refutations off her. She was very understanding, but veyr vigilant as well. (Ole Dave Hume is a complete asshole for coming up with that Determinism crap - very hard to refute on grounds other than absurdity.)
At any rate, my mind was opened and encouraged to such a degree by the end of college that I think I even forgave the shittiest teachers I ever had: History 150: Western Civilization and Phil. 300:Ancient Philosophy.
The former should have been one of the most interesting classes able to be taught, but the militant feminist no-personality bitch that taught it made it a names & numbers game. The later - excepting the militant feminist part - was the same.
Mr. Lucas. I had been tinkering/programming for 5 years by then, and it was 1986. Mr. Lucas gave me the single most important epiphany I've ever had with respect to computers and programming.
"Every single thing you do in life is a sequence of steps, and each step can be broken down into its own sequence of steps." He gave an example of going to school: I went to school. I drove to school. I got ready, drove across town, and went in the school. I woke up, I got dressed, I scraped ice off the windows, I warmed up the car, I drove down my street, got on the highway, got off at the school's exit, parked in the parking lot, turned off the car, locked the door, grabbed my books, shut the door, walked up to the building, pulled the door open, and walked inside. And so on, and so on.
The same holds true for computer programming. You take a concept, a goal, and break it down into steps. Then you attack each step and break that down. It makes any programming project seem approachable. It makes any programming language learnable. Eventually you can say, "I know all the 'whats', it's just a matter of learning the 'hows'."
--
Intelligent Life on Earth
Hello,
being on many schools/edu I can only remember very few teacher, those that were really great and I enjoyed the class...:-)
There was one physic teacher, a really old one, who always liked to make something with the laser we had, cause he could smoke than during the lesson, you couldn't see the laser otherwise...
Everybody in the class had problems with math and always short before a test, someone asked him in his hour if he could explain it. He did, and after 10 min everyone had understood the stuff, which the real math teacher couldn't explain in weeks...
The other one was a historic teacher, you could ask him what you wanted about historic, he could always tell you some interesting story that sounded, as if he would have been there himself...:-)You could hear this needle fall in classroom if he spoke...Just because it was so interesting to listen to him...:-)
Another physic teacher had the abiltity to compute everything in his head, faster than you could even type it in your calculator, quite impressive...
Most teacher had no clue of course, they were just doing this job, because of the long holidays they had and most teachers in germany are paid by the state and can't loose their job, which is another big reason for many to become one...
Michael
The one really great CS instructor I had was in my Junior and Senior Year of High School by the name of Hannelore Maddox. What made her so great was the fact that she cared about her students. It wasn't just lip service that she said she cared, it was that her entire being said she cared. Her license plates at the time were "HUGAKID" and "HUG1KID." When she gave exams, she understood that having the material sink in was more important than the grade, but the grade was what most anxious high school students are looking at! So to compensate, she would give exams on a Thursday or Friday. That Friday night or Saturday night, our class and a class from another school she taught at would get together and have a study session, using the exams that we had taken earlier. Most of the people would have mediocre scores, while others had excellent scores. We would do peer teaching to make sure that everyone understood the material, then we'd take a make-up exam when we were ready. The make-up exam would then overwrite the mediocre scores. People would have good scores and also know the material. Since it was an AP class, we'd all take the AP test at the end of the year. It wasn't uncommon to have everyone score 4s and 5s. The only unfortunate thing is that when I took her class, she was teaching Pascal, which has fallen by the wayside. Sure could use a teacher like her in my efforts to learn C++ and Java.
I would definitely have to say that my favorite teacher was an english teacher... however, that's not what he taught...
To all you other posters, computer science teachers aren't important because they teach you how to code... teachers are important because they help you learn how to think.
This english teacher I had for several years in both a program for the intelligent kids (~15 of us)and then for english. What made him important is that he interacted with us, and treated us as equals. And he really directed us as to how to think and to be critical and develop our sense of selves and intelligence. And for that, he has my ultimate respect. He didn't teach me something concrete, like grammar or perl, but he taught me a way of living, something way more important.
"Lazyness is the first step towards efficiency." -Patrick Bennett
...was my 12th-13th grade physics teacher. He really managed to get all of us excited about physics. We kept pondering all sorts of weird ideas, discussing things like photons rotating around each other and stuff like that. This sort of thing really gives you an idea about all those numbers and relations you're learning about. One day I found out (on the internet) that this particular teacher had done some great work on chaos theory when he was at university. Asked about it he prepared a presentation about chaos theory and it's implicancies and invited us to learn a bit more about this subject *in his spare time*. Tell you what: we all came back to school at about 07:00pm to listen to his explanations. As far as I know, this teacher is now working for a company in the UK. He left our school the year we had our graduation.
The best teacher/professor I've ever had was my first year calculus at the University of Waterloo. He loved to teach and it was incredibly evident in his teaching style. He would explain things really well, get the students involved and have some fun with it. He was so good that my classroom was packed with people; there were students standing all around the edges of the classroom and sitting at the front, evidently finding him a better lecturer than their own there. Where most professors would have drawn the line and started taking attendance, my prof came in one day and sadly said that although he tried to book a bigger room for the class, there were no rooms available at that timeslot.
Also, just before exams he had very open-ended office hours -- any time he was in his office. He also managed to finish the course early so that he could do review, and he did the entire 1999 Fall MATH 137 exam in class. I saw one girl from a different class ask him for help on almost every question of the same past exam he did in class. And what impressed me is that he didn't complain, didn't even mention that he did ALL those questions in detail in class.
What might interest you is a man that I've never had as a teacher, although I've attended one short talk he gave, which was the most fun I've had learning something. He's an undergrad student who taught a combinatorics & optimization course and got some of the highest prof ratings anyone had seen for a while. What's interesting is that he does not believe in the lecture style of teaching, and instead plans what he calls 'tours', which are very interactive, thought-provoking learning experiences. But my explanation cannot come close to his, click here for a very detailed explanation of a revolutionary way of teaching.
My Inspirational teacher, was my Sixth Grade teacher. In my town elementary was K-6, so we were not jaded middle schoolers then. His name was Mr. Vanderels. One of the coolest men I've ever known, he taught outside the box in so many ways.
He inspired his class to think outside of the text books, in ways that many teachers will never phathom. From his zany capitals quizes, with questions like This place is Satan's dishwasher.. Helsinki(no offense ment to our friends in Finland, its one of the ones I remember to this day..) To his Hang-man challenges. Where he'd run the hangman on the board and we'd dig out our atlas' and try and find the city he was looking for. A correct answer would erase a demerit or give a bonus to the next test.
One day in May, school was almost over and he turned the tables, a bit, he told the whole class, find one city in hangman. If you can stump me, everyone will get 100 bonus points on their final. We were up for the challenge! Digging out the atlas we poured over the globe trying to find the hardest most complicated word without any foriegn language markings on it. We came apon Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky(Excuse my spelling here its been a long time...) Wouldn't you know it, he got it after the second letter in hangman! We lost! defeated we asked how he knew, he picked up a pulp fiction novel of the time. You know one of those spy dramas, and said "It's all in the books." He started me right then in there on my love of reading.
Mr. Vanderels, I credit with my analytical quick thinking mind. Elementary school is so important to a person in their formative years, to have someone as cool as him is a bonus in my books. I might not have a PHD, or Masters, or even a bachellors, but because of him, I know what I can and can't do, and I am damn good at what I do. A little of everything, somethings better than others.
Most memorable teacher in my case went by the name Fred Hurst. It was him who, in pshysics, tought us the concept of mass very clearly. He took a brick wrapped in masking tape and passed it around the class to test its mass. Then he would quickly swap it for a wrapped brick of styrofoam, same size, and toss it at a student. Then there was the chess club he was in charge of... but thats another story.
The best teacher I ever had was a high school business teacher. She was not a programming teacher or a systems administrator, but she made me realize that I had potential to pursue computers as a career. She as much as forced me to become a member of FBLA and enter a Computer Concepts contest. It was mainly a contest about the history of computing and using certain word processing and spreadsheet programs. I had been in her class learning exactly that stuff the previous semester, and I ended up winning the state contest and a trip to Anaheim, California to the national contest. This was a very big deal for me, having almost never left Arkansas before.
Through this experience, I realized that I could make a living doing things like this, and I later became the district treasurer. She took me to all the district meets and would use her free time to take me to various FBLA functions. She also bent the rules a little to allow my FBLA duties to be a "class" which basically was like being a lab operator. It was not until college that I started doing programming, which is what I do now, but she definitely helped open me up to the idea that I could pursue a career in computing.
When I first entered high school I was one of the few computer geek type people around (this was only 4+ years ago too) and was kinda lonely in that respect. I had a few friends, but no one I really connected with. All the teachers were very good, but still teachers stuck in the system. They did what they were told and stayed within the lines of the system. The ray of light in my school was my sysadmin / computer teacher. He agreed that most of what is done in school is a waste of time and shared many of my views about many things, from the absurdity of the educational system, what music could be considered masterpieces in their own time, and various gripes about the US government. He was like a sort of Socrates to me, in that I could present him with any idea, and he would point out every hole in it, allowing me to explore more deeply my own personal beliefs, allowing me to become my own person without influencing me with his own beliefs. For that I thank him, wherever he is now.
-- From my Best Friend (Written to me over ICQ): "i was gonna go to a party...but i had to reinstall windows"
Although most of you are talking about your favorite CS teachers or computer related profs, by far the best teacher that I have ever had was my high school English teacher, Matthew Holdreith. My freshman year, he taught me everything there is to know about grammar (which I have forgotten by now btw). Besides grammar, he has been an inspiration in my life, and was just a downright good person. Thank you Mr. Holdreith.
At Oklahoma Baptist University, there are exactly 2 comp. sci. profs. -- Dr. & Mr. Hanchey. They were exceptional teachers who taught us the importance of testing, documentation, retesting, keeping up with current technologies, and retesting. :-) They had both worked in the IT industry, so they were able to give us real world advice. And, it's obvious how much they care about their students.
human://billy.j.mabray/
human://billy.j.mabray/
"Every good system has a backup." -- Dale Hanchey
The Hamilton College Comp Sci faculty had the right combination of hacker/teacher/friend to enable many of us to find our own niches in this vast world of computing.
I was a sophmore in high school. I was supposed to compete in the American Legion's persuasive oratory contest on a Sunday afternoon, but the contest was postponed because of miserable weather (-20 F). Dr. Stark called to tell me that the contest was delayed a week. She also informed me in no uncertain terms that I needed the time, because my speech was not ready.
Her exact words were, "Come over. Bring the speech. You're going to sit at my kitchen table and re-write the speech while I cook dinner for the rest of the week. You will learn how to do this."
I was not a happy camper. I bundled up and walked over to her house. When I got there, I was cold and cranky. I argued with everything she said in the first half hour I was there.
Dr. Stark refused to give up. In between chopping vegies and stirring sauces, she kept asking questions like, "Why? What do you mean by that?" and telling me, "Explain it! Develop the idea!" I had assumed that if I said something, all the implications I saw in the statement would be obvious to other readers or listeners. I thought it was insulting to explain things. But of course, in persuasive speaking and writing, the whole point is to draw others into understanding and supporting your opinion.
The next weekend, I gave the speech. I came in third out of four, which was my own fault. I really shouldn't have tried to convince the American Legion to oppose the death penalty on Constitutional grounds.
I was lucky enough to take another class with Dr. Stark my senior year. She still had to remind me, from time to time, not to write in the passive voice. But the turning point was at her kitchen table. Even the writing classes I took in college and law school only refined the fundamental lesson Dr. Stark taught me when I was 15, crabby, and cold.
Liza
These opinions are my own. My employer is not aware of them, does not endorse them, and is not responsible for them.
My favorate teacher would probably be my chemistery teacher Mr. K. He graded very easily (never failed a student, I got a 100 semester average) He wouldn't force me to pay attention if I understood the subject, and would happily take time to explain and teach me anything related or not to the class that I might ask.
"huhuhuhh, go away. we're like closed or something"
He showed me that nobody can know everything (you know how your father seems to know everything when you are little) but you can learn. He would say "I don't know" when he didn't know. Sometimes he would guess, but he would explain me how he got to his conclusion.
My mother, on the other hand, just _can't_ say "I don't know". She always just guesses an answers, and gives it like it's the truth. And she thinks I'm passive agressive because I ask her thinks she doesn't know, and I'm just waiting for her to say "I don't know" so I can laugh at her. That's how I learn what happends when you think you know everything.
--
--
Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
This is a real player video of a staged wrestling match between my former calculus professor, and my former discrete math professor from spring 2000. For this reason, they had to be great teachers, and that they were.
KlausTolle.rm
--------
--------
It's OK to be social, just don't tell anyone about it.
The one teacher that made a difference would have to be Mr. Miller. I had his classes my sophomore and senior years. Although the classes were calc, he and I would always end up talking about quantum physics and the latest theories. Not to mention, if not for him, I would never have likely taken advanced calc courses and decided to go into computer science, instead I would be studying journalism (which is still the second half of my double major).
I have been blessed with many wonderfull teachers, both in out out of the classroom, from my 12th grade teacher, who pushed everyone in my class so hard that we all thought college was a joke, to College professors who understood that I knew how to learn and that I would put most of my class to shame if they just let me do what interested me. I've only had one bad teacher, and she was just to tired to teach any more, but thirty or more years of teaching high school will do that to anyone.
But I had to teachers who stand out above the rest. By the time I entered fourth grade I hadn't spent a single day of my life in "normal" school, and I didn't plan to start then. I had been enrolled in a program in which kindergardeners through fourth graders all shared a classroom and teacher, and I was entering a program where not only did fourth through eigth graders share a classroom and teacher, but each student was allowed to set their own educational goals and map out their own schedual for the week. The day I started fourth grade was the day I met Carol. She was one of the founders of the program I was enrolled in, and of all the "Adults" I ever met she was the most alive. Carol was, I think, one of the most critical, harsh teachers I have ever had. She was tough, but she never punished anyone out of turn, and the punishment was never out of proportion with the wrong.
All that said though, Carol let you set your own pace, and she let you challenge your self. Not only that, but she was genuinly happy for you when you did something extra-ordinary. I knew her durring four of the most important years of my life, though she wasn't officially my teacher untill eigth grade. I acceled in eigth grade, I read more, and learned more about math, than I think I have since, I pushed myself and she helped, she was always there when I needed a hand, or had a question, and she tought me that I had to fight through bad days, and not just give up. Durring eigth grade, under carols supervision, not only did I complete all of the eigth grade math, but also all of the nineth grade math. I learned to read hundreds of pages in an afternoon, and I learned to learn things without the organizational and memorizational aids that help most people, but had always slowed me down. Carol recognized that I had the potential to be not only a good learner, but a great one, and she brought that out in me, I owe her a debt so great that I will never be able to repay it. So every day I do all I can to make her prowd of me.
In ninth grade I encountered the second great teacher of my life, one who had the same first name as me, and one who had just started teaching the year before. Sam wasn't a big man, but he had a huge personality and he just radiated energy. To this day I still remember the tenis ball that he always seemed to have with him, and how it would never stop moving from his hand, to the wall, and the floor, then back into his hand. One day after class Sam came up to me and told me that he knew I could do better in class, and that I only seemed to be doing what was needed to pass his class. So I told him the truth. I told my teacher that he wasn't challenging me, I told him that he was in fact boring the shit out of me. He told me he could fix that.
So, for the rest of the year I spent most of my time wishing that I had never said those things to my teacher, because not only was I doing the same work as the other freshmen, but I was also doing the work that was being assigned to his senior honors students. Sam pushed me, but he also let me know that I could stop at any time, and I did take some breaks, around the time of mid terms, and finals, I took some breaks. But he would always bring me back to those books, that were... perfect for me. It was the first time, that I had ever really been challenged by not only the language and words of literature, but also by the ideas and the intelligence conveyed by it. I will always remember sitting in Sams classroom with the high outside windows on the far wall, reading The Cavern, by Socrates, and having my whole world change around me.
I have heard that Sam went on to get his masters, or doctorate, and I have no doubt that he is now teaching very lucky students at a college somewhere. I hope that he is still challenging those students to enlarge their minds, and their perceptions of the world, like he challenged me. Sam, you tought me how to live, and I will never forget you, or your tenis ball.
Another ubiqitous CS teacher. Name of Dr. Gary Stafford.
I live in OZ (.au) and Dr. Stafford was from Canada. He would always turn up to lectures with a 1 Litre mug of Coffee, which he would proceed to demolish withing 30 minutes.
I had him for a first year subject, introduction to computer hardware and operating systems. He ended up showing us how to code a micro kernel for an old nova 2. A very old machine, possibly before the PDP series from DEC. Needless to say, i's console consisted with switches and LEDs.
The first thing I rember from his lectures was his examples.
(Think of this in a kermit the frog voice, after too much coffee)
"This is how you can perform addition in B:
auto fish = 1, frog = 2, cow;
fish + frog = cow;"
A CS legend if I ever saw one.
Yeah, I know - not glamourous, but the thing is this - we were poor folk in Montana, and they didn't have PC's up there and very little involvement in school.
They scraped together a couple hundred bucks and bought me a TI-99/4A - which got me started on BASIC and a couple of books of basic programs (the kind of books you order from the Arrow book club - you know... that was the start of the lunacy
Later I lost track of it but my programming experience was later used in High school using a programmable graphics calculator (the Casio FX-7000 - with about 480 bytes of memory!!!) and programming the Mandelbrot set using those mathmatical instructions and other fractals and watching them plot out on the screen. Lots of fun. But I never had a decent CS teacher. What can you do?
----------
ah honey, we're all resplendent - Bill Mallonee
Of the teachers I've had over the years I think I've found that there are certain attributes that really make the learning experience better, and I suppose this will sum up what a lot of the other comments have said: 1) Make it fun (even if it's as dry a subject as Systems Analysis and Design ack!) 2) Challenaging 3) and Beer - heh, one of my teachers bought me beer once when I was getting some help on some material. This actually made the studying more casual and I learned quite a bit because of it. One of the best teachers I've had was my Systems Analysis and Design teacher in college, he did his best to make it enjoyable and challenaging, but what really helped is that he had just come out of the job market. From his experiences in the work force he gave us a lot of little tips about how to succeed along with the course material which helps a lot.
Professor Venkataraman at Drexel University in Philadelphia, PA is one of the most dedicated teachers I have ever known. He teaches all three classes of the freshman engineering physics series (Physical Foundations of Engineering) and he knew his students well enough to recognize a visitor to the class in a lecture of 200 people. He was about five minutes into class last year when he looked up, saw a girl he didn't recognize, and said "We have a visitor today!" He still knows me by name a year down the road. He is an excellent teacher and a wonderful individual.
All of my favorite teachers wee those that piqued my intrest into things outside the digital realm. I had never realized how much worth traditional literature had to offer, until I went through Ms. Williams-Frye's creative writing course. Not only would we read modern literature, but we were encouraged to write our own...whole class periods dedicated to nothing but creative thought. I was so overwhelmed by her free-spirit and open-minded nature (which is really rare for a Catholic school)..she was the only teacher I ever gave a thank-you card to.
My 11th grade History teacher, Mr. Arthurs enstilled in me a love of history that I carry to this very day. Some people didn't like him, b/c he could be very stern, but whenever he loosened up, he was one of the funniest people around. When talking about historical events, he would draw ridiculously goofy pictures on the overhead, and urge us to marvel at his "superior" artwork. He was the first teacher I knew to approach a historical issue from all sides. For example, when we were discussing the atomic bomb, we spent a week talking about the events leading to it and also wheter Truman could've prevented it. He ended the week by showing us war dept. footage from Hiroshima...seeing the human effect of the bomb hit much closer to home than just reading about figures.
My 11th grade Ethics teacher, Mr. Griffen, really wasn't my favorite person. We definatly didn't share many of the same views about things. He represented most of what I disliked most about Catholic dogma. But you sure had to admire his passion about things like the death penalty or abortion. I had never seen a teacher rouse up an argurment in the classroom the way Griffen (or Grif) could. Some class periods he would literally start sweating and breaking down b/c he was so into what he was talking about. He went to seminary school the year after I had him, and was replaced by someone much less emphatic.
Lastly, was my flamboyantly gay International Studies teacher. After you got over the initial shock of what a flamer this guy was, you see that he has to be one of the most traveled people on earth. He has been literally everywhere (and has the slides to prove it!!) Not many people can say that they hiked through the Himilayas, or stayed in a hut on Java. He took people beyond the walls of the high school, and sent them all around the world. The only reason he taught was to fund further trips all over the planet. I remember thinking at the end of the year "What I wouldn't give to live this guys life"
My parents weren't very involved in my life, and as a result I was left to learn many things on my own. I removed the training wheels from my own bike and set out to learn how to ride it with only 2 wheels. I fell countless times, and earned a number of scrapes from the sidewalk. However, I think the most amazing thing is that I actually learned how to ride it by myself, with no outside support. I learned in a day, many other children took much longer to learn. My teacher then was myself, with a little help from pain.
Academic life was dull for me until I reached fourth grade. I had a teacher that finally realized that I was bored in class, that I wasn't being challenged. She pushed me, and I actually enjoyed school for a while, but all things must come to an end. I've had a number of teachers make class somewhat enjoyable. My 6th grade English teacher, 7th grade History, 8th Grade History, my ROTC instructors in high school. However, none have pushed me to learn like she did, great teachers are few, but they do exist, and they can change the lives of many people. I thank the teachers that understood me, and I hope that they will touch others like they have me.
.sdrawkcab si gis siht
I started to respond to this by saying I'd never had any good teachers, but then I started to think a bit harder.
My primary school teachers ranged from forgettable to relentlessly bad.
In secondary school, only one stands out in my memory: Jack Sharpe, my Senior year English Lit teacher. I remember when he told us: "Don't write a thesis paragraph for your essay. If you feel you need to do such a thing to create a good essay, write one and cross it out, and I won't read it." Prior to this, I'd had teachers who taught us to write standardized 5 paragaph (thesis-body-body-body-conclusion) essays, and had a hard time with it. I rarely had well-formed ideas about a work when I sat down to write, so coming up with a specific thesis right from the start was rather difficult for me. So I found his approach quite liberating: It was much easier to get started when I could hold off on specifying a thesis and instead focus on some smaller matter. My essays still had coherent conclusions, but I usually would write the first 2-3 paragraphs before I had a clear idea of what the conclusion would be. I should add that Sharpe also had a lot of enthusiasm for his subject, and showed genuine interest in the interpretations his students would come up with. His class fundamentally changed my attitude towards language/literature classes. I'd previously considered them necessary evils at best. Afterwards, I'd come to feel significant pleasure in the process of analyzing a literary work and writing about my thoughts on it. Despite the fact that I went on to study computer science in college and now work as a programmer, this comfort with writing was by far the most valuable thing I got out of high school.
My high school math teacher of four years (algebra through calculus), Lee Temperton, made his classes fun and exciting simply by taking large chunks of time, his time, to involve himself in students' lives. That's the genius of teaching, the ability to shape other people's thoughts and opinions through the wisdom of your own successes and failures.
There was never a time where Lee (or Colonel T, as we came to call him) would refuse to address an issue, however private, in the highest of urgencies, and that quality is still appreciated by me today.
As far as math and dry theory goes, he could make it seem easy both by illustrating simple examples for proofs as well as exploring the various technological benefits of the advanced graphing calculators.
Above all good teachers prepare you for life and leave lasting impressions - perhaps the best shot at immortality lays in educating the young.
Godspeed, Colonel T.
My best teacher had to be a Mr. A. Who allowed me to set up a class web server running Linux as a final project.
In retrospect, I know that he was my best teacher. He tried to show me, and the other students, the beauty of math, and it's power. I wasn't listening. Unlike other math teachers, he had a *passion* about math; it wasn't just formulas and equasions, it was real things being disected by numbers. Damn, I should have listened.
Right. No, your other right. No, the other other right.
All through Junior high, I had a cool tech teacher named Mr. green. He developed a morning news program for the students that replaced the boring attempt at announcements by our principal over the intercom. This gave kids the opportunity to combine their skills to run a successful news program that the whole campus would watch. A few of us would go out around the campus with video cameras and then meet back to put together a story on the mixer. This was alot of fun and gave me somthing to look forward to during the day.
During my 7th grade year, Mr. green brought in his 486 linux box named alfred, and set it up in the class room. I was just learning linux and was eager to learn. Soon afterward, a local business upgraded their computer systems, and they basically dumped 50 486 boxes with Mr. Green, which he brought to the classroom. From now on, my job would be build as many working linux machines as I could. All throughout my 8th grade year, I administered a local mail/telnet server for the classroom, and would teach linux basics to the kids who were interested. Mr green always let me experiment around with the computer equipment, and gave me alot of room to learn. I think to everyone else, Mr. Green was just a weird tech teacher, but he left me with 10 times more than any other teacher could give me. If every teacher was as dedicated as he was, the american school system might actually not suck.
He made an imact on me, and for that I thank him.
For me, I have fond memories of (then) Geometry teacher Fred Case, last known to be living (retired) in the tiny "town that time forgot" of Noxon, Pa (USA).
Now, geometry can be hard to teach, perhaps because many students find it a bit of a paradigm shift.
This guy used an overhead projector and - more important - a big, genuine smile, not to mention an ability to slowly and carefully work his way around & into each concept as it came up (or as it "rolled across" and into view, on a long "scoll" of -clear- handwritten notes, diagrams, etc.
I'm sure it was his calm, thoughtful presentation that helped to put students at ease as they grappled with the new material, as much as any of the technology that he used to display notes & diagrams.
He -faced- students continuously, sitting next to the projector on a desk, in the same area of the classroom as the rest of us sat (i.e. in "our" side of the teacher's desk).
So, I suppose, that - compared to anyone who stood on the other side of the teacher's desk, e.g. writing on the chalk board, with back to the class - he seemed to be "in our space" but his way of being made him a welcome visitor to that space.
Great seminar speakers seem to have captured some of Fred Case's ways in their bag of tricks.
May more learn from them!
---
Later in Life, I find such people as Cliff Stoll - despite his very different level of energy - to be inspiring.
I'm thinking of his "Snakeoil..." talk, over at Dr Dobbs TechNetCast.com in which he challenges lots that I'd bet slashdot readers hold true...
(Maybe he's just in his Philosopher phase, in the context of a model like the Hindu 4 phases of Life:
1. Learn (to do)
2. Do (e.g. work)
3. Teach (next generation of learners)
4. Write (Philosophy... why did we do it [that way]?)
He's got my vote for wise "old" Elder Statesman of our cybercivilization, in any case... :-)
A good Ask SlashDot question!
one of my teachers in high school was and still is the smartest person i've met to include all the things that this man can do would take to long, but some of the highlights that come to mind are; Photographic memory (actually remembered a paper that a student's sister wrote 5 years earlier, pulled it out and gave him an F on the spot) Ambidexterity: he could actually start a sentence with both hands at opposite ends and make them meet in the middle (perfectly legibily (better than i could do with my dominant)) Refused to go on Jeopardy as it would be unfair to the other contestants, i know that sounds rediculous but you'd have to meet the guy Slept 3 hours a night and read a novel a day! The man new EVERYTHING! (like the atomic weight of Cobalt, not like he ever need it though) And to top it off he taught the most exciting science fiction class on the planet with books like Farenheight 451. more importantly than that he taught life, from the eyes of someone who could comprehend more than most he added flair to everything
Oh High school.... I had a wonderful english teacher in 11 grade that dressed in 70's style suits and always look like it was the worst day of his life.
One memorable day he gave a self-graded 10 point quiz. The idea being that as he counted outloud you were to raise your had to show what score you had gotten on your quiz...
So the teacher begins slowly counting with us all raising our hands to show our scores... All us except for one student who did not raise his hand at all. Once the teacher reaches 10, does he stop and ask this student what his score was? No! He continues to count....For the next 42 Minutes!!!
He made it to somewhere in the four hundreds before the bell rang. The student had scored a zero and the teacher had started counting at one... Oh how I love to see hard earned tax money at work in such wonderful ways!!!
This is my last semester and I am taking my fourth class with a physics teacher who is probably the best I have had. She is enthusiastic about what she teaches, you can tell she enjoys her work. Her lectures are not monotonous but include stories and anecdotes, and after each new idea she lectures on we work an example on our papers, which we have to turn in at the end of the class meeting. Not good if you want to sleep in class, but I find that I do most of my learning during the in-class work. She's a tough grader, but I'm pleased to earn Bs in her classes: that means I learned a lot.
This teacher cares about her students individually and is fun to be around outside of class. And to top it off, she runs Linux on her desktop machine. Of course, the entire physics department uses Linux on their desktops, but she's still cool.
She also is evidence that women can succeed at physics. That is something I know anyway, but the encouragement that I'm not the only one trying is nice sometimes!
I have been reading the previous posts and some have good, some have bad experiences.
I wonder if this is true? (I have heard it many times)
The students that do well at university go become professionals at companys/orgs.
The students that can not get out of it become academics (lectures, tutors, lab assistants etc etc).
This is most probably a sterotype...anyways.
i am not a computer science major, nor have i taken any computer science classes. my best teacher was a geology professor who taught us truly how to be scientists and look at the world in a completely different way...
please me, have no regrets.
I always hear people say how they only had 1 or 2 teachers make a difference in thier lives. I have been incredibly fortunate to learn from many great teachers. In grade school I can remember at least 5 that helped me enjoy reading and supported my quests for knowledge. Then throughout highschool, college and grad school more and more fine teachers helped with keeping me interested and challenged. Maybe instead of expecting the teacher to come to you, you should go to them. I can only remember a few teachers who were not accessible and friendly.
I think I was lucky in my formative years: I was blessed with many "good" teachers. In fact, I think I can say I only had one or two bad ones. I can even go so far as to label a rare few "exceptional." Yes, I'm going to use names here.
Let's get started early: fourth grade. California's "Gifted & Talented" education program was just getting started. I was lucky enough to get a teacher who not only cared, but actually understood. Mrs. Yin (Cutler-Orosi USD) did a great job of letting us explore all sorts of different areas: extra music instruction, art, science, and literature (no computers yet). Oh, and we learned stuff too! :) Thanks to her for a super boost (as if I wasn't already off and running).
The big influence in Jr. High comes from Pamela Frost Martinez. English? Bah! (actually I did learn some English, too) The real work came from my involvement with the yearbook staff. Photography is Chemistry, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise! Making pottery after school was great fun, and I got to operate the kiln!
High School. Thanks first to JoAnn Powell for physically pulling me out of class into the counselor's office and making me apply to Arkansas Governor's School. Thanks also to Barbara Wade, Chemistry. She somehow figured out that when I started doodling, it meant that I understood--not that I was bored.
In college, one big thank-you goes to Dr. Susan Mengel. I'd had a lot of instruction in computer science up until that point, but she was one of the most effective teachers I've ever met.
--
In high school I took 2 physics classes with Mr. Limmer. In AP we gave devoted a couple months to working on a Rube Goldberg machine that never actually got built. We also learned that VanDeGraaf(sp?) generators and Tesla coils (we had one we called "The Freshman Tamer" :) were cool.
Now in college (where physics classes aren't nearly as much fun) I've turned to computer science. In Programming II, we got the most interesting project I can remember. We wrote a MUD in C++. Thanks to Dr. Boyland for a great job in that class.
His name was Mr. Bollea. He would always encourage us to take our vitamins, say our prayers, and get 8 hours of sleep so we could be good little Hulkamaniacs.
I submit to you my stories of my best and worst teachers in high school (9th thru 12th grades). My best teacher was by far my choir director, Jack Lindsay. For four years he taught us music, and how to make it, but much more than that. My junior and senior years, as a part of the school's premiere touring performance choir, I learned more about life than in the previous ten years of my life. Now, perhaps this is coincidental, but I don't think it is entirely. Mr. L gave us not only the desire to learn music, but fueled the desire to learn from and do well in our other classes as well. With a six- to seven-period per day schedule in which two were dedicated to this choir, there was ample chance for members to slack off in their other classes, especially with the number of performances we did for private parties, elementary schools, public functions... etc. (in the two 3-week periods preceeding Christmas those two years, we gave over 170 private performances, often missing other classes to do so). However, every one of the students maintained a high GPA, ranging from 3.2 to 4.0 (some students technically had higher grade point averages due to inflation from honors and Advanced Placement courses, but this seems to be the best way to show "true" progress). Many students actually had better grades coming out of the choir than they did going in. But more than grades, Mr. L exposed his students to culture, the arts, professionalism, and even international travel. My junior year, we spent two weeks touring South America (being from California ourselves). My senior year, we toured through eastern Europe for two weeks. We sang and performed and entertained, and learned a great deal about life and each other. (okay, sappy, but true.) My worst teacher was either my freshman science teacher or my junior-year biology teacher. My freshman science teacher, however, cannot be held totally to blame for my bad memories of that class, for the class itself, by design, was a waste of time and thoroughly pointless. My biology teacher had a knack and tendency to belittle and condescend to her students, most of whom were freshmen and sophomores. These are often the most frustrating and difficult times in young adolescent's lives, and she made them worse, as far as I could tell. Nothing she did was pro-active towards the furthering of students' lives, except for the instruction of basic biology. Okay, enough ranting... I believe I have gotten my point across. Oh, and for those who are wondering, I was quite good in all science classes, as well as liberal arts classes -- these are not just sour grapes.
----------
----------
I'm sick and tired of being responsible for the preservation of the universe and its outlying suburbs.
Personally, I hate classes where you're graded on "what you learn" or "what you got out of it". Something about not having right/wrong answers that can be graded on a scale from 0-100% bothers me... I guess the other reason I don't like it is that it makes the grading very subjective. So, if you end up with a teacher like my English teacher who doesn't really like you, you don't do well in the course... but that's another story.
---Managed to stroke my ego enough to make me write some of the best stuff I ever wrote.
This
I hate teachers. Most of them are (from my experience) pathetic losers who can't hack it in the real world, so they take some cushy job in a classroom where they only have to work 5 hours a day (and get summers off).
My problem with teachers is that they teach through hveing the student regurgitate reading material instead of having the student think for himself. They stress conformity over individuality. On top of everything else, they have a tendency to prey on a student's weakness if possible (at least to my expenerience).
Granted, these are very sweeping statements and not all teachers are like this. I'm just saying most of the teachers I dealt with in high school were either A) losers, or B) Know-it-alls who don't want to listen what the student has to say. I'm glad i went to college because I found out that REAL teachers existed.
My best teacher was probably my dad. As long as I can remember, we went to the library once a week, regular like groceries. He'd pick up any books that looked like they might be interesting, no subject being unworthy of investigation. He kept his mind open without being unquestioning. Always cheerful, always reasonable. Never preached, but always interested to talk, always there to encourage an interest.
Once a coworker with young kids asked him how he got his children to read. "Well, when they picked up a book I didn't bat it out of their hands."
On paper he had only high school education (rare enough in the time and place he grew up) yet retired as Supervisor of Stores and Maintenance for a steel mill. Which he also converted from Burroughs mainframe to early PCs. Again, by quiet example. When the high priests of Central Processing dragged their heels, he bought one PC, learned it, and patiently answered questions of the rest of the mill management until each department had their own and no one used the Burroughs any more.
at my school the cs department is really small, there is only one full time teacher for 3 students in my year (amazing uhu?) I've taken most of my classes with him, I had a couple of other professors but this one has been the best, not just that explains and give us good projects to work on, but during classes, since we are so few people he always talks about situations that we would eventually have when working, and tells us to always be friend with the boss assistant and stuff like that. Is kinda cool too that the usual relation professor-student has break and we get a long great with him
what's up with the stealth geese comments? they're getting really old. anyways, i must say that i've had three great teachers in my time. all of them around 10th grade. the summer after 9th grade i went to military school to take chemistry. my teacher there kicked ass. any time we didn't understand something she'd let us go back to the chemical closet and blow shit up. had i taken it at public school like i would have i wouldn't have gotten to blow shit up like that. She was an awesome teacher. she'd tell us stories about old russian spies and always stressed that we should follow our joy. she was awesome. in 10th grade i had 2 great teachers. my creative writing teacher was cool because he was so laid back. we'd just sit around, laugh at each other, and listen to porno music. it was really quite fun. he'd sit there and talk about the time he was fired for selling weed to a student. my computer science teacher from that year was pretty damn cool as well. we'd just chill in her class, and help out people who had no fuckin' clue about how program C++ and then play around with network settings to freak out our network admins that had no clue how to administrate a network. i got 105% in that class every quarter 'cause it was so damn easy, but it was fun and educational. those were my best teachers.
-"Hey, Baby. It's not a rash, it's textured love."
He is, without a doubt, the kindest soul I have ever had as a teacher. Not to say that he didn't have his good moments... Like his habit of getting the class' attention by smacking his yardstick on his desk...
Nonetheless, he would take our class into the computer lab(he was in charge of it at the time) for French Language Arts and for Computer Class(natch) and even for some other classes.
Now, before I went to Ecole Bannatyne, the only thing we got to do in Computer class was lame learning games like Find the Number or the precursor to Mario Teaches Typing.
At Ecole Bannatyne, our computer class was given the following options:
1. Play games
or (this would be the most important choice)
2. Learn BASIC.
If it were not for Ray Gamache, I would have never gotten into computers like I did, and if he were alive today, I would thank him time and time again.
The only other teacher that would come close would be Tony Woodroffe, my Graphic Arts teacher. Nice guy, but a wee bit on the 'old sk00l' of Graphic Arts.
Anyway, that's my two cents.
Savage.
When I was in high school I also worked on the side 20 hours/week and was busy with playing soccer for the high school, so a lot of free extracurricular time was put towards those, and unlike the others in the CS major, I didn't put that time towards the many science clubs that were available after school. My teacher didn't like this, and basically told me that I would never be good at computers, and if I wanted to achieve decent grades, I should vacate his class. (which I did, went into architecture and got A's in there instead).
But this is the kicker, I've been using computers since I was about 4 (I'm 24 now), and computers were just natural to me. So once I went into college, I persued my CS degree in spite of that previous high school teacher.
I graduated with a BS in CS and am right now persuing my Masters in CS at Oregon State University. I made it a point all through my collegiate experience to make a trip at least once a year back to that teacher to let him know how I'm progressing. :] I've always been that type of person though.. tell me I can't do it.. I'll prove you wrong.
My most influential teacher had to be Mrs. Gall. She was my english teacher from 5-8th grade. It wasn't any old english class, it was for the kids that would score within the 99th percentile on the CAT tests. So that's where she came in. She challenged us to the fullest extent. EVERY marking period, we would have to invent something, write a three page research paper, do another 12 pages of either journal entries or written pages, 2 book reports and a master class. She showed me so much of the world, and expanded my views on almost everything. She encouraged us to think outside of the normal boundries and go out and explore every little thing. If it wasn't for her persistant nagging, I probably wouldn't have been able to get anything done in my life. It's actually kinda haunting now that I get to thinking about it...
see sig. see sig run. run sig run.
"He'd get excited, tell me it was cool, and stay out of my way." I had a teacher EXACTLY like this in Grade 11 programming. I got in the first day, learned the language (Turing... gag) and by day 3 I was working on my independent study project. I ended up with a 5000+ line Turing program that was essentially a clone of Command & Conquer. I learned more about programming in that semester than I have in the years before (and I wrote my first program when I was 8, on a Commdore 64...) ;) Let's hope that I can repeat the last experience.
Now... I have him again next semester... And we're covering Linux. I have an odd feeling that I'm gonna end up as 'root' on the server.
Computer courses have the best teachers. I've had three so far.
One was a balding zany character who refused to admit to his receding hairline (It's true Mr. Monks) and pretty much let us do whatever. Another was the most open and flexible teacher I've ever had in any classroom, and the last and current is questionable at best. Let me explain why.
My current teacher doesn't really think out his assignments. I don't want to say that they were oh, pulled out of his ass while laying some cable , but that's what you'd think. They're all the same. "Make a website." "Research this." "Read this and write your thoughts in an essay." He'll use big words and strange grammar structures to make it sound sophisticated, but it's not the computer science that I fell in love with at the age of 10. It's designed so that he has to the minimal amount of work possible, and he gets paid a premium for it. This man honestly doesn't have to work: He has labtechs (they get extra credits) to fix computers for him, so all he has to do is mark essays -- never with any insightful comments or thought provoking messages, just with a "Good" or "Excellent!". We don't learn.
My sister's in the class with me (she's grade 12, I'm grade 10, it's a grade 11 class), and we recently had to make a project without using any website builder tools. She is making a simple web site, using SimpleText (Macs in the school system -- a whole different tirade awaits you there from me.) and recently confided that that project was the most fun for her because she was actually learning and saw how easy it was to pick up HTML and use resources on the web to solve any snags she ran into.
That was the bad teacher. The good teacher, Mr. Readman (who, sadly enough, is now just a substitute teacher because his wife got lured away to a better paying job in a different city where he's only on the sub list) was this man's complete opposite. He actually had criteria, on paper, that he'd give you before he started explaining the project. And he was open to student-led projects. I easily finished the tasks he set out for me, so he let me do whatever I wanted as long as it showed that I was learning something about technology. That year I broke into the school computer system (and didn't get suspended that time :), set up and administered a linux server remotely during my CS class time and played around with DHTML. This is the way teaching, especially in a course like CS, should be. Freeform. The students should find a path and see where it takes them, getting only guidance and a helping nudge from the teacher. People who treat it as a real course with research project and essays are missing the point.
Similar to art, fun, oldschool CS is an expression of your feelings. Take any language, make something you're proud of in it. Make an animation that boosts your self confidence because it uses tricks that you learned yourself.
But God, if I have to write another essay on how Napster is evil, I'm taking a god damned hammer to their G4. :)
I dont think i really had some "awesome" teacher, but i did have one that had extremely huge breasts. It was my spanish class. For some reason, people decided to tell me that i was hooking up with her. Then my friend found a porno picutre of her online (i swear to god it looked exactly like her) Kinda weird. Well, needless to say, when I stayed after school once, we got to talking. And then I followed her home where she prompted me to remove my pants. Well.... you can use your imagination from there. (Note: this story is pure fiction)
What you say!? ---Captain
...who told us explicitly, "I don't want you to memorize formulae; I want you to understand what an integral IS well enough that you can derive any formula you need for the task at hand."
;-).
His insistence on comprehension over brute force rote repetition has serve me well in all my work in Math, Computing Science, systems analysis, and everyday programming (even though it sometimes drives my co-workers nuts
I had some fantastic college professors - music, costume and apparel history, classical greek and roman literature. The one subject where I never ONCE had a professor from whom I learned a single thing was CS.
I took a horrible intro class where the prof was the golf coach, and half the classes were cancelled because they had practice or a match (he also couldn't come up with a definition for what a "constant" is, as compared to a variable).
Next two were lecture classes given by someone who would give us a skeleton program and have us fill the rest of it in... not a problem once you found the multiple (and not intentional) mistakes in EVERY code example he gave us.
Next two classes were taught by a prof who decided that he wouldn't actually go over what we'd need to know for tests and homework... we'd take tests, and there would be all kinds of things that no one had ever seen before. We figured out that the only way he'd tell us what would be on those tests was if we spent another 3-4 hours in his office every week, on top of class time and any independent study.
Last class was a networks class where we didn't cover a single relevant topic. We talked a lot about the ARPAnet. Forget current networks.
It wasn't that I wasn't interested by the subject matter, because I certainly was (the day I figured out recursion despite the ramblings of my professor was a very proud day), but it became very difficult to enjoy the subject when the classes were so very painful. I guess I'm another example of how useless college CS courses are - if you want to learn it, learn by doing.
As such, I have more or less self-taught myself everything. And in my opinion that is one of the best ways to learn. What is more having information shoved down my neck has a worse effect in that I lose interest in it, because I associate the lecture/seminar/tutorial with boredom and then associate the boredom with the subject at hand.
This is why I left Uni, I turned out to be so disinterested in everyting I was supposed to be learning, that I couldn't bring myself to do the coursework, assignments and the main project, that I would have failed anyway.
However almost immediately after leaving, and getting a job, I started having ideas about a new programming language and OS and because I wasn't equipped to investigate these with my current knowledgebase, it pushed me into further investigation of the subjects involved. And now a almost 2 years after leaving uni, I am heavily involved in learning and applying princicples of computer architecture, microkernels, reflective object orientation, UI, programming language design and so on. I mean I am actually trying to learn lambda calculus and all the hard theory that goes behind all of this as well.
So while its horses for courses, no teacher has ever had an amazing effect on my life, except perhaps for Mr. Hartwright who told me not to use OO Pascal in my school project ('94), whose advice I promptly ignored, and went on to get highest in the class ;-)
I was also greatly influenced by the TRS-80. Mr. Cohen, a math professor at my junior high school, who won a TRS-80 Model 1 in a Radio Shack giveaway. He brought the computer in to the school and allowed my friend Arthur and I to spend a great deal of time with it. Our art teacher even let us experiment with using the computer for computer art (not that you could do that much with 4K and Level I BASIC). That was followed by the further good fortune of my father winning $500 in the lottery around Christmas time and getting me my own TRS-80 (16K and Level II BASIC!!). The TRS-80 certainly changed my life, too.
My best teacher goes to Mr.Wehling, 10th grade Geometry teacher. I was doing terribly in high school, didn't enjoy learning, was uninspired. I remember it was the end of the first week in Geometry class that Mr.Wehling was discussing the meaning of theorems and pointed me out and asked me if I were a 'hip' person. I said yeah I guess. Then he looked at me and said how can you say that if you don't know the definition of hip? From then on I was hooked on mathematics, it all clicked with me, like a firework went off in my head. Mr.Wehling truly loved the subject and made that year unforgettable. Thanks Mr.Wehling!
This isn't a comp-sci story, but I had an Argentinian art teacher in the eighth grade named Ms. Bozzo. Once I was sick in the hospital, and she came to visit me. Before leaving, she gave me a warm passionate kiss dead on the lips. That was pretty "fun and exciting" for THIS student. Sigh!
Oh, um, yeah, she also got me interested in Klee, Miro, Picasso, whatever...
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
I know how you feel--
My network class spent a month on the ALOHA protocol. The rest of the class consisted of the professor bitching about his cable modem.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
The real amazing thing is the lack of stories about subjects other than CS. Aparently, teachers of English and History or Science have had little impact on the Slashdot population.
Maybe this explains why Slashdot is such a dysfunctional 'community'? There is nothing worse (or more pathetic) than a bunch of CS geeks vying for attention on a messageboard.
School is more than training for an occupation.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Best Private Teacher: Captain D. Fox
Captain Fox was my seventh, eighth and ninth grade science teacher in a military boarding school. He was relentless in his pursuit to drive science into our heads. We took at least five pages of notes every day. If anything, he taught me how to write very fast. Captain Fox didn't take any guff from slackers. He expected us to learn everything backwards and forwards.
Upon transferring to a public school, I was apalled at the simplistic, hand-holding teaching methods most of the science teachers used. They spent the entire school year drudging through elementary things I had covered in two or three weeks during my military school attendance.
Best Public Teacher: P. Ackely
"Herr Ackely" was my German language teacher for only one year. However, he was very good at what he did. Like Captain Fox, he expected us to learn our subject matter. Those who didn't make an effort soon found themselves ejected from the course. I learned more German during his tenure than that of any other German teacher. Unfortunately he was replaced the following year with a meek, shrewish woman with minimal teaching abilities.I hope both of these gentlemen have found rewarding postitions with generous pay. They were excellent teachers who demanded the best from their students. America could use more professionals like them.
He believed it axiomatical that all college students, by definition, had no common sense. So he took it upon himself to challenge me every single time I screwed something up. Everything I needlessly did, everything I did the hard way, he called me on, and made me feel bad that I disappointed him. By the end of the summer, I could do the work with half the effort, just because of what he taught me.
The best teacher I had in school though, was Coach Mac. He was one of those teachers who everyone in the school knew, and was afraid to disappoint. He taught me a new level of accountability. When everyone turned in their homework, if you didn't do it, and didn't turn it in, the next day, you could expect a reviling on how disappointed he was that you... lied to him. That's right. By not calling attention to the fact that you didn't do your homework, by not telling him to his face that you had that little respect for him, THAT was the crime.
For him, when you screwed up, he not only called you on it, but made sure you never did it again. He taught me that a man's word is his bond, and gave me the tools to see that I could apply it in real life.
Busco a alguien que me quiera como yo la quiera.
On arriving at a new school I was put into the 'medium' stream. They were doing algebra in math class, and without the groundwork I was totally lost. Homework was a nightmare, as the teacher taugh by rote how to 'solve' a certain kind of equation, but as soon as a slightly different form was presented I had no idea how to solve it.
The next year I had a new teacher called Chris Hayden. In the first math lesson he taught me more than a year in my previous class. The one big event in his class was when he said :
"The equals sign is like a see-saw - what you do to one side you must do to the other"
It was a great moment for me because I realized that all the complex and incomprehensible rules about what to do to what equations to get a result all boiled down to a single easy to understand concept. Maths suddenly became easy - and I could work out myself what steps were needed to solve things.
I will always be thankfull to him, because without his help I would not have been able to achieve what I have.
Same here. In the 11th grade I took trigonometry, and the teacher was a nice guy, but he was one of those read-from-the-book teachers. I came out of trig not knowing much more than when I went in. In my senior year, I took Calculus with Mrs. Scales. One day she got frustrated that the class couldn't answer some trig-related questions, so she took one class period going over trig stuff, and I was immediately enlightened -- I *understood* what trig was all about. I got more out of those 40 minutes than I did the entire previous year.
I'm having trouble trying to think of *any* other teacher in high school or college who was as good.
Maybe my EE prof in my freshman year of college, although most of the class probably wouldn't agree with me. :) He used to encourage people to put down the calculators and think about what was going on in a circuit rather than plugging in numbers. Many people don't like that. They want to know what formula to use and that's it.
(Mildly offtopic): A few semesters later I started tutoring for that class, and I had a hell of a time getting people to work out a problem in their heads. I sometimes had to physically take their calculators away from them. Very frustrating. :(
My parents hav been some of my best teachers. They're both well educated, and have encouraged me to learn as much as a I can, without expecting me to get good grades in school. They support me in my decisions regarding school, no matter what they are, and that encourages me to make my own mistakes and learn from them. My mom used to read to me when I was much younger, and I firmly believe that had a lot to do with my learning skills and my "lust for learning." I still enjoy learning new things... it has a lot to do with curiousity, yes, but I also like impressing people with my knowledge of varied subjects.
:)).
My coworkers also help me learn about new topics, or extend my knowledge of others. My work environment is very loose... I work in IT support and some days are slower than others. Sometimes we talk about computers and how to administer Terminal Services for Windows 2000. Or maybe we'll talk about world politics (something I don't know a lot about). There's give and take... sometimes I'm the teacher sometimes I'm the student. When I don't know "enough" (in my opinion) about a subject I'll research it a bit on the internet (ah, the internet
I thought I'd mention some college teachers as well:
San Francisco State University:
Erwin Seibel
Philip King
City College Of San Francisco:
Suzanne Homer
Craig Kuhns
Michael Shannon
Consequently, I also attended University Of California at San Diego and did not find any teachers that seemed to care about my education, or have any interest in encouraging me to learn.
I don't know why you'd want to remove their names for privacy reasons. Does privacy == keeping them to yourself? Why not give their name so that other students can receive the same encouragement you did? I highly recommend taking a class from these teachers if you attend either of these schools.
Credit for everything I know goes to the internet. Reading others' code is probably the biggest source, but there are others such as documentation and IRC. I have no books.
Mr. James O'Donnell at Robert P. Ulrich Elementary school in California City, CA. He taught me 6th grade. There was something about the man that made the kids shut up and listen. Of course, school was different 16 years ago - back then he got away with beaning kids with a chalk-board eraser.
He taught every subject as if it were the most important. Because of him, at the age of 11, I knew what a covalent bond was, I knew the atomic weight of Yttrium, I knew that it was George Washington Carver that invented peanut butter, I could spell "ubiquitous" and used the word in my reports on common California desert snakes, and because of him I went to middle-school able to compute the volume of a sphere and count to 1023 on my fingers (base 2).
He had a unique ability to get kids to sit down, shut up and pay attention. Once in high school, I noticed alot of familiar faces in the "geek" math and science classes - all the kids I went to sixth grade with.
So here's the point of this post: What was his "unique ability"? Magic. I don't know. I have no idea how he did it. A genuine love of children and a desire to see them do well is the only tangible quality I can say seperated him from the other teachers I've had. That, and a 50 MPH chalk-board eraser upside the head really made kids not want to act like little rude monkeys in Mr. O's class.
Physics is another matter, most of the our teacher is great, the lessons are fun and everyone enjoys them. At other times though you get the impression that teachers do not really care and would be anywhere instead of infront of a class of 20....
Your right as far as CS is concerned. All the programming and other skills I know are self taught.
Not quite as bad, but a couple HS CS stories of mine (bad) spring to mind...
:)
BASIC I (1985 this must have been) we were learning BASIC on a TRS80. We were partway thru the course and were doing some INPUT $A stuff with ZIP codes (doing a quick 'mailing address' list thing with printf). The instructor, bless her heart, had an issue with the fact that I was treating my input as a string, not a numeric. 'A zip code is all numbers' she stated. 'There are ZIP codes that start with 0, and your display logic won't work right otherwise'. I got marked down for 'mouthing off' or something like that.
The other story is too involved, but good memories anyway...
creation science book
that's the funniest shit i've read all night
well, the tacher that has had the most infulence on my life would be my freshman year of high school humanities teacher, DuBios. He never really did work, we just spent the two hours a day discussing things, and I learned more in his class than any other. Plus, he got me into /.
"Cornflakes are not the innocent critters they seem"- Sterling Morrison
Ms. Tulk was my English teacher at Bucklers' Mead, Yeovil, UK. She taught me a lot about English, about structure and style. But more importantly she taught me about taking your dreams to newer levels and not letting go. She taught me how to turn something I wanted to do into something someone else wanted me to do, how to make something my own, how to stick at it whatever the cost and not to give up. Yes, we all fancied Ms Tulk something rotten, but she inspired people. She inspired me to acheive as much as I could in English, which is surprising as it's not my best subject. I'd like to thank Ms. Melanie Tulk for listening to me and helping me get my B at GCSE. http://www.bucklers-m.somerset.sch.uk/
Of all the things so big and small The best were never there at all!
After several years of bad math teachers I was hopelessly lost...couldn't factor a polynomial if it was to save my life. One teacher, Steve Gorgichuk (I think the first name's right) taught me all the mathematics I'd missed out on and gave me the inspiration to push on further. Today I can play with complex numbers and differential geometry and all sorts of stuff like that. I haven't had the chance to thank him, the next year he won the lottery and retired...
The one that I remember most, and got me to where I am today was my old IT/Computing teacher, George Dryden. After doing my GCSEs, I wanted to go on and do A-Level computing ( before it turned into 'how-to-use-a-word-processor'). Problem was my school didn't do Computing at A-level, so I took technology which seemed the closest thing at the time. Well, 1 year later I decided that it sucked and I'd had enough. I decided that I would try and do the A-level computing course on my own, and the only teacher who encouraged me was Mr.Dryden. He arranged, out of his own time, for all the paper work to be filled in, he arranged for me to sit the exam, he marked my coursework, got the syllabus guides and a whole host of other 'admin' stuff. None of which he had to do in his job - he just did it because he was a nice guy. The end result was that I passed A-level computing with an 'A' grade, and got 96% for my project, got accepted into University, and am now finishing my final year before I go out into a job with a big London company. None of which I could have done without his help. An all-round top bloke, as well. If only there were more teachers like that around....
There was the ex-naval pilot who taught maths, a few years later. His examples of vectors were from personal experience, e.g. getting back to his carrier from 200 miles away in a given wind. Far more appealing to a bunch of teenage boys than the textbook stuff about birds flying across the road in front of a car.
Neither would happen these days. Let 10 year olds loose with sharp tools? Let someone teach who hadn't been through teacher training? Not a chance.
freedom, n. Allowing people you don't like to do things you disapprove of.
"Eminem has taught me that there is good realness in utterly stark and honest railing against all that is Apollonian in the world. He is the modern incarnation of Dionysus, and it really took exposure to his work before I could even begin to see the light."
That's about the damn dorkiest thing I have ever even heard of.
"and sengan has taught me the most golden lesson of the bunch: shutting the FUCK up."
Then when are you going to do it? Fucken fuck!
p.s. I happen to be momocrome's girlfriend.
-=kellet
He basically said the following at the beginning:
Write anything you want, present it to the class when it's finished, and you get an A.
I wrote an Alien Invaders clone for MacOS (even though this school had never seen a Mac before), it was great.
I've never had really great teachers I could remember of in High school. Maybe one or two of them, namely my Geography teacher.
:-)
However I have come across good ones in my current Higher Institute of Learning. One of them was my teacher for Computer Systems Architecture, another was a teacher for java programming.
One of the major problems in the Education system in Singapore is that some of us, while we were students, recieved government subsidy for education, and therefore we have to work for the goverment after we graduated. We end up being teachers, but without the passion for it, that's why we get more and more young yuppies coming into class with that "come fuck me" look. You know -- I call it the blowjob face.
Anyway, I have written an article about our local education system in my personal homepage. You can find it at http://www.xtreme.dhs.org/detach/works.shtml entitled "Education: One to one stupidity mapping"
Oh, some guestbook entries would be appreciated.
The best teacher(s) I've ever had where the two Johns at the University of New South Wales. John Storey and John Smith tought us electronics, and they actually cared about the students and their interests. For example, one day I noticed the little yellow flash that precedes the fluorescent lights turning on. I remembered that it's called a "condenser" and it has to be replaced every now and then. I remarked about this a fellow student, and after unsuccessfuly trying to work out what the condenser does and why it flashes, we went back to work. The next day, John gave me seven photocopied pages from a magazine and a textbook about what condensers are and how they work. Apparently, he overheard us and decided to satisfy my curiosity. I didn't even have to ask.
...was always clear to me. Never mind that I was entirely wrong about this clarity, it felt clear.
From an early age, I was interested in science - I wanted to be a physicist, since that seemed to me to be the most "scientific" thing to be. During my teens, I began to modify this to astronomy (always have loved the stars, always will).
Now, all the time, I was reading lots of stuff - not only the hard SF classics, but also softer stuff. I also liked to read fantasy, so a side interest in history was sort of natural. It never seemed more than leisure stuff, though.
Came the time I attended high school, and had to take a lot of classical studies and history classes (this was in my native Denmark, where the Danish Gymnasium still has some of the qualities of a classical Renaissance-style curriculum). In those classes, I met a teacher who had a terrible problem: Ernst Høybye had classes of science-majors who had to take classical studies. I'm talking about people who wouldn't know Julius Caesar from Julie Andrews if it meant their lives. Predictably, they thought he was a geek, and paid no attention.
Me, I looked at the man himself. I saw the way his eyes lit up every time he discussed these obscure subjects. The way his whole posture changed when he talked about Greek vases or the plays of Sophocles, or something else that nobody in his audience cared about - but he did.
It changed my life, though it wasn't really clear to me at the time.
I started paying attention in his classes. In my spare time, I would read the classics. I'd take Arrian's Life of Alexander to the beach, while my buddies had their noses in the latest John Le Carré novel (not knocking Le Carré, but he writes for an entry-level audience and doesn't really demand anything from his reader).
Meanwhile, I went to the University and majored in Physics, with an Astronomy major. Surprisingly, while I didn't find it heavy going (well, actually, I did find quantum theory sort of rough), I also did not find it very engaging. Oh, the astronomy was fine, but the physics just didn't grab me. I still found it interesting enough, but not as a way of life.
A year or two of this, and I decided to drop out. I took a job in computing, and went the way of the professional programmer. This was satisfying for a while, but a few years ago, I found that I was bored with it. I wanted to learn again - I wanted to go back to the University.
Not being really clear on what I wanted to do (I just knew that I wanted to learn), I took CompSci as my major, and looked around for a minor. And there it was....History. I thought about it, and decided to give it a shot.
My first history class at University level was with another great teacher, the famous-in-his-field (colonial history) Prof. Niels Steensgaard. He made an amazing impression on me. Here was a man who matter-of-factly, talked about history as a "vocation". Who discussed the fact that most historians are historians because they couldn't imagine doing anything else with their lives, not unlike a vocation for the priesthood.
His words rang a bell within me - a big, loud Quasimodo-would-have-a-tough-time-getting-it-going bell. I realised that, without ever really knowing it, history was what I'd been looking for all my life.
I won't bore you with the details of my life since then, except to say that I changed my major to History, and that my academic achievements since then have been pretty much stellar - chiefly because I feel totally at home in this field....
I often think of these two teachers, with fondness. They made me realise something about myself, something so buried that I couldn't see it myself - but when I did see it, it changed everything about me, forever. I may have been born to be an historian, but I had to learn to understand that - and these two taught me that.
Ernst Høybye is still teaching history and classics to bored science majors, still with the same enthusiasm. One of them may be undergoing the same feelings today that I experienced back then.
Professor Steensgaard retires this year. I'm planning on visiting him in his office later this term, and thanking him - one vocational historian to another....
- Peter Ravn Rasmussen
- Peter Ravn Rasmussen
Good teachers are the ones who have some type of plan of what they want their students to learn during the course of a class... Who really want to present their students with the knowledge and skills that they see as important. They then devise useful exercises and projects that not only reinforce the class material, but challenge the students to develop a deeper understanding of the material and to start to apply the information in new and creative ways.
For lack of a better example, I remember my teacher for the first class I took in C/C++ had us write a string processing program that first used char arrays as the basic data structure to process, and then, as our next assignment, had us rewrite the program to char pointers... It doesn't seem like a very useful thing to have done, but it reinforced for us that arrays and pointers in C are virtually the same thing. (I know language lawyers will tend to disagree).
Moving on to my perception of what a bad teacher is, I have also had an incredible number of these... They are the ones that either make the material to learn incomprehensible to the average person in the class, or move through a given (usually very small) set of sections of a textbook at a pace that serves no one except their own laziness. These teachers have no goal as to what they want their students to learn and are teaching for no other reason than they cannot hold any other job.
I think that the problem with finding good tech teachers is the same as finding good business teachers (if there is such a thing) and finding good law professors. The issue is that anyone qualified to teach this stuff would make a hell of a lot of money than they would if they did anything but teach. Occasionally this works out okay because sometmes a person who really loves to teach is willing to sacrifice the giant paycheck for it, but it's more often the case that those who become teachers in technology are either not competitive due to qualifications or they're burned out by the commercial world. In both cases they're bitter, and even resentful of younger tech-types with brighter futures than theirs. (We could also relate this resentfulness to the rampant sexism in engineering schools, but that would be offtopic.) The question here is: what can we do to encourage intelligent, knowledgeable people to share their knowledge rather than hoard it all as intellectual property, and just how the hell is it fair that a guy like me with a BA in history can make more money on an IT help desk than a person who spends ten years in college and goes on to contribute to the future of the field? The fact is that people who don't get the respect they deserve will very quickly and inevitably lose interest in their students and lose their passion for the subject.
* Please do not read my signature.
My all time favorite teacher was a man by the name of Ray Gilbert, my college calculus and engineering math teacher. He had retired from teaching full time many years before to run a striping company (painting lines on roads, parking lots, etc) with his sons, but continued to teach at night. Deep down he was a math geek. He told us stories of how before his basketball games in high school he would sit down and do equations because it relaxed him. I can't really put my finger on exactly how he did it, but he made everything make sense. He was also genuinely interested in you learning the subject, but he would only put as much effort into you as you put into the class. He passed away a few years ago of a heart attack and even to this day it brings a tear to my eye to think about.
My second favorite teacher is also one of my current teachers. I've had to take most of my college classes at night. Anyone who's done that knows the quality of the teacher can vary wildly from the very poor to the very excellent. This guy is definitely one of the best. Not only does he teach because he loves to, but he knows what he's teaching. Unlike many night instructors I've had, he also approaches it like a true professional and expects the same out of you. He's so good that I'm taking the classes he's teaching each semester even though that means putting off my degree for a year or so.
There are a few teachers who stand out in my mind, actually. I have been lucky enough to have more than one favourite.
First of all, there was Mrs. Jamieson, my Grade 2 teacher. I always enjoyed her class and she spoke to me and other students as if we were adults. She never talked down to me. My mother later told me that in an interview she stated that whatever I had chosen to do in this lifetime had nothing to do with anything being taught in school.
Then there was my Junior High computer teacher, Mr. Stobo. Unlike many other teachers of the time, he recognized the computing skill possessed by a few of us students and allowed us the opportunity to use it. Instead of doing the typical desktop publishing classes, we ended up helping him with administrative tasks.
And last, there was Chuck Murray, my Grade 12 Social Studies teacher. With each of his puns, insults, and declarations, he forced students to think carefully and argue with passion. Regardless of the topic for debate, he played a brutal devil's advocate and allowed students to form opinions of their own on the world around us.
Wherever you are, I salute you!
I send you this message in order to have your advice.
Damn straight, look, my "CS" teacher doesn't even know what Linux is, he thinks all programmers are shiftless hackers, and he proceeds to push his "knowledge" on everyone that will or will not listen. You wouldn't believe the trouble of making this jackass leave you alone for awhile as you test your damn 3D game on the p2/266's running *gag* NT... jackass. Thanks for teaching me MATH, also, retard!
and lest anyone flame me, it wasn't for lack of imagination. to this day i'm still a sucker for just about any scientific announcment, finding, whitepaper or article. it's actually a foobin' wonder that i was bored silly in physics.
sincere apologies for the rant. i realize there are a rare few wonderful teachers out there. big ups to them. i just wish i knew one or two of them when it mattered.
My .02,
My .02,
zencode
iactivist.org/jason
Usually the best teachers are the ones who teach you more than just the subject they teach.
:)
...
By 6th grade I had come to detest mathematics. My 6th grade teacher Mr Krishnamurthy, not only made me love mathematics, but also got me to love programming.
He made math more like a puzzle game to solve and soon enough my grades were better and I was starting to enjoy the subject more.
ALL of his students feel that way!
I still call on him every other month or so and thank him for all he has done for me
The number of the beast
1. Not showing a "smarter than thou" attitude although they probably were and hence being approachable
2. People that showed where common sense applied and used it to derive the entire set of rules from basic principles - that is just cool.
You can read on if you like but unless you know these people it probably won't make much sense to you =).
Here is my list of people that come to mind immediately. Best Teacher/Lecturer :
Prof. M. Johnson & Dr. L. Hamey , Computing Science at Macquarie Uni Sydney. (Hamey winning the best use of Powerpoint award- yes I know it's MS, but you gotta see that sliding window presentation folks.)
Honorary mention : Prof. L. Maciazek (apologies if mispelled) for being human , and laughing at my silly cartoons =)
Dr. M. Battey Macquarie Uni Sydney Electronics for being human.(Honorary award goes to K. Imrie for bringing common sense into the practicals and for being truely an academic =) and for being able to decifer the mess of wires on my desk as a barrel shift encoder)
There are many more (Thank you to you all)
--
Jon - TheSpork
Because she was about money and she looked good. I when back to the my to see here but she took a higher paying job. =P
From Zero to Hero... Starbuck Zero
Dont be too hasty in dismissing all math as easy. Key word(s) in your post: high school. You think that's real math? It's not even a thorough introduction to easy math. And if you are trying and you still can't do it, you are not very bright. Even the smartest people think some math is hard, even if they can do it. It doesn't matter if you got an A on your math final(im sure /. readers are -very- impressed by that). Even with an "open mind," you probably wouldn't even know what what was being asked when presented with some difficult math. I am certainly not lauding the arrogance of self proclaimed "math gods" on /. But if a person has taken the time and energy to learn math, they have every right to be proud of that.
Math requires a different mindset than most other subjects. Most other subjects expect you to simply memorize and regurgitate. Math, OTOH, simply gives you the TOOLS to do something...it's up to you to figure out what to do with those tools, and how to do it. It's the difference between knowing what makes a good piece of furniture, versus knowing how to build a piece. You're only going to be able to build that furniture if you know how to use a lathe, milling machine, sander, saw, straight-edge, router, dowels, etc. Fall short in one of those areas, and you'll have a hard time with that furniture. You really need to have a very thorough understanding of WHY something is the way it is, in order to be able to do math. And I think a lot of students are short-changed in the basics of math very early on. Without those foundations, it can indeed be very difficult to perform higher-level math.
during my university years, i kinda found it hard to pin point a good lecturer that i could associate with and actually get really interested in studying. i spend most of my time doing contracts and ended turning up to only the first lecture, last lecture and exam - however, i made it. the plot thickens tho...
:) they were putting in 30-40 hours a week to studying.. once all the topics were covered (they had labs on them too) i made it clear that those left will pass, and do well. i then made it 10 more weeks of fun. take an arcade game, do it. if you dont do anything, it'll be boring.. otherwise, you'll have fun. you have no project at demo, you dont pass. i turned up weekly (fridays) and got status reports, helped them with some problems that came up.. and, after running the course since sept. 2000 - the results are showing.
:)
:)
in a move from down under (.au) to sweden (.se) my path was made by becoming a teacher myself! i must say, its been interesting, if anything - i have tried to do exactly NOT what my teachers did. my strategy is simple, put enough pressure on them, after the first group drops out - you have a good bunch, then make it fun.
recently (final exam this friday) had an advanced java programming course.. started with 37 students, 11 dropped out within first two weeks. it was basically a new topic from the JDK 1.1 every week (RMI, Threading etc).. kinda got too much for em
they all agree, that through me forcing them to work on their own initiative - its the best course they ever had.. however, it had nothing to do with the teacher.. i was just there, directing them. they all taught themselves.. the concept of teacher = higher power didn't exist, it was a massive group thing, everyone working to improve each other..
they were nice guinea pigs
ps: look forward to the implementations of the classic arcade games on friday
My best teacher is my Unix mentor.
(the short version)
I was going to a community college taking general courses and then took the Unix 1 class at this college. That is where I met this man. After taking this class with him, I took all the other courses that he taught. Then, we did a lot of special projects together, directed studies and coaching, et cetera. I basically got all sorts of good excuses and credit to hang out with this really cool guy.
Now it's much later, and I'm accross the country, and I still talk to him a lot. I help him with problems on his systems, and he's a good friend. I definately couldn't imagine a better teacher. I've learned a lot from him.
Thanks, Doc!
Mr-Pope
"The only way to learn a new programming language is by writing programs in it." - Brian Kernighan
In America, teachers believe in voodoo education. There are lots of "systems" floating around that have as much scientific basis as the MakeMoneyFast systems you see advertised on late night infomercials. The fundamental assumption held by all American teachers is that students will be unable to learn unless the teacher helps them. For people like me who have a huge passion to learn, this ends up being the most oppressive environment you can think of. At the same time I am winning essay contests, math, and chemistry competitions, I am flunking those same classes.
Teachers are terribly conceited -- they have their way of teaching, but it doesn't apply to every student. For each student they find where their method clicks, they oppress ten other students that don't match that style.
The thing that bugs me the most is that teachers think that since they are on some noble quest to help the nation's youth that they are beyond reproach.
In short, I think I would have been better off if the teachers left me alone and didn't try to help me.
Looking back, there were three teachers that shaped my career as a software engineer, each in a different way. One taught me write well, one sharpened my problem solving skills, and one taught me the pragmatics of software building.
In high school, my 11th grade English teacher, Marty Green, taught me to write well. For the first several weeks of our advanced placement class she made us write an essay on one of several topics and turn it in. It was given back the next day, with incisive and practical criticism. Unlike previous teachers, she didn't try to force her style and voice onto our writing - her only concern was that the writing be correct and clear. Once almost all the class could write an acceptable essay, we dived into literature and the rest of the expected curriculum. Being able to write a well structured essay served me well in college (astronomy/sociology major) and has been a great help in my current position as a systems engineer and systems architect.
At Rice University, my Mathematical Physics professor, the late Bud Rorschach, demanded hard work and made dynamics and electrodynamics come alive. Our weekly recitation sections were my first exposure to peer review, as we were called on to present solutions to our homework at the chalkboard for comments from him and the others in the section an exhausting and exhilarating experience.
Finally, at my first software job, all of the new hires were given an apprenticeship under the chief programmer, Kent Frazier. I learned more about how to write well structured programs and how to attack programming problems in one month than I had in several college courses. Kent had started programming in the 50s and wrote a variant OS for one of the mainframes, which was distributed by a user group. (He didn't realize that it was impossible for an individual to write an OS themselves, so he was able to do it.) He then spent time at IBM working in OS development and moved to EDS as a networking and optimization guru. All without any college.
I owe each of them a great debt, which I have tried to pay forward.
Ive never had a teacher like that, my school has horrific teachers... For instance my 8th grade algebra teacher, i was a year ahead of everyone else, and that stupid $*%# put me a year behind, i hadnt recovered from that until this year, my junior year in high school...
I had always been an all A math student, and ahead of everyone else, but 1 teacher can really screw things up...
And then theres the lack of a good english teacher. (Count the comma splices, win a prize!)
technical director was always a funny title since Auto-CAD is about as technical as most university theatre programs get. And maybe how to hook-up a 408 three phase feed. In theatre, the TD is the person who organizes, plans, and basically makes the designer's ideas reality. Murphy was the TD at my university. He never had us call him professor, if we wanted Mike was okay, but most everyone just called him Murphy. A grey beard in the fullest sense (we told the freshmen he was Santa Claus) he was another one of those teachers who just pushed and pushed for excellence. I don't think I've ever had a greater challenge than trying to meet that man's expectations. He'd nail me if i cut corners and if i had everything perfect he would say i was being to anal and needed to relax some. And we butted heads all the time. He was humble too. He is one of the most respected people in the industry, sitting on national baords for this and that, yet teaches at a small school in West Virginia, instead of an ivy league. And we never could find out anything more about him, just that everyone in the business we ever met knew of him. Unlike most folks in theatre, he never bragged about what he had done. Sure, I don't think his lectures were that great. Actually, they were non-existent. but he tought me how to see and do the seemingly simple, and somehow from that the actual learing of the complex stuff, like how to actually create a good lighitng design, came naturally. He taught me things like how to feel a piece of 2x4 to see if there were any cracks inside it that would cause it to break under load. How to set a circular saw down into the middle of a sheet of plywood to cut a trap door and not loose your arm in the process. not to be afraid to stir five gallons of paint with your arm, and how, if you need to paint a long straight line; just stick your tongue into the corner of your mouth and do it. I could probably go on for ever about what an incredible and unique teacher he is, but you get the point. he taught without teaching, and somehow he managed to teach things that most people say can't be taught but needs to come from within.
My 11th and 12th grade CS teacher, Mr. Moses, is the only teacher I have ever had that values the opinions and the skills of his students over those of the "experts" (read idiots) from the school board. He has allowed our Cisco Networking class to wire most of the school and redo some of the extremely broken wiring laid by "professionals". He has also allowed my to set up a linux server for our web-based curriculum. He's a hacker in the true sense. Too bad I'm graduating and he's leaving...
1st Grade: In 1st grade I went to a small private school in Cambridge, MA (near Harvard and MIT, though, oddly, I didn't know either place existed!) that taught about 20 kids total, and there were four teachers. That place was awesome! Although we met in a church basement, we learned a ton of stuff. Every Wednesday we'd go on a field trip somewhere in Cambridge or Boston (sometimes we'd take a long trip out to Plymouth Plantation), and every afternoon we'd go to one of the playgrounds around the city. We started learning BASIC in 1st grade (!) did all sorts of art projects, studied current events, Spanish (I made friends with the kids of the Spanish teacher, who were also there) and it was even a mom and pop school! 4th: I was in the public schools of Lexington, MA, which were really good at the time, and my 4th grade teacher was wonderful. She covered an entire wall of her room with plants, plus she kept a dove and frogs there. She taught us lots of stuff about books and biology, and had us dissect owl pellets to re-build a mouse skeleton! The school also invited in someone who owned an owl so we could meet them. It was a great year overall. 5th: No amazing teachers this year, but I became friends with three other silly kids and we were all good at drawing so we drew comics about one other kid in our class who was a TOTAL screwball! (He wasn't stupid, but he had some very funny emotional problems.) He did weird shit like try to make us stop singing by waving middle fingers at everybody in the room, or when we had a spelling bee, all of our desks were arranged in a circle, and he wasn't allowed to participate so they put his desk in the middle so everybody would stare at him (very strange decision on the teachers' part) or when he didn't get chosen in a simulated town council (cool cooperative project between the three 5th grade classes, we discussed some serious issues like building a highway over a park, having bicycle licenses, and I think public transportation), he'd jump up and down in his chair (sitting down, holding the seat by his hands, looking like he was tied down) screaming through his teeth! That was some of the funniest stuff in my life and my friends and I drew comics about it. But the teacher didn't like it so we changed the names of the characters and didn't base them on real people anymore, but we kept drawing comics through 7th grade, largely about personal experiences and video games. Cool stuff! 8th: This year I moved from MA to FL, where the schools are much worse, and this year was really hellish for me, but amazingly, I learned how to touchtype and program BASIC (yes, I had it earlier, but didn't practice until now). 10th grade: I hadn't had many good teachers since 8th, so I was really fired up to have a cool English teacher for 10th! It's not that English was the best subject in the world, but the guy who taught it was awesome! He was only 28, about to go to Harvard for his masters and it was easy to tell that this guy wanted to run his own school. He raised our interests in literature to the point that people were quoting Romeo and Juliet around school in their spare time! And this was an all-boys school! He was quite an inspiration for me. 13th: I had a philosophy teacher from India at a community college. He had us discuss things in depth, and often let class discussions roam when they hit some critical issue by chance. Also interesting.
The teacher who pushed me to do my best ad work the hardest, would have to be Mr. Cuddihy from a class called: Computers and Calculators and you learn just that (see title)
He pressured me in different ways:
The next year, Mr. Cuddihy moved away without notice... supposedly to Ithaca, New York. (Which was interesting, because another one of my friends had magically run away to Ithaca... I think it's the witness protection program!) So, Mr. Cuddihy, wherever you are, thanks!
-- Kleptotherapy: Helping those who help themselves.
I'm sorry, He was my best teacher. No doubt about it. 4-6 grades were some of the best times at 1:00 pm-2:00pm twice a week. He taught us things that opened up our minds to completely different things, such as film makeing, (we watched an episode of "Unsolved Mysteries", and remeber what he said about the different producers), computers,(volentarly let us use his own MacSE 30 with an extra 20meg hard drive), and what happenes when you try and make yourself black out, (you lose brain cells). But I will always rember how he opened up some painful stuff and told us about how Cat scans work.
He also forced me to learn to type. I was in 5th grade, and was typing. That type, (no pun intended), of learning was started in 7th grade, and finalized in 9th. Hows that for advanced?
The Poems, (an is is just a was that was, and that is very small), the science lessons, (you can boil water in a leaf, and not have the leaf catch on fire), and brain teasers, (How can someone who is only 5'10" hang themselves from 10 foot high ceilings, when they have no marks on them, except burns on thier feet?).
If I'm ranting, I'm sorry, but I just can't say enough good things about Mr. Siegle, (now Dr. Siegle). I just wish I could actally call him Del and not think to myself, (cool, I just called a teacher by his first name.)
Sincerly,
Mark W. Wallace
Alas, poor clippy, I loath him so.
I wouldn't say I had any great teachers in high school or for that matter in my first varsity (Canterbury - New Zealand), in fact this probably contributed to my bad grades and eventual dropout.
My second tertiary experience was at the University of Otago, I found this totally different from Canterbury. All the lecturers I had in my first year at Otago seemed genuinely interested in the students and it was obvious that they took the time to get to know us. One lecturer in particular, Willem Labuschagne, memorized all our names and faces before taking his first class. Now everyone likes hearing their own name, Willem didn't have to do this but the fact that he did was like telling us - "hey I'm not just here for money or research, I really wan't to help you guys learn".
I think it's great when staff and students feel comfortable enough that they will approach one another about anything, it makes learning more fun and criticism easier to take.
He who defends everything, defends nothing. -- Fredrick The Great
My mom
I come from a town where a lot of the teachers were hired for being in the right time with the right political ideas or for having a good daddy.
Which does not NECESSARILY mean they suck.
I remember my 3rd grade as hell. The teacher hated me so much that she told my parents I was retarded. Maybe she was partially right. I was so bored I found many EVIL ways of spending my times. But I don't think I am retarded, nor do my professors.
My only wish at that time was getting out of elementary school. But then middle school sucked too. Not because of the instructors: they all were very nice with me, but just one of them made me really work (the others at a certain point stopped giving me homework because they said there was no use in it since I could do it in front of the tv without thinking), and since I was a geek, well you know how geek life is.
Then High School, which is not mandatory in the town I lived at the time. There too just one professor made me really work: the (worst feared) physics instructor. That was so painful since by the time I got used to doing nothing, and he sometimes had non catholic methods for motivating students (like make you undreline the textbook in four different colours: blue for the definitions, green for the theorems, yellow the time-axis in the graphs, blue the space-axis, red the velocity... geez I remember all that useless stuff!), but something helped my mind in that subject instructors often neglect "learn to learn" and "how to get an A at an oral exam".
I think I abused of the last one during my freshman year. But it worked.
He also motivated imagination. Yep, in phisics problems. I never understood why or if he really meant to do that or what he wanted us to do. But he was happy when I called m,n,a,c the functions instead of "f1, f2, f3, f4".
By the way, everybody hated him while in High School. After High School some people start to appreciate him. Just some. (~5%)
All that stuff to say that bad teachers lead to evil and lazy students. At least for me.
And that bad teachers leave more memories than good ones.
teachers who are really hard have tended to be disliked, but for me, they were the best. the harder they pushed, the more that i tried, so the more i learned. my ap chemistry teacher was that way, she abused the class the whole year, according to her strategy. but in the end, 87% of the class got 5's on the exam, and i don't think any of us regretted it.
At my high school, my CAD teacher and the programming teachers have no idea what they're teaching. They don't know the subject and when they don't know an answer, they BS so it won't look like they don't know anything. At least we have a knowledgable sysadmin.
I had two friends who tooke a class in college called "Programming C in Unix." The teacher didn't even know what Unix was. One day, the teacher wrote a program on the board and then said to the class, "so what happens when you run this?" Without any hesitation, my friend Dan said, "The compiler will say 'statment missing in function main(), line 6'." Never, ever bother with community college.
#include #include
My favorite teacher was my 10th grade biology teacher (last year). We learned all kinds of things, perhaps the most profound was when she explained the Big Bang "And after every planet formed there was a large explosion." That is how it works, isn't it?
-----
so i says to mable, i says
In my first year at university I had lessons with this really crap dude who told me I seemed to disliked programming (I had been coding on the Amiga for 5 years and love programming), on the other hand, in my second year I met a really good OS teacher, that guy got me hooked on Unix, and is partially the reason why I'm running these BSD boxes now. Unfortunately, at least in Spain, it seems really hard to find good teachers in CS, which is a real shame, because a lot of people ends their career whithout a clue of what CS is about, tho most geeks find our way by ourselves.
Being at a convent school in Oz in the mid-70's meant that I didn't do any tech subject at all.
The nuns forced us to take compulsory classes in dish-washing/ironing etc..
I got to 6th form college and work experience cropped-up. We were told we had a choice between teaching and nursing.
I really, really HATED school, and to this day would not spit on a burning nun.
But I had a Math teacher, Miss Stanford, who one day announced that she was veering from the curriculum and that we would learn something she felt could be important to us in the future. She managed to speed us through our proscribed Math so quickly that she had a whole 3 lessons spare in which she taught us some Fortran. She also spent extra time drumming in binary/hex etc..
Nonetheless, I was guided by the nuns into high units of Art and English, which I also liked and was good at, but I lost my faith in the education system along the way and did not take up a place at University.
I wasted 10 years after high school working in various *creative* media jobs (no degree required in those days) before I got a commercial programming job. I taught-myself code using small cheap consoles hooked up to my TV, got on a training course then got an *apprenticeship* in a small software house and for the last ten years haven't contemplated doing anything else.
One of the 8% of women programmers in the UK.
none of my teachers have been any good so far; it's perhaps a good thing I still have a while to get some. The IT teachers have no idea, and have barely heard of Linux. The computers in the school are about as good as the one I have (read:crap) and have some of the worst software you can imagine. Smigs
I was in his very first class. First day, he walked in (long hair, shades), looked around, and said "Nah. Not doing this. Get in a circle or something." Everyone kinda looked around and moved the desks. He came in a few minutes later, sat on his desk, put his feet up on another desk, and began. He had everyone's attention.
I proceeded to take every class of his -- Fiction Writing twice -- and even had him be my Councelor.
The thing that was kewl was that we were encouraged to stand out -- to NOT be conservative in our writing. I remember when he told us all to write the most erotic thing we could -- then had everyone read them aloud the next day. Quite a few of us were a bit embarrased -- but it made everyone more comfortable with each other.
For my Research Writing class, my final paper was on the feasibility of moving to Oceania, which was still active at the time. No other writing teacher at my college would have allowed that.
I think that my classes with Craig helped me to realize that I can do it -- that I can make a difference -- and that it REALLY does NOT matter what anyone else thinks.
http://www.google.com/profiles/malachid
Sorry to tell you this, but math is one of the easiest subjects you'll find. Those students who "can't" do it merely have pyschological problems with it , possibly because of bad experiences with it previously.
Math is too hyped up and dubbed as "tough subject" by popular culture. In reality, only a small percentage of students should be struggling with it, because, it is NOT a difficult subject. It's 95% approach to the subject and 5% " mathematical intelligence".Sorry to dissapoint those of you who worship math as some sort of all-powerful skill, but it is not. Try polo pony pyschology if you want a challenging subject.
For the record, after being told I would never do well in math by my secondary school teachers and early high school teachers, I ended up with a "A" in my math final. Besides the fact that I found it total boring shit, it's actually quite easy and if students who "struggle" with it just wake up and realize how reptitive and easy it is, they would probably do a lot better than sitting there saying: "Oh wow, this is so hard...I guess I'm not a math person."ok, for the most part yeah teachers are major lusers...but u are forgeting the few that aren't rite now i go 2 Forest Park High Skool
and for the most part the teachers know nothing and are constanty asking for my help with everything the sys admin(s) knows nothing about computers, they run a netware network, and are just learning linux...they think they are all specialrific cause they have rh7 on a box in their office....which is better than the other computers which are all running win98. There is a few teachers at FP who actually do know stuff and i hate 2 say this is but kinda kewl, Mr Hackett is 1 of them. and i cant forget the it program director Mr Drake and the cisco class dood Mr. Wiz, one word QUAKE!!!! need i say more so while most all teachers are complete morons, so arent and we cant forget that. OH YEAH i must inform u that MRS. WHALEN THS COMP SCI TEACHER KNOWS NOTHING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ttfn....
~Help the space cows are comming for me....
Some kids hated him, because he wouldn't write their programs for them... Some profs at cal poly think computer science is a typing class, others think you have to write 4000 lines to demonstrate that you understand data structures...
Laszlo's lectures were relevant without writing the code for you, and those with half a brain did well and love him!
My history teacher that made us live the French revolution and always found parallells in history to current world event. Event where we made have succeded better if we had learned something from history.
My religion teacher that asked everybody what they believed in and then tried to find parts in all religions that fit together with our beliefs. He was very religious, christian, but never ever let that interfere with teaching us about all religions without prejudices. In short, those who listened, adjusted, found the weak spots and trained them, let us explore our strengths ourself just gicing pointers, those that knew there respective subjects very well, those that took the time to know the pupils. Those inspired me.
My Best Teacher was Mr. Velasquez, hands down. In 5th grade he took the smartest kid in the class, the guy that knew everything, and showed him just how little he really knew. From that point on, I've always known that somewhere out there, there's somebody that knows a helluva lot more than me. Humility is a wonderful trait to have.
The teacher that taught me the most was Mr. Herrington. The guy was a bastard, very set in his ways, very big on having power -- HS Calc teacher that ran the department. Apparently nobody ever bothered to teach him the lesson above. But he did force me to learn how to sit back, shut up, and do things somebody else's way. Which has served me wonderfully in the working world.
Oh, and Mr. Curry, my AP Physics teacher -- when you don't know the answer, don't be afraid to BS around for a bit before giving up. That BS counts for something!
Now don't get me wrong I've had "nice" teachers. I enjoyed going to their class.. But my two favourite were in high school, they were my Law teacher and Accounting teacher. But that was just because they were fun teachers and you had fun when you were learning (what a concept). The computer teachers in my school sucked. One of them actually discourged me from programming when i was 15 (im 21 now, and i know better =P) I like to call him the Code Nazi.. anyway.. im in my 3rd year of university and i have yet to find someone who challenges or pushes me in anyway. But it gets harder and harder to find one because of the enormous class sizes now. I do realize there is after class.. but i mean they set their office hours and when you get there, usually there is 100 students waiting to ask questions. Ah well, i think teachers and professors are really important, and life through school gets tough when it seems like they don't care..
Ms. Shaffner, who taught me my first programming classes in high school fro '79 to '81. I don't know where I'ld be without her.
Mr. Aldo Borgia, who taught me to LOVE mathematics (and a fair amount of trig). His passion for the subject really showed through and made math come alive.
Mr. Fobear, who taught me the greatest lesson you can teach to a smartass, know-it-all, pseudo-intellectual with delusions of grandeur. He taught me that "There are more geniuses in the gutter than on Wall Street". How true it is...
Thanks guys. I owe ya.
Bill
You can tell a lot about a person by their Sig. It's a
You can tell a lot about a person by their Sig. It's a
window into the soul and psyche of the poster.
One of my favorite teachers was my high school senior English teacher Mr. Brunetti. While this was obviously a not technically oriented class :-), his love and enthusiasm for his subject made it a fun experience. In fact, he one time assigned a 3000 word essay on Hamlet. We were so determined to impress him we were turing in thesis. One person turned in 21 hand written pages. I turned in 18 if I recall correctly. When he returned the papers he thanked us for our hard work but asked that we please keep around the length assigned. (After all, that poor man had to READ all that stuff we wrote :-))
You can share your opinions of your teachers and read other students' opinions at:
The site boast several thousand student-written reviews for schools all over the world, is not-for-profit, and is run by students/slashdot readers (as opposed to company or university that might censor reviews).
--
dylan greene
http://www.DylanGreene.com
Of all the teachers I've had, most have been ignorantly blind to the real world (because it wasn't "in the plan book") but the best of all time is my current AP Computer Science teacher (12th grade high school). Mr. Pieretti. In the 3 years I've had him for various computer science classes, he's taught me C++, Java, a bit of Perl, Forth, and Python. But best of all, he knows being smart isn't everything. It's being intelligent that matters. In my class I sit next to the top student in my class (We'll call him John), and doesn't have the ability to apply a single thing he knows. Mr. P has (on occasions) rubbed hard drive magnets across John's disk, rigged his computer to never compile the code, and screws with the resolution in NT (Yes, our school uses NT 4, and John is a WinME kind of guy, kind of funny to watch =). Mr. P has helped my set up an in school Linux server (Debian 2.2) with ftp so we can send our work on the weekends. He even tells me funny storys of punch cards, computers the size of small rooms, and FORTRAN. He keeps Mathematics books written in Latin, Has every OS released up to Windows 95. The various Mac OS, IBM DOS, MS-DOS (1.0!!!), OS/2, Distrubutions of UNIX, even has the Linux 1.0 kernel on CD!!! It's this man that has instilled in me a deep pride in the programming that I do, and has inspired me to keep at it, and to make him proud of what one of his students has given me. So, I ask, lets all raise a glass and here's to Mr. Pieretti, the short, funny man with the thick glasses, that would be a slashdotter, if he had the time. *clink*
--"In the beginning, the universe was created. This made a lot of people very angry, and has been widely regarded as a
The $150 is out of context considering that a good meal costs Rs 25, which is 50 cents. Teachers make less money everywhere in the world - Make it as high paying as MBA grads and u will have quality increasing. In the US, the SAT, or whatever standard test to get into education are the lowest as compared to all other subjects like science, engineering, etc.. === If everybody were rational, the best people would be teachers and the rest of us would have to settle for things less.
How about our Computer Architectures lecturer who took an angle grinder to a hard drive so we could see what the inside of one looked like?
Or the maths teacher, who whenever he taught us some maths, he would teach us all about the person who came up with it, their life, and usually how they were killed in some nasty circumstances. And sometimes we'd just have a class where he'd tell us all about whatever he was reading at the time, which included philosophy, sociology, and quantum physics. And we all got A's in maths!!!
I'll start with a mild description. He's in his 40s, married with two children (one of them was in my class :). He is considered the 'high-level' computers teacher (meaning he is the only one who teacher 11th and 12th grade).
Now, I'll try to explain the idiocy factor of this, Moshe (*) fellow. I can sum it up in one sentence:
He does not know anything about computers.
Let me explain. There are some teachers who know a bit about, well, W*ndows, for example. This is not Moshe. There are teachers who know things about old technology but are not up-to-date. This is not Moshe. There are some teachers that just aren't the masters of Automata. This is not Moshe.
Moshe *does not know* computers. _period_. And, in addition to this, he's a m*ther-f#cker. For example, his hobby is to take 20 points off a 10-point question. Why? Cause he's an idiot.
So, you're asking yourself - how does this person teach in class. The answer is simple. He doesn't. He reads sentences from the book. And what if people ask him questions? He does not answer/answer incorrectly. And how does he check exams? Simple. All his exams are recycled questions from past years, together with the 'correct' answers [not that Moshe does not know the different between '*the* correct answer' and '*a* correct answer'. If your answer isn't "the" correct answer, you get points off.
That is how I managed to get my grade up from 47 to 97 on an exam. And that's how the average grade on 12th grade finals were around 50.
That's all. Just wanted to get some anger out. Idiot.
(*) Whoever's wondering what a f*cked-up name that is, well, I live in Israel. Go figure those Israeli names. [Mine is Avital. Go figure *that*!]
My favorite teacher in life was not employed by any board of education. He was my father. He taught me the value of money early in my life by helping me find a job. He taught me integrity and how to laugh even in the darkest situations. When his job was cut by a multinational corperation he started his own business. He taught me the power of forgivness when he became the top distributer for the company he was cut from for 3 years in a row. He taught me about perserverance when he helped take a business of 3 people into a corperation with 3 businesses. To whomever mesures money as a form of sucess my father is a millionare now. But probably one of the most important lessons my father taught me is that money is no substitute for family.
Ok, we all had remarcable teachers. I had two (one put a keyboard in my hands, when i was 12, the other became my friend). But does anyone knows where do these people come from? Or why they are so few? I mean, most of the teachers I know hardly ever really try to teach.
If you wanted to make a school with ideal teachers, where would you take them from?
High School Physics teacher, Mr. White. Made it interesting and fun. Ex., walked into the auditorium at the top of the steps and announced: "Today we will begin studying gravity." He then turns over a box he's been holding over his head, and dumps hundreds of ping-pong balls down the steps. Huge.
College Calc Teacher, Dr. Smith. Knew his stuff, knew how to make you 'get it.' Made it fun.
Later,,,
>Miss Pereira, if by some twist of fate you're reading this, know that you've been the most influential teacher in my life--and you weren't even one of mine! Hi honey! Of course I'm reading this.
I claim to be a genius no more than a fool; how often the two seem correlated. It was an AP class (a college credit should we pass the AP test) and computer classes always interested, but never challenged, me. As I know from my own teaching, the toughest challenge to manage in the classroom is how to keep the slow learners with the program without boring those that excel. That tightrope is managed by many factors including people skills, subject material, class size, sweat; I think you will agree that Mr. Barrett did it in more ways than one.
Particularly I recall a programming assignment where we were to solve quadratic equations by plug in in the numbers and doing the math. Quadratic equations, the intrepid reader will recall, have the form of aX(squared) + bX + c = 0. In ancient times it was recognized that such an equation can be solved with the quadratic equation where X = -b + or - the square root of (b squared - 4ac) all over 2a. I note that it was quite fortunate for Einstein that e is not equal to mc cubed!
Computers can solve such equations easily, and you can find such programs on the web. Assuming the answer is not irrational (negative numbers have no square roots) the answers (there are two due to the plus or minus) are output as useless decimals, not the simplified equations that we learned to calculate in Algebra class.
I decided that my program would solve it the way we did it in Algebra class.
Suffice it to say that I ate and slept little that week. There was a quite tricky bit of math that I figured out that made it all look easy, and the program's output was six frames showing the equation's simplification and solution. I handed in the assignment on Friday without a word and eagerly awaited Monday. Before class on Monday, I asked him his opinion, and he, naturally enough, said he'd like to speak with me after class. After class, naturally enough, he asked me if I could explain, on the board, that tricky bit of math that made it all look simple. I made a stab at it, and missed. I tried again, not quite. Mr. Barrett started looking at me, over his glasses, and he was not the only one sweating. I got it, I showed him, it all added up, but I don't know what expression I should have worn on my face to convince him that I wrote that program.
A big part of motivation is making the student feel that they are making progress, and that their time is not wasted. My integrity was challenged that day, and though I knew I was integral, I recall few greater insults. Nor do I remember greater compliments - the program was so good, there was no way I could have written it. I credit Mr. Barrett not for his judgment of character, but for his judgment of programs, and for motivating me beyond my means.
Mark Johnson. mark@nospam.inforaction.com
My drama teacher in Highschool was, by far, the best teacher I've ever had. We all refered to her as "mom" because, that's essentially what she was to us. She respected us as equals, and belived in every single one of us. To this very day, I'm amazed at some of the productions we managed to do there, and did well. I'll always miss her. Unfortunatly, we lost her this last november to Cancer. Mom Adams, We all miss you.
My first-year computer science TA was pretty good too. He immediately saw that I was wasting my time with the little lamer programs in that required class, and set me up with something more challenging.
In high school, I can't think of many good instructors that I had. They were mostly dedicated and sincere enough, but when there's 35 kids in the class, there's limits to what you can do. Probably the best was my freshman English and sophomore Ethics instructor (same guy). This was at a Catholic school and he'd been at a Jesuit seminary for a while before deciding that wasn't what he wanted to do with his life, then he'd spent time working as a counsellor at drug treatment programs, then he decided to teach. It still amazes me that they let him teach what he taught -- for example, in one unit, talking about the ethics of having sex, including frank talk about masturbation, birth control and sexually transmitted disease, at a CATHOLIC SCHOOL? He was constantly challenging kids to think, and was a prime rebuttal to the theory that a religious viewpoint upon life was incompatible with an intellectual life. While I am no longer a practicing Catholic, I must admit that experiencing Jesuit thought first-hand made me respect the Catholic church a lot more than some of those blatantly anti-intellectual religions out there (see the footer on my home page for what I think of the Christian Coalition and its ilk :-).
Oh, regarding that "timeless wisdom etched in stone" bit -- probably the best thing this guy taught was that much of what's tossed out as "timeless wisdom etched in stone" is no more etched in stone than anything else. I guess this was under the philosophy of "toss out a morsel of timeless wisdom and you've taught a man a morsel, but teach a man to think, and you've put him on the road to wisdom".
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
Anyway, I got into this industrial computing course, and we was doing assembly on some 68K boards. I was bored throughout the whole thing which was really pissing off the guy I was working with :-)
Anyway, comes the exam (2 hours) and off I go, programming in assembly as if it was basic and getting a working version of the program in about 1/2 hour! (some weird shit, interfacing the 68K with some IO ports and timers) 15 minutes later and the program was looking a lot less messy than the original version. Around this time comes the teacher to check on me, checks the program, sees that it works, and asks me for my flowchart...
So I tell the teacher that I haven't quite finished my program, that surely there are things to optimize, so I'll draw the freakin flowchart when I'm done with the programming. :), so I got marked down... eventhough I knew my shit like nobody else.
Not quite the question order he had in mind (was I supposed to draw the flowchart thingy BEFORE coding??? me???
After getting my result and talking to the guy I learned a valuable lesson: I gave him the impression that I could have done the thing my eyes closed and ended-up making some minor mistakes (can't remember what it was, but it was some silly 68K specific shit, or something... took him quite some time to find something to mark me down on, though!) so he hurt me plenty for that (like, that'll teach you being so arrogant :-)
What I'd say is that a mark is just a freakin mark, nothing else... is it going to affect your carrer if you're only the second best in your field? (especially if being the best means so much more work). Is a mark that important that you can't take a joke? Was you going to fill A Complaint because you was marked down? come-on, man, cheer-up! ;-)
---
"Hasta la victoria siempre!" El Comandante
- I wasn't in calculus
- I didn't have any classes in the computer lab
I was an art major, our school was specialized. See, the problem is that none of the teachers charged with educating me actually were any good at it.So, I'd cut the classes and instead hang out in the computer lab, which the calc teacher running it wouldn't really care about.
The environment in the computer lab was amazing. All of the dorks (me included) hung out there and fucked off all day. It was full of musical instruments and computers and math. The calc teacher loved talking to students. He had an eccentric personality that was very hard to get used to, but you came to love the guy once you got to know him (about a year's time).
He'd let us all cut class if we really wanted to, and he'd even tolerate us sitting in on his regular classes that he had in there. We were allowed to play networked doom on the LAN (or any other game) and could freely use the internet (no censorware). My grand plan was to get a Linux box in there so the entire LAN could use the internet, rather than just a single computer with a modem. The students had full unsupervised access to anything and everything.
Anyway, besides letting us fuck off as much as we wanted, he'd fuck off with us, and the subject matter of the fucking off was actually educational. We'd be dicussing some bullshit philosophy or he'd teach us about 4d space on the whiteboard or show us some cool math, or maybe kicking all of our asses at chess. It had chess boards and they were all being used, and none of these people could be considered nerds. They were artfags!!
The kids who were cutting their classes to be here were actually learning stuff they never would have normally cared about. He was never an assigned teacher of mine and technically the entire experience with him was 'illegal', yet I think I learned more in one hour there than I did the entire day of school.
He totally hated the school system and probably saw how stifling it was. While sitting in on one of the classes, he let students entirely choose their own grades without a comment, other than maybe "You really think you deserve a 95? ... ok".
Sure, he let us get away with whatever we wanted, but at the same time, we respected him. We learned a lot from him and many of us probably don't even realize it. It reminds me of a painting called "The School of Athens". It portrayed all time great philosophers and artists and musicians just chilling in a huge room, and hundreds of students chilling with them, doing their own thing, or hearing the masters speak about whatever.
The rest of the school day was just a boring slur of "..2 more hours until I can hit the computer lab.." or "..3 more hours until I can go the fuck home..". I think that makes him the greatest teacher I never had.
I worked my way up to AP computer science my senior year in high school, and ended up with a teacher that everybody dreaded- mr enenstein. He always ran a very tight class- if he even caught you chewing gum he'd make an example out of you; he would stop class while you went to throw your gum away. The sort of shit students REAALY hate.
:) I never did get a chance to truly thank him for it, but one of these days I will.
I thought I was hot shit, king programmer. I soon learned that was not the case! One of our first assignments was to randomly print the contents of an array. My solution? randomly pick a number between 0 and the length of the array, print that element, and set it to null. If I ever hit a null, try again until I hit something that wasn't null. He took one look at my short, seemingly elegant program, and promptly gave me an F. I was quite puzzled, as the program worked flawlessly. He explained- "Your program may seem to work flawlessly, but it's far from it. What happens if your random number generator is not up to par, and you never end up picking the last element of your array? Your program would be caught in an endless loop."
With that he had me rewrite the whole algorithm to actually shrink the array when it removed elements, so that the random number that was picked would always reference a valid slot in the array. It took shitloads more programming, but it was MUCH more solid than my "monte carlo" approach.
THat's just a small example of the sort of shit I had to endure, and by the end of the year I was so glad to be out of there!! It didn't really hit me until about a year later that he had actually managed to instill in me good coding practices. I'm probably one of the messiest people I know... there's barely enough room on my desk for my keyboard right now, but if you looked at my code you'd never know it. It's spotlessly clean- good indentation, comments, very consistent style. I CANT STAND sloppy code, and I have him to thank for that.
You don't have to just wait for a good teacher. Find out who they are and put yourself in their class! Bend the rules if you have to, get your parents to help if you're in grade school!
He taught CS for a while at Westfield State College in the early 80's. His love and enthusiasm for the field was infectious. He had us all buy Vic-20's and read Tracy Kidder's "Soul of a New Machine" before the first day of class. The chief lesson I learned from him (digested too late to save me from flunking out of college) was to start 'hacking' as soon as possible, i.e., when you get some knowledge on a new topic you're learning, go out and play with it/use it as soon as you can. Don't wait for an assignment to assimilate all the little pieces you get before the assignment.
You know, the whole spiel...
; )
**>>BELCH
Apart from a grade 3 teacher who almose "adopted" me (to the extent of inviting me to her country place - with my parent's consent - for hunting trips), the best teacher I ever had was a grade 9 math teacher who explained calculus to me in 5 minutes.
He drew an arbitrary curve: " this is the curve of your function ". He then hashed the area under the curve up to a point " when you integrate your function, you calculate the area of the curve ". Then, he drew a straight line tangent to one point of the curve " and when you differentiate, you compute the slope at that point ".
--
Basically you are responsible for educating yourself.
However, there is so much out there, that someone
who shows the way and cuts through the trivia
is valuable.
My best teacher ever was Bruce Saunders, whom I had for history in 7th and 8th grades. I went to this middle school with a quasi-magnet program for highly gifted kids, called the IHP, so part of the experience was being surrounded by other smart people. Anyway, Saunders challenged us and talked to us like adults. I was a math-and-science nerd before then, which I know is what people here think of as being a real nerd. After his class, although I still am a nerd in that way, I'm more interested in history and politics. Saunders was the only teacher I ever had who totally changed my focus in that way.
Switch the . and the @ to email me.
While most people have a teacher they can point to that encurraged them to learn by intoducing them to some new science or something.
I had one who tryed to discurrage me. This was messed up. She was busy telling me I could never learn basic math let alone computer programming.
She went so far as to tell my mother that my intrests in computers should be discurraged.
To make a long story short.. all she did was cement the image in my mind of her being an insult to the teaching profession.
Such people are very rare but somehow they avoid being fired.
I had one such person as a teacher...
Teachers are in a position to encurrage kids to go on to great things. They are also in a position to distory lifes.
I've had bad teachers.. over worked, dealing with local system politics, one on the verge of a nervous breakdown. But they all wanted to be great teachers. Most of my teachers were great, insperations of some sort.
I couldn't single one teacher out and say "the best" most were great...
I can single one out as the worst...
I don't actually exist.
Although I have had a few good teachers, I have had many more terrible ones, and what motivated me was my despise of them. Maybe I should give some examples.
In 7th grade, I had an awesome Latin teacher: he used donut holes and jokes to teach us Latin. In 8th grade I unlearned most of what i learned since my teacher was mediocre. I was unmotivated that year, but in 9th grade I had the good teacher again and it was a great year. Then in 10th grade, I had a despicable teacher who didn't know Latin himself, let alone posses any ability to teach it. However, I conquered that year because I hated him so much. I got a 99 on the final when he expected a 75 or so of me.
More examples might be necessary: my 8th grade science teacher constantly forgot which way the earth rotated, and other pertinent principles. However, I hated her with such a holy passion that I aced the course and learned more than an only mediocre teacher would have taught me since i was forced to learn from outside sources.
So good teachers might be a good thing, but terrible ones can work well too.
-Leo
Unquestionably, my best teacher was Fred Carrington, Physics teacher at Ulysses S. Grant High School, in Van Nuys, California.
A Music Studies major, with a Physics minor, Derf got his teaching credential back when they gave blanket credentials to teach any subject. Teaching Physics, Derf's primary motivations were to make learning fun, and to make Physics intuitive.
Thanks to Derf, I can still derive kinematic laws, EM equasions for magnetic flux insolonoids, even Lorentz Transformations, solely by remembering how physics (even special relativity) work intuitively, then deriving the math from there.
Derf was responsible for my getting a double 5 on the Physics BC AP test in 11th grade, and was more interested in the lives of his students than any other teacher I've known. From sponsoring, organizing, and leading the Backpacking Club (even when it cost him a finger!!) to the Physics Olympiad, the Paper Airplane Contest, Egg Drops, April Fools stunts (did anyone ever get the tire over the flagpole?), and all the rest, Derf is a benchmark by which all other teachers are measured.
Now that I find myself a TA/tutor for a graduate course, I'm looking back to the lessons Drf taught me, not just in Physics, but in learning.
I salute you, Derf, for all that you've done for so many people, and I thank you.
Sincerely, and with utmost gratitude,
Kevin
-------
Kevin Fox
Kevin Fox
Although I've had some good, some great, and some bad teachers, no-one really motivated my as much as - myself!
No-one else really fostered my love of computers and programming.
No-one else really motivated me to get over the hurdle when I was struggling with some of the more difficult math in the CS program at college.
No-one else has been around to help me keep learning many subjects as I continue post-college education, things like financial acumen, photography, cooking, hiking, snowboarding, telecommunications, automotive repair, etc...
In short, I can't really point to any particular teacher and say that THEY made a huge difference in my life as much as I forged my own path. Some teachers may have cleared away some of the brush, but I always knew where I was headed...
However, I must say that I owe being able to be my own best teacher to my mother, who really believed in John Holt's messages of Unschooling and continuous education. She's the one that guided me into thinking that you never stop learning, and you can learn anything you really want to and are interested in. For being my best Meta-teacher, thanks Mom!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Hardly. I learned alot from this guy, even though I didn't know I was doing it. Recursion, data structures, modular programming, all the foundations for what real coding is like. Sure, the stuff that he put into the curriculum to talk about for 4 days I picked up in 4 minutes (like any good geek would), but the fact is that I did learn things. He even knew when and where to strike the balance -- we (there were about 3 of us) only had to go to his class when he was starting a new subject. Other times we got to hang out in the lab. And he would great our assignments differently, to put more challenge in them. "Make a program that draws a birthday cake", for example, was intended to just be a bunch of println("****")s together (come on, this was 1985). I made one out of block graphics (remember what happened when you went after char(x) where x>127?) and made the lights animate. Or the time we had to write Conway's Life, so I made a 3d version. And a favorite, when a test question said "Write a sort routine, any sort routine" I wrote a recursive bubble sort :).
Some favorite moments from class:
- "Mr. Morin, perhaps if Miss Baldasini turned around and listened to me for a change she would understand what's going on."
- "Mr. Morin, you are not my friend. You are not invited to my wedding."
- "Get out, Mr. Morin. Get out, get out, GET OUT!" (That'd be when I pulled a knife on another student as a joke, and Mr. Kendall didn't find it very funny.)
Yup, I was a shit. I've often thought of going back to visit him and telling him how much he is to blame for what I am today (be it for good or bad"She just told me she's not learning shit from you, that's why I'm explaining it."
"Can I come to your funeral when you die?"
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
Worst lecturer I've had:
:)
Was quite competant but,
Told us how if our half year group project was handed up 1 minute late we get 0 and fail the subject (and therfore have to repeat another year).
He then told us the story of a student who'd worked on the project for a few all nighters and crashed his car out of tiredness while trying to drive it in before due date. Then he laughed and he was friggin serious.
Students put the guys pic on "am I hot or not". He got a 3.
Best tutor:
Was absolute computer nut, would help with absolutely anything to the point of actually checking your program's generated assembly code looking for weird errors. Would spend ages helping you (but without doing it for you) so you actually learnt something.
And now that I've left uni I've come to realise I hated every single lecturor/tutorer at Adelaide uni except for David Knight (tutorer in question).
Here's to you David
It's turtles all the way down.
I like how their security plan was simply tell people off who went into the dos shell. My friend once got banned for playing around with network drives, not doing anything bad, just showing how easily it can be done.
:)
Granted there was a heck of a lot of stuff in IT exam that was never in classes, the worse part was when the exam asked me what does "this" algorithm do, and I pointed out where the algorithm crashes's, which they obviously didn't appreciate.
But atleast I was never told that a mouse is a GUI
It's turtles all the way down.
My high school AP physics teacher told us on the first day that for his class, the physics was secondary to learning how to problem-solve - to think through any challenge we would encounter in life.
He was an excellent teacher for two reasons - he had an unsurpassed enthusiasm both for physics and for teaching. And that's the crucial combination...
He also had a sweet remote-controlled random 'student selector' on his Apple II so no one could ever feel that he picked on them. Heh.
I would have to say, during my high school years, was a man by the name of Peter Schwartz (I think that is the spelling). He was my high school physics teacher, during my senior year (at Bakersfield High School, in 1990-91). I don't say he was my best teacher because he helped me in any particular way (not that he helped me to learn difficult physics concepts - he did), but how I saw him act as a teacher.
He was a "strange" individual - and he truely was an individual, going against the grain in every respect. He tended to wear strange clothing (one day he came in with two different color socks - both were a hideous orange and green plaid, but a different pattern on each). He was a vegetarian (he once had for lunch a brocoli and garlic yogurt - one guy in our class said he tried it, and it wasn't bad - but it didn't sound good). He rode his bike to school - every day - no matter how cold, rainy or foggy it was. He would help students any time of the day, and stay as long as was necessary to help a student (even to 9 or 10pm!), then he would ride his bike back home. He was a dedicated teacher. He always made experiments in physics interesting - it was always hands on (one experiment he helped us to do, at the end of finals - was quantitatively figuring out the mass of an electron - using an old ocilloscope and some other equipment and algorithms. I remember that the mass that was found was only off by a couple of magnitudes - which is not that big of a deal, given the equipment we had to work with). He was a very dedicated teacher.
I don't think one student left that class without learning something - from the smartest individual, to the dumbest (or least interested).
He only taught there for that one year, as a break away from his work on his doctorate (I believe) thesis involving plasma physics (using a Tokamak at PPL) - from what he told us, he couldn't complete his work because someone fried the startup capacitor bank. He had the incomplete thesis in class - huge thing. From what I understand, he had degrees from both MIT and Princeton, had done the Peace Corp thing - and was teaching us. His age: 25.
Our school lost a great individual when he left after that year. It was truely a loss. I caught up with him later via email at the PPL - he told me he was doing reseach in Materials Science. Don't know what he is doing now.
If you read this Mr. Schwartz - I thank you for the impact you had on all of us. Good luck in your future life...
Worldcom - Generation Duh!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
...was myself. If I hadn't taken some personal initiative and discovered computers and the artistry of programming, it is possible that I never would have escaped the rural Oklahoma cesspool in which I spent my first 18 years.
--
SecretAsianMan (54.5% Slashdot pure)
Washington, DC: It's like Hollywood for ugly people.
The two high-school teachers who influenced me the most were my Honors History and Honors Lit teachers. My math teacher was another major positive influence.
You want "negative reinforcement" when you do something wrong? Forget the usual high school crap. When you feel bad because your teacher is disappointed in you, that's when you know you've got a good teacher. (Amazingly like parents in that respect...)
The most influential teacher in college was a CS prof who left to go into the seminary and become a minister.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
My best professor by far is Dr Gilmore at my university. He is a prof. whose genuis and grasp of the elegance and beauty of physics dwarfs any physicist I have ever met. Apart from taking a class with on of the legendary greats, I cannot imagine possibly getting more out of a class than with Dr. Gilmore. I am currently taking a nonlinear dynamics class from him and it is absolutely fascinating. It probably helps that he's literally the man who wrote the de-facto standard book on catastrophe theory.
I'm sure a lot of geeks loathed their gym teachers. Here's my reason. I personally still hate Sue Reynolds, (East Detroit school district, Michigan) because she didn't believe asthma was a real condition.. "Oh, that's just another word for sissy kids." I wish that rather than stopping in the middle of a run and collapsing on the floor, I'd kept going to the point where I passed out. Maybe if I'd been hospitalized, that demon of a woman wouldn't still be working there. Instead, I got myself disciplined for insubordination.
On a lighter note, I have to pay tribute to my HS biology teacher. Lotte Geller was the best, she challenged me unlike any other teacher. In a room that was part greenhouse, part lab, part classroom, and part candy store, my classmates and I got some of the best teaching around. The class I was enrolled in was just the basic 9th grade bio, but there was nothing basic about it. When I was done with the normal coursework, we'd talk about everything, my favorite topics included the folded structure of proteins and DNA, and the mechanisms by which genes were selected to be expressed. When Lotte didn't know something, it was up to me to find out and report back. Her stack of Scientific American back issues was at my disposal. I secretly suspect that sometimes she feigned gaps in her knowledge just to get me to do the research, because when I'd return from the library, she'd discuss my findings with a suspicious amount of background.
I can't say enough good things about Lotte. For years I'd been less than enthusiastic about school, to say the least. Her class was the first that I really cared about, where I was disappointed in myself if I let down the teacher or my classmates.
My class met immediately after her AP Biopsychology class, and I'd usually pass some of those students in the hall as they were leaving. "We talked about you again today", they'd say. Apparently I was a favorite example when certain conditions came up in class.
I've been kicking myself lately for not having taken more bio courses in school, as Lotte insisted I should. Of course, the public school I transferred to didn't offer anything at the level I wanted to take, and I didn't go to college. If I do ever get off my ass and pursue biology, it'll be because of Lotte. May she rest in peace.
So i will post a little note about my experience. I had my computer science education at a liberal art school. The professors i had were not the best code writers arround and one admitted to being pretty behind on technology. He was more of a theory person, and well thats the way he enjoyed working. Well anyway, after taking an intro course with him you felt for a bit that "hey this guy does not know all that much". THEN you walk into his algorithm class, or his theory of computation (think finite machines etc) and you were just blown away by how exciting he made things.... I mean some of the algo's you read about left you light headed for a few hours (hell the Y-Combinator still amazes me).
A LOT OF TIMES (maybe not always) profs dont get the credit they are due cause we think they are working us to hard or that the skills we are missing out (hands on java/IT issues etc) are more important.... bull crap! and he knew how important a solid background in math/theory was, and patiently got us at the same position.
i think any prof. who wants to be a prof and loves to teach has to be given full credit...teaching a bunch of crazy college ppl can be a bit annoying would'nt you think...... so here is a slight quote (which i might be getting a bit wrong)
When i came to college, I thought i had all the right answers..... after 4 years of learning, i am just beginning to ask the right questions
Non-Deterministic Finite Automata
Without a doubt there have been two teachers in my education that stand head and shoulders above the rest.
Mr Skinner (Richmond BC), my grade 7 teacher can be credited with introducing me to Science Fiction/Fantasy and the wealth of ideas associated with that genre. He instilled in me an interest in literature of all sorts, in writing my own thoughts, and in research.
In High School (Saltspring Island, BC, Canada), I was fortunate enough to be taught History and Geography by Ted Harrison. This wonderful man loved teaching, loved his students, and was innovative in his approach to teaching subjects (like using games to illustrate concepts - no study of the events leading up to WWI was complete without several games of Diplomacy for example). Without a doubt he was the best teacher I have ever encountered.
Alas, due to unfortunate events I understand he is no longer teaching. This is a great loss to countless generations of students. Wherever you are Ted, Bravo! and Thank You!
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
this guy sounds very similar to the assembler teacher I had in college. We would have numerous tests, quizzes, and projects throughout the quarter, but your grade was based solely on an interview at the end of the quarter. He would sit down with you and ask you some questions about the programs you had written. If you had a firm grasp of the material (which he basically already knew from class interaction) it was a 5 minute interview and you were done with an A. Of course then there was the poor guy who was in there for 45 minutes. No one ever saw him in a programming class again. Then for second quarter assembler, I had this same teacher. The entire quarter who devoted to a project. The class was broken up into groups and you designed a program. It could be anything you wanted (with his approval). The 8 of us ended up programming a version of the old Star Trek game where you went to the different sectors and fought Klingons. It had working sound, a Gui, opening movie, etc. I learned more about real programming in those 2 quarters than the rest of my college experience combined.
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
My best teacher was a quite crazy physics teacher who regarded the curriculum as an interference to learning. He would walk into class, make a statement and then ramble through the relevant physics until he was satisfied. The best example I can think of was "The sun is going to die cause it is blowing off mass constantly... I wonder when? Then one class later having used the classes knowledge to work out just how much it was blowing off and how big it was he told us just how long we had (well we ignored the fact that as the suns structure changed its properties would also). He was a god, to such a degree that when our Vice-Principal whose office was directly across from the classroom came in after 15 minutes of the class to be told our teacher was sitting outside at the end of the building reading the paper, drinking his orange and smoking a few cigarettes while chatting to the groundsman he told us to sit down and be quiet....and didn't bother going near said teacher.
The best part was his regular quote that "it's harder to fail the exam than pass it", the final response to which was two of my best friends screaming with delight and jumping around hugging each other as they came out from receiving their final results only to discover they had suceeded ... in FAILING! They had failed just about everything else aswell so it's not like they were diligent students who had been let down (trust me, they weren't).
My worst teacher was my applied maths teacher for the last two years. In our mock exams, he gave me 0 marks for a question I had entirely correct (amongst other marvellous marking irregularities). I obviously queried him on this, and he said that it was not explained, I placed the paper in front of him and read it back, showing him just how I had achieved the result with a simple method he had never even thought of....his answer was "I looked at it wasn't the proper method and I didn't understand it instantly, and the examiner marking the paper mightn't either" (simple linear motion equations fully explained with copious amounts of text as I had long since learned that when it came to an exam with a teacher who knows me marking it I have to spell it out to them cause if I didn't most of them disliked me to the degree they said that as it wasn't explained it was invalid and did as this guy) . Bottom line I got 41% on the Mock (1% over a fail) thanks to his marking when it should have been 80%+. Come the final real externally marked exam I got an A1 (90%+) and never enjoyed showing a teacher a result as much in my life!
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
However, I must say I've been blessed with great teachers all my life, starting with my parents - YES, the very best teachers I ever had simply because they taught me how to THINK and to learn and gave me the thirst for knowledge.
Then there was elementary school Teacher, who managed to find some resources from her efforts to support my interest in math way beyond what the rest of the class was showing, and didn't mind it in the least when, one day in second grade, not only I have gotten a different answer to a math problem than her and other 41 kids in the class (yes, to all those Americans whining about large classes, we had 42 kids in elementary school class I attended), but after i've proven my answer right, she was GLAD, not angry.
The next two, who are sadly no longer among the living, were teaching me when i became older... rest in peace, Yevgeniya Nikolayevna Anisimova and Alexandr Borisovich Voronetskiy.
There was my first serious Math teacher, who first spotted me at the age of 6 - she and my parents were neighbours - and gave me a book of advanced math problems for the future when she moved. Later on, in 9th grade, when I tranferred to the Math/Science school, imagine her surprize at me showing up in her class - one of the best in Russia if you judge by various math contests on national level - and quickly getting my place on the city Math team.
Then I must say a kind word about the man who wasn't my official school teacher, but a Teacher - he was training the city's math team and was responsble for my real interest in math by challenging us and refining whatever talents we had (read: Galois theory and Commutative Algebra by the last year of High School). Out of his group, 2 of us wound up in the top 3 spots in Russian National Math contests - and achievement any Master would have been proud of.
The best professor in my NYU grad school years is, without a doubt, our Data Communications and Networks lecturer, who seems to have an energy of a supernova, comic abilities of Letterman and understanding of the subject that only someone who's been on IEEE commeetees and started dealing with TCP/IP in Bell Labs back when they just started working on it. Here's to you, Mr. Padovano!
"The right to figure things out for yourself is the only true freedom everyone shares. Go use it"-R.A.Heinlein
The best teachers we have are the ones that teach us about life. I see alot of posts here about X teacher that made so and so work a little harder for their grade, or X teacher that helped a student learn this or that about physics.
the teachers that usually have the most effect on our pre-adult minds are the liberal arts teachers. Philosophy, English, Art, - they make us more well rounded people. And i'm not talking about the parental clause (the adult tells the student "one day you'll see that this is true." and, 10 years later you realize they were right.) I'm talking about the teachers that made you change your mind. The teachers that didn't tell you they were right....they showed you they were right. The best teachers are the ones where everyday you walk out of that class and have an epiphany, not about an assignment, but about life.
Mr. Moe was one of those teachers. He taught 11th grade English and 12th grade Humanities seminar. We studied books like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Damian. Although my chosen field is one of computers. I think that Moe's advice and teachings have been more helpful than any of my comp-sci teachers or math or science teachers' advice could ever be (and ever was).
I'm talking about one of those teachers that sharpens your critical thinking skills. Sure, i learned all the things that any 11th grade student was supposed to learn about literature, grammar, and whatever the hell else we were supposed to know. But the times he just talked with the class were some of the most enlightening experiences i've ever had. I suppose it's the same as college. They say the real knowledge gained at a university is outside the classroom. For me, the real knowledge i gained in highschool was not from reading Brave New World but from simply talking with Mr. Moe on a peer to peer level. And that, no book can ever replace.
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
I actually didn't enjoy my assembly class that much. My professor's grading style was similar to yours, i.e. size matters, thus everybody, including myself, spent way too much time on their programs. Twenty hours of outside class time for a three hour class isn't acceptable. Yes, I got that A, but was it worth it??? I'll never go back to assembly again. People who enjoy trying to tweak their program for 2 less instructions are insane.
I tought myself most stuff. The teachers I had on my previous school didn't really teach me all that much interesting, really (gym -- yuck). The teachers I have now are supposed to teach me informatica, but well...
;-)
So I learnt most stuff myself. That doesn't mean I didn't have teachers, because I read an awful lot of documentation and stuff to get there. So more or less, I am the one to decide what I want to know and to keep myself involved, and, well, just anybody out there is my teacher. From that perspective, viva open source!
It's... It's...
"We can confirm that Debian does *not* ship the version with the trojan horse. Our version predates it." [CA-2002-28]
Actually, I think that my best teacher was my High School swimming coach. Unlike a lot of coaches, he understood that the value of competitive sports was in the discipline and fitness that you picked up trying to win, rather than winning itself. He was willing to sit anyone who broke training rules, even the best athletes on the team for the most important meet of the year. I learned more about the value of setting goals and hard work from him than from all of my other teachers combined.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
He had an interesting way of running the class known as the "weedout" class for comp sci at Tufts, as well as some of the other less theoretical higher level classes. There were 4 or 5 big programming per semester. He'd pass out the assignment. 9/10 of the class would blow it off because it wasn't due for another few weeks but 2 or 3 of the hardcore students would tear right into it. Those students got personal attention, and really ended up collaborating with him to find good solutions... the problems were setup so usually he didn't have preconceived notions of what the best solution was going to look like. He would then disseminate the techniques discovered with those students to the rest of the class... nothing was more irritating than some punk getting equal results to you starting two days before the assignment was due, just by implementing the technique you invented, so the elites had to press on to even better independent tweaks and methods.
You can see his old-school homepage here
--
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
When our professor arrived, Prof. Teleki, he immediately launched into questions about why we were here, what we wanted to learn, and our thoughts on the current state of the environment. His intention was to find out what we thought in order to model a course around us, something I'd never had done before. He immediately dismissed the course title as an attempt to put two words together that should never ever go together, just to see if the university would accept it.
In the coming weeks we learned of his working with Jane Goodall, his attempts to establish a national park in Sierra Leone, and his work with (and against) the US government to prohibit illegal animals coming into our country that drug companies pay top dollar for. He forced me to refocus my common beliefs about how land should be handled with his opinion that national parks aren't places to be visited by tourists but places that should be entirely shut off from human intervention with no one allowed to enter them at any time. His interactions with the World Bank in the 1980's led him to believe that they are responsible for a large amount of the environmental destruction happening around the world. When I did my final project with him, I ended up meeting a World Bank employee in charge of a particular country who fully admitted that this was true, and that little was being done (or would be done in the future) to prevent the exploitation of people and resources.
We would leave class either incredibly inspired, or downtrodden, depending on that day's discussion. He made me think of my future not as a time to find a job and settle down, but as an opportunity to do something truly different with my life, to use my gained knowledge in computers to affect people positively, rather than just settle down in some button-pushing tech job.
The class ended almost a year ago, and I continue to keep in touch with him, going over his house for dinner, playing with his kid, and leading him through buying his first computer (he doesn't even have an answering machine). When my college education is finally over (this june), I will leave with my BA in Computer Science from the engineering school, and a firm desire to change the world from Professor Teleki.
I had a physics teacher in high school who could explain any and all facets of physics to anyone who was moderately interested, and who would explain whatever part of physics you ever inquired about, in or out of class. He was the kind of guy who could make physics seem like the most exciting thing on Earth, and his classes (including mine :-) were always in top 10 gradewise in my country.
In computer school I had a teacher who taught us the fundamentals of algorithm design, algorithm analysis and optimization, data structure design principles and stuff like that - basic computer science. He could to it in a way that made it perfectly obvious to almost everybody how things worked. He just knew how to explain things, I guess. You could ask him anything about computer science you liked, and he'd find you an answer. Great guy.
For a couple of months, our regular professor in mathematical analysis (a regular Mr. Boring) was hospitalized. During that period, some other guy from the math department took over, and we were swept away by his passion for math, and his ability to explain even the trickier parts of proofs with simple drawings, analogies and just plain good explanations. For two short months, math was very exciting, fun and downright entertaining.
The latter guy is probably the most awesome of the three - I mean, I liked *math*. I've always liked physics and computer science, and math was just a necessary evil to support the two. But for two months, I really enjoyed learning math...
Black holes are where God divided by zero
For some reason, and this may just be me, when I think of a great teacher and what they teach, technology is not high on the list. Like many /. readers, my education in technology didn't come at school...it came at work (Stream :::shudders:::). But that is probably not the reason I don't equate a great teacher with teaching about technology.
I think this is because I equate technology more with experiencing things and practicing on my own, as well as discusions with people of my own age. And part of the process of learning about technology is creating your own. On the other hand, when I think about a great teacher, I think about someone who is teaching me "timeless wisdom" and things that are etched in stone. I would definitly think the best teacher is one that is in a hierarchal relationship with me, while I have always thought that learning about technology is more of a matter of equality.
Does any of this make sense? Am I totally off-topic and off-base?
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
A middle school instructor, Mrs. Groos, taught my class to think creatively and apply the results. Sure, she let us play Civ on the 286's (which taught me more geography, politics, and history than any schooling I'd ever had), but the class had little to do with technology. She preached the principles of logic and encouraged us to use all of our available facilities to solve problems. No solution was rejected before being reviewed. Nothing was too obscure as long as it was effective and efficient. Often we were placed into groups for completing tasks. We had to use social skills to get anything accomplished. Looking back, Mrs. Groos was preparing us for both higher education and the working world. Solutions to real problems don't come in multiple choice format. Most projects are handled in teams, and often there are competing ideas to contend with. I gained valuable experience at an early age on dealing with co-workers. Problem solving skills, creativity, and team collaboration are the some of the most important things in programming. Or tech support. Or design. Or management. Mrs. Groos sharpened the tools needed in the real world - and did so with encouragement and direction that deserves the utmost praise.
Some teachers model our lives. Others shape our minds. Then there is the rare individual that doesn't do either. They just show that beyond what you know, beyond what you think everyone else knows---there is free thinking to be done. He was my high school Physics teacher. Not only did he realize that physics was about the physical universe, he instilled that all life is a search for knowledge. He wasn't the normal teacher. He didn't just grade tests and homework. He wanted you to see that beyond you home, your city, your MIND, there were things that needed research. Deep Thought. Not all questions were answered where they? Is it a computer program that draws your attention, or astronomy? He cared less about what you wanted to learn, as long as the desire to seek what was unknown was instilled. For me he was the origanal guy to say "think outside the box." This is something that I will forever cherish and hope that all young people shall grow up cherishing. If only there was a way to box and share what a teacher like this can do. All the world would be better. "Wow thats how they figure acceleration?"--Me 1996
"No son it doesn't matter whether you win or lose just how drunk you get" ---Homer
Teacher's in India are mostly those people who can't find other work and resort to teaching as a last alternative. Considering that teacher's here are paid less than 150$ (5000 Rupees) in most places a month there's no doubt why. I was lucky enough to go to a private school and even there there were some teacher's who were lousy. But there were a lot of good ones. If I had to pick one it would be my 10th grade Mathematics Teacher (and also the school Vice Principal) Mr. Kapadia who left school 2 years back. I really can't pick out why everyone liked him so much ... he was impartial, funny, handsome, intelligent, dedicated.
The biggest thing that stood out from him was that he was highly qualified himself. He chose this profession because he wanted to and not because he was forced to. I remember that in the 5 years he was in school ... he missed only one day. He'd be willing to teach after the school hours as well.
Now he's in Pittsburgh doing a PhD on something related to black holes.
I was fortunate enough to go to a school with many great teachers, but one of my favorites was Dr. Holmes, who taught English. He was one of the few teachers at my school who actually had a Ph.D. To look at him, you would not think he was very likeable. He always wore a suit and a vest, and occasionally a stern expression as well. But in fact he was not stuffy at all, but quite congenial, and I think he was one of the best-loved teachers at the school.
I think English is one of those topics which many students feel is extremely wishy-washy, that for example you can make an argument for whatever thesis you feel like supporting that day. Dr. Holmes showed me, at least, that that was false. Whenever he asked the class to interpret a passage in a book or a verse of poetry, and somebody came out with some outlandish and abstract perspective, Holmes would ask him to support that with specific evidence from the text. When that student tried to answer again, sure enough, his interpretation would usually end up unconvincing, and Dr. Holmes could always point out specific and convincing evidence for his own conclusions.
I was always good in English, but I also had this wishy-washy perspective on the subject before I took Holmes' class. But not afterwards. I think this was the first time I really learned that critical thinking and reasoning is something that transcends formal systems like mathematics and programming.
One thing I remember specifically which he said, and which surprised me at the time, was that students should major either in physics or philosophy, because these are the only two curricula at the undergraduate level which build critical reasoning skills. His perspective was that the undergraduate education is too short to study anything in depth, and so it should be considered as only a primer for graduate-level studies, which is when you should start specializing.
His advice had a great effect on me. I had planned to major in computer science, but when I got to college I couldn't bring myself to do it, and chose physics instead. Unfortunately, I only pursued it for two years, and then switched to CS in the end anyway, but I did benefit from it, because I caught a glimpse of how theory and practice can be made to work together harmoniously, and how they inform each other.
Now I am back in school, getting a Ph.D. in CS, and I can really appreciate what Dr. Holmes said. I think he was right about undergraduate education: it is too short to waste on studying specifics. The best way to spend your undergraduate years is to study a field which gives you a broad and solid grounding in fundamental reasoning skills. Physics and philosophy satisfy that condition, and I would also add mathematics. But CS is too specific and biased.
Anyway, I am grateful for the opportunity to share this story with ./ readers. Maybe someone else reading this will know the Dr. Holmes I am talking about? :)
Thanks, Dr. Holmes!
BH
Fools! They laughed at me at the Sorbonne...!
Bob Ross, teacher of American Studies at Davis Senior High School, was able to give us a clear view into the past not by lecturing endlessly, but instead by forcing us to discuss the past through the lens of the present. His tests would leave students shuddering, but his grading was fair. You knew he read all your papers all the way through, mostly because he wrote a response to every one. Thank you for inspiring an interest in local politics.
Dr Andy Katz and Dr. Jules Steinberg served as my mentors and teachers in the Political Science Department at Denison University. They are two of the wisest, most fascinating men I've ever met. Their styles, different and unique, they often taught in classrooms where the apathetic and the bored stayed away, for fear they might be called upon and have to defer. Each made relationships with all their students, knowing them all by name, knowing where they were from and what they did in their spare time, they could make even the most abstract concept (postmodern deconstructionism) seem straightforward and clear. Thank you gentlemen for giving me the ability to read cogently, to form thoughts intelligently, and be responsible for my own opinions and thoughts.
So there I was. Naked. In a refrigerator. With a potroast on my knees. Smokin a cigar. That's when it got REALLY weird.
Michael spoke on my behalf, continued to teach my 5 credit computer workload, and generally stuck up for me, both personally and professionally.
I don't know if "teaching Open Source" would be a consideration of what a "good teacher" is, but I know, as a friend, Mike was invaluable. Thanks, Mike.
-
-Be a man. Insult me without using an AC.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
It wasn't until a 3rd year French course that a Assistant Prof. (new Ph.D from Yale name Darryl Lee) showed me that learning is the destination. My entire life shifted around this new idea. The funny thing is that there was no way before that I would graduate in four years. Using this mentality has allowed me now to be out in four.
Of course, now I'm applying for grad school...
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
I'm sorry you had such a bad experience. I am a teacher and I know that some of my students feel that I am an incompetent loser. I can tell; I see it in their closed expressions, their absolute refusal to commit even the smallest amount of intellectual effort or curiosity to the course.
Most of them come into the class with that mindset. They have been turned off somewhere before they get to me, and I haven't been able to turn them back on. A few, I regret to say, I seem to have turned off myself; apparently, my enthusiasm for literature did not communicate itself to them. I always regret that.
A few, a very few, I have been able to reach. They start the year closed and leave it open. Somehow, I managed to reach them. Or perhaps it was another teacher, and it spread to my class.
But you will pardon me if, despite my regrets, I do not wallow in grief about those students who are turned off. I firmly believe that most people are as happy as they want to be in school, always excepting those whose life experiences outside of my class preclude happiness anywhere. My class is not "boring," too many students tell me they enjoy it. The student is "bored," a choice he/she has made.
Fine. Be bored. It isn't my job to entertain you, although I try to make my presentations as interesting and stimulating as possible. Do the work, bored or not, and you'll get the grade. Don't do the work, however enthusiastic you are, and you'll flunk. That's the standard I was hired to use, and that's the standard I believe in.
But I doubt that most of your teachers were incompetent losers. I'll bet that there were many students in the same classes you attended that found those same teachers interesting, informative, caring, and effective. Perhaps they did not meet your particular needs. But perhaps you never gave them a chance to. Both situations happen. As for 6 figure salaries, I appreciate that idea. It might indeed make the quality of the teaching profession higher. Regretfully, I doubt that it will ever happen. And even with a 6 figure salary, I doubt that the most inspiring teacher in the world will be able to reach a student who is determined not to learn, not to cooperate, and not to care.
The best teacher that I had would probably be my 6th grade elementary school teacher. I was a very secluded kid. I didn't care about anything, including school. This teacher immediately noticed that and did whatever she could to help me out. She actually cared about her students and what they learned. She would also make subjects like history come alive in the way she would tell stories of things like the same damn boring story of columbus or whatever. The majority of the students didn't realize they were being taught the same thing over and over and over each year, but I did and i hated it. I couldn't stand having to put up with that crap and this teacher noticed and would let me do other things instead of doing "practice exercises" with the rest of the class. I really enjoyed what she did for me, and her impact lasted a few years until I reached highschool, where i stopped caring again, but there were no teachers there to re-spark my interest in school so I dropped out. Now i'm working for the government making 5x than the average of what the rest of my class is making now.
My most influential teacher would completely deviate from district's standard lesson plan. He'd bombard us with stories from his travels and cool facts from literary sources we would never have been exposed to. He stressed vocabulary that still impresses to this date and taught advanced math to those students who could handle it. He engaged the students in examples and kept the class fun. And can you guess who got the axe when it was decided that one teacher had to be let go? I suppose the administration didn't like his approach, but he sure inspired me. Thanks for goin' the extra mile Mr. M!
[ This space for rent ] - Your full service media whore
In college, the teacher that has been best was my freshman english teacher. He would be frustrated by my occational sleeping in his class (long nights of work combined with 8 AM Calc made me sleepy in there), but I did the work better than anyone, and challenged people in class when they tried to make a statement, but didn't have anything to back it up. We had a journal we had to do every term that, honestly, was totally pointless. I told him this, he understood how for some people, it was a total waste of time. He let me out of doing it for the year as long as I just went to talk to him about how they could improve the class (it was the first year of it, same students and teacher for a whole year) when I felt I needed to talk. That was what college teachers were supposed to be like, understanding to the fact that not every student is the same and ideas need to be challenged.
There are other teachers I'm missing, like my math teacher in 7th and 8th grade, and my CS professor who would invite me over to drink beer and smoke pot (ah, good old college stories), and many others, but those two were the best since they cared about you as long as you cared about what they thought and you would adjust to fit each other. If more teachers would realize that every student isn't the same, it would be a better educational system in this country.
My best teachers have always been books. They are there when you need them, usually you have several to chose from and when you dont like a book you can easily take another one. Unlike school/university, you can decide what you want to learn. Two hours reading Richard Stevens books can teach you more than any teacher could, especially if you are in a crowded class.
One teacher (whose name, sadly, I don't even remember now) I think had a major impact on my life, early on.
This was in kindergarden (aka pre-school), so I was 5 or 6. For some reason, I was curious about the temperature of fire. So, I asked one of the teachers (or, more likely, she was a teacher's aide. She was really young, early 20's I guess).
Now, I would expect that most teachers, these days, would say something like "really hot" and send me on my way. Who knows, they might have noted down my interest in fire someplace, lest I turn out to be a pyromaniac. This also wasn't part of some lesson plan. This was just a play period, where presumably the teachers were taking a break, while watching to make sure we didn't destroy the classroom.
But this younger teacher said "I don't know." Now, that acknowledgement that she didn't know something in itself seems pretty rare. But what made this unique was what she said next: "Let's find out!" We went over to a desk, where she pulled out a small thermometer. She then fished through her purse and got some matches (this was the early 70's, remember... everyone seemed to smoke). She had me hold the thermometer while she lit the match, and held it near the thermometer's bulb.
Well, the thermometer was probably something made for measuring room temperature, so it only went up to 120F or so. The mercury shot up to the top of the thermometer pretty quickly, so she pulled the match away. "Well, it looks like the thermometer doesn;t go up that high," she said. "But, at least we know that fire is hotter than 120 degrees."
So, I didn't actually learn how hot fire is, but I did learn a more important lesson: when you have a question, you can try to find the answer yourself. This is, to me, the essence of what learning (and ultimately, science) is all about. To not show kids through actions like this that they can learn for themselves, only causes the death of curiosity, which I think is the biggest risk we face these days. In this info-rich world, are kids given a reason to experiment, and find things out for themselves?
I'd say, a *good* teacher needs to foster the curiosity and explorative nature of his or her students. Instead of handing out facts and figures to memorize, have them find things that interest and excite them.
Unfortunately, this seems rare, judging from my later experiences, especially in "science" classes.
i only ever had one teacher that truly understood that: Tony McCann, 12th grade english. yes, an english teacher, even though i'm very much a technical person. I never really liked english class that much until i had him, since he was the first person to treat it like more than the prescribed curriculum. he gave us assignments, but no assignment was outright required, or had rigid requirements. He graded us on what he thought of what he thought we were learning, not on some objetive-esqe evaluation of trite questions about the same "classics" that people have been reading in school for decades.
He gave us a day off on the first day after the leaves started falling so we could appreciate its beauty, and again when things bloomed in spring. that, in itself, might seem stupid, but he was also teaching us to recognize the beauty we see everyday.
he didn't just teach us a curriculum. he taught us something much more valuable than memories of having read and overanalyzed a John Steinbeck book. He taught us to think about all these things for ourselves. He worked in the fringes of the system and showed us that we don't need to stick to the prescribed curriculum of life.
I would often (more like virtually always...) stay after class just chatting with him because he was such an open, accessible person, with no pretenses. He did not look on us as students, but as people.
When i got my Eagle Scout award the following summer, i invited him to speak, since i have rarely respected anyone as much as i respected him. I will never forget him or the lessons he taught me.
#define F(x) int main(){printf(#x,10,#x);}
F(#define F(x) int main(){printf(#x,10,#x);}%cF(%s))
I don't know where you go/went to high school but I thought most of my high school teachers (I'm a college grad now) were actually pretty good. Sure there were some of the burned-out ones who'd been there too long, but for the most part they were all very knowledgable and personalable individuals.
My father is a primary school teacher and thus I've known an entire school of teachers from the time I was small and again, none of them are losers or morons.
As for the lack of competition, you obviously know nothing about that which you speak of. Getting a job in a school district is incredibly difficult because of such a low turn-over rate. Many new grads spend YEARS as per diem substitutes before they can move into the "year-long substitute" position for a teacher who's ill or on sabatical. Sure teachers don't make as much money as a tech worker or business executive, but they chose what to go into and knew the salary and job market when then entered it. They also have a three month vacation in which to do other things to make money. My parents raised three children on one teacher's salary. My father did different things in the summer to make additional money from computer lessons (back in the TI-99 and Atari days) to landscaping work.
Most teachers really love their job and it's the few students nowadays that really want to learn and recognize the value of their teachers that really make the teacher's jobs worthwhile.
My favorite high school teacher, among many that I liked, was Mr. Altmire. He was one of the english, rhetoric and writing teachers. He was also the debate team coach. He made class a lot of fun, but at the end after all the fun you really thought "wow, did I really get a lot out of that class."
It's not just the teachers that make your high school experience, it's also what you make out of it. It's up to YOU to decide to give it your all and to participate, etc.. and then you'll succeed. If you don't learn that in high school when the goings easier, you're in for a rude shock in college or the work force.
Some people take their .sig way too seriously
The subject's name: Information Processing and Management (IM&M)
A week before the exam, and we are being taught for the 1st time the stuff that will be on the exam (we wasted the year playing with Excel and Access)
Sitting in a group, giving us a quick rundown on things.
We reach the mouse.
My teacher pipes up:
A mouse... Well, a mouse is a GUI.
I, and a few others, were dumbfounded. We didn't even TRY to fix that. No, she didn't confuse it for being a way to interface with a GUI, the mouse IS the GUI.
Thank god I got out of that class alive...
(The other 'bad thing' that springs to mind was using NT's command prompt to ping to see if the network was up and copping it for 'accessing DOS'...)
Anyway, time to supress these memories again...
I've never seen students work so hard in my life. By the end of the year we'd designed built robots, a sound card, a TV capture card, a digital flute, at least one operating system, and more software than I can count.
Never underestimate the power of letting a knowledgable class forge for themselves. The results can be spectacular.
Slashdot monitor for your Mozilla sidebar or Active Desktop.
The best teacher I ever had was Mr. Arsenault. It would be hard to tell you everything about him, so I'll just say that his sense of humor (including quite a dry wit) and acceptance of students was phenomenal. One example for you:
:)
He would never get mad, and he played the quintessential straight man (the Abbot of Abbot and Costello, but with a much more intelligent air). One day, one of his senior classes locked him out of his classroom. While most other teachers I've had would have marched straight to the office, he marched straight to the edge of campus to the maintenance sheds and got an extension ladder (his room was on the second floor). He then proceeded to climb up the ladder and through his classroom window; then he walked up to the chalkboard and without even cracking a smile (a major feat while pulling off an act like this), he picked up the chalk and began teaching as if nothng at all was out of the ordinary.
People told that story for years, and it was only one of a bunch. He understood what you had to do if you wanted to get people to learn, and he'd do it. He'd help anybody that needed it. He taught me geometry in 9th grade while I was also taking algebra, and in the same class (of two), he taught a senior (I hope she's done well in life; she was quite slow).
Oh, and since it doesn't take the whole hour to teach geometry if you only have two students, he'd let her work on her homework so he could help her with any problems, and we'd play chess the rest of the hour... he won the year, but I actually won one more game than he did. (That's the problem with playing matches and sets.)
Anyway, there you go. (My second best teacher has much less a sense of humor, but he used to take classes on camping trips... you haven't lived until you've played our variant of capture-the-flag/chase on a raining, moonless night in Louisiana backwoods.)
My best teacher? That one's easy. Name's Mark Schroll. He was my instructor for Electronics and, later, R&D in high school. This guy had to be the coolest teacher in the world. When a friend of mine mentioned to him that stawberry poptarts would shoot big, scary flames when toasted for too long, he brought in an old toaster the next day. For the last 6weeks of electronics, he taught us how to create holograms, using the laser equipment the school had purchased at his recommendation. Every one of us took one of our own design home. He actually knew his subject, in and out, and he never forgot a single one of his students. (I went back 3 years later, he greeted me by name. He was the only teacher that did.)
It was in his class that I first saw the ENTIRE "Connections" series, and also the movie "Sneakers". He was friendly, outgoing, funny as hell, and very, very good at passing on his knowledge. He was the only teacher I had that made sure that we didn't just repeat back what he said, but that we actually UNDERSTOOD it. I hope everyone has a teacher like this guy; if I had had more teachers like him, I would have enjoyed school a lot more.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
Can you honestly say that you are solely the sum of your biology? If so, you are going against all known science. I thought that we were past the "nature vs. nurture" argument...it's been agreed that it is a combination of both that makes us the people we are...but since you are apparently a student of the sciences, I assume you knew this.
I have taught both 8th and 9th graders for some time now, and would like to inquire who gave that young, gangbanging girl her confidence? I would hope her parents (it looks like it was not, from what I know), but it was most likely from the success and care she experienced in her prior year of school. Many children do not "blossom" in 9th grade...in fact, I've found the opposite to be true. Ninth graders are actually less outgoing in general than eighth graders. They are scared to death of many aspects of high school; for most, it's new and in a different building, with much older, more mature kids. Don't you all remember how you viewed seniors when you were freshmen?! They were gods! But that's all just anecdotal...here's some more substantial proof.
Under law, teachers act "in loco parentis," or "in lieu of parents" while they are at school. Think about it...by law, teachers are the "parents" of every one of their students while those students are at school. Most teachers view this in a legal sense only...that they are responsible if a child gets hurt while at school. But are parents only responsible for making sure their children are not "hurt?" NO! They are responsible for their student's overall well being, and many teachers do not view teaching in this way. Thus, just as there are negligent, uncaring parents, there are many teachers who are negligent in their duties as well.
So yes, you are correct, many teachers could be replaced with a beach ball, and little more would be accomplished in their classrooms. A heated blanket has more electricity running through it than some teachers do! However, please do not dismiss those teachers who truly DO care for their students, and wish to help give them the confidence they need to mature into strong, intelligent, successful people. They are usually the ones we remember as our "best."
My best teachers always challenged me, and made the challenges either fun, or interesting.
:)
I had a teacher for Assembler who, for the last project, told us that he was going to grade it only on (a) if it works correctly (80 points) and (b) our count of instructions executed relative to the rest of the class (20 points). Also, there was a 25-point bonus (or really an automatic 125) for writing a program faster than his program.
I managed to beat him by an instruction or two, but it wasn't easy! I ended up working far harder than I should have for that extra 25 points, but it was definitely worth it.
The challenge was this: given four numeric characters of input that are not all the same, (1122 is valid; 1111 isn't)
1. Sort the number from greatest to least
2. Print the result
3. Subtract from this the same number sorted from least to greatest.
4. Loop; terminate when two successive results are equal.
Example: 4377
Sort,Print:7743
Subtract:7743-3477=4266
Loop:Sort,Print:6642
...etc.
It was well worth the time spent. Hint: the final program was well under 100 x86 instructions to implement; the early implementations were well over 500, though!
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
First and formeost in my mind is Dave Cagley, my Drama teacher my senior year of high school. Dave, as we knew him, came into our lives when the previous Drama teacher contracted Lupis and had to leave. It was great because for the first time we were learning real acting and real theater and stuff that we could use in the real world. But not only that but he taught us about confidence and going into any situation in life with the outlook that you are going to win. When we were on stage he pushed us to win. To win the moment. That philosphy he urged us to carry into other parts of our lives. To win at what ever objective we were pursuing. Then there was Fred Myers, my senior English teacher. He brought the beauty of the written word to life for us. He took a bunch of apathetic and ill-educated high school seniors and brought literature to life for us. Not only that but he urged us to see the lessons that these books could teach us. He also had us take a look at popular culture and to really examine what made us like the things we liked. It was fantastic. Mike Mikulics, goverment teacher taught us that it is not only right but it is our duty to question our leadership. Good teachers are hard to find but those that we do find need to be treasured and allowed the room to educate children as they see fit. The common thread amongst all of my most influential teachers is that they thought outside the box and weren't afraid to step outside the cirriculum if that meant educating us better.
What Fools These Mortals Be!
I had 3 teachers who really made a difference...
In the 2nd grade, I was in a classroom where both the 2nd and 3rd grades were taught. Generally, one grade level was brought to a small area for lessons while the other worked on assignments. I asked if I could take both grades at once if I kept up with the work. The teacher simply agreed, telling me I could proceed so long as my work was good. She didn't lean on me or breathe down my neck, simply let me do my thing. I got all As in all courses for both grade levels.
In high school, I had an English teacher who taught English almost as a secondary thing. Her class was all about life lessons; what it feels like to be an adult, to get older, to enter real relationships, to age - on and on. She tried to give us a picture of the real world, something which was lacking in every other classroom I've been in. Almost every time she'd start talking, I'd listen and drink it all in - no other teacher had me doing that.
Lastly, in my senior year of high school, I had a computer teacher who just got excited about what I was doing. That was it. He'd get excited, tell me it was cool, and stay out of my way. He let me work on pretty much whatever I wanted, so long as I was actively doing something. I ended up publishing a game I'd written in class, and that was the start of my career.
My vote for best teacher has to go to Ken McVay, (now well known for the Nizkor Archives, which became his passion after I was his student.
When I first ran into him he was running the local FidoNet BBS system. I was about 12 at the time. Ken was locally famous for his lack of patience with anyone under 30. I was the sole exception to this rule in the time I knew him. I was running a local Commadore 64 standalone BBS system, and Ken felt that I should move up and become part of FidoNet, and helped, through his part pile and the part piles of people he knew, me put together a pile of parts that it was possible to assemble into a 4.77MHz IBM compat. I was in 7th heaven. Over the years, Ken was responsible for my first exposure to multiuser systems (QNX), unix (Xenix), and became my first employer at his local computer store.
So here's a toast to the Crumudgeon, the most influencial teacher in my life!
--
Remove the rocks to send email
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
Well i used to have this teacher named Mrs. Robinson, and we used to do all kinds of great things together... Walks in the park, romantic dinners, days on the beach.... Oh wait... damn, I'm getting reality and imagination mixed up again! Damn you Paul Simon!
One of my college profs, Leon , is the person who probably taught me the most about CS of anyone.
... confused.
When I was a freshman I had a major leap on everybody else because I already knew Pascal. (Yes, folks, back in those dark days, that was the language of academic computer science.) I had all the programming coursework done in the first week of class, and all the homework done shortly thereafter.
My first exam, then, I was deeply surprised to see that he docked me three times as many points as the next fellow for a specific programming question, even though our answers were absolutely identical. I was angry and asked him why I was docked more severely--and, for that matter, why I was docked at all.
"Well," Leon said, "you declared this as a global variable, not a local--" I interrupted him at that point and made some rash statement about how Joe over there did the exact same thing and Leon docked him hardly anything at all.
Leon's answer? "I judged you more harshly because you know better than he does."
I walked away from that exam with just a burning rage at how my A was getting eviscerated down to a B+ unfairly. I couldn't drop the course without screwing up my entire degree plan, though, and I couldn't get into a different section, so I was stuck with that petty tyrant, Leon.
Once I realized I was stuck, I went back to all the code I'd hammered out in the first week and removed every single global variable from it. It was bad enough that I got nailed once, but I'd be damned before I'd be nailed twice.
Every time homework came back to us I'd find myself judged more harshly than other students; I'd have points docked off for things other students were able to get away with altogether, or I'd get docked for using the algorithm he supplied instead of researching a better, more oprimal algo, or what-have-you. My ire kept on going up with every returned homework assignment, every exam, every pop quiz.
And after each and every one of these deaths-by-a-thousand-cuts, I went back to my code and fixed it. I went back to my homework file (remember how I did all the homework the first two weeks?) and amended my answers.
By the end of CS 101, my grade had fallen from the A I was Anticipating to a C I was Chagrined at. It especially boiled my noodles that I was head and shoulders the best programmer in that class, and I was getting one of the lowest grades in the class.
When the course was over and I was waiting for final grades, I was dead certain I was going to be filing a complaint with the Administration. I finally got my grade, tore it open, and lo and behold... 100, A. The registrar sent me a note in campus mail congratulating me on the "rare feat" of passing a course without missing a single point. Parents were happy, friends were happy, I was
I stopped by Leon's office and asked him what was up with the schizophrenic grading. He explained there was nothing schizophrenic about it. "But I had a C," I said. "How did I get an A?"
Leon patiently explained to me a grade is meant to show how well a student has learned the subject he's been taught. "Right," I said, "and my grades were lousy. You kept on nickel-and-diming me everywhere, on stuff that wasn't even important."
No, Leon told me. He was teaching everyone else in the class how to program, and that's what the tests measured. Sure, I was flubbing those tests, but those tests were irrelevant because he wasn't teaching me how to program. Instead, he was teaching me was how to program well, and he measured that on an entirely different scale.
My senior year I had to write a thesis. I chose cryptography as my topic and requested Leon for my advisor. The day before graduation, Leon and I sat down in his office and discussed what the last grade of my last year was going to be. He was complimentary about my work and said that, between the thesis and the research I'd been doing connected with it, I undoubtedly deserved an A, if not an A+, for my efforts. "But I'm only going to give you an A-," he said with a grin. "As a reminder to you that there's always more."
That's the most important CompSci lesson I've ever learned.
Thanks, Leon. I owe you.
I spent countless hours with that system. most of my ability to approach problems and solve them (technically, at least) came from the time I spent hacking code (and hardware) for 'my personal computer'.
back in '78 or so, when it first came out, personal computers were a novelty and fascination. and you felt special if you posessed one of these in your home. you wanted to spend all your available time with it, and with so many hours comes a level of 'grok' that can only be attained by hardcore overtime.
I found that since I was in my early teens when I got my first computer, learning to relate to the box at its level became second-nature to me. by the time I was college age, the computer science classes were almost trivially easy and the lab assignments were unchallenging as well.
I fully believe that getting exposed to computers very early gives people such a huge advantage later on - especially if they go into that very field. the radio shack trs-80 was the first system to be so widely available to anyone who wanted it, and it had a 'cool factor' that, at the time, was undenyable. give a kid one of those and if he really gets into it, he's just found himself a high paying and secure career for life.
--
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
I'm not convinced. They deserve higher salaries, but not for the competition it would bring to the field. Most teachers in public education are in the job because they love the payment that comes in forms other than money. Sure, there are exceptions, but for the most part these teachers put up with the really poor salary to truly make a difference in the public education system.
A particular example comes to mind. After getting out of high school, I TA'd there a couple years later for a "new generation" teacher got hired the year after I graduated. This instructor taught introductory computer courses to mostly lower-income 7th- and 8th-graders, something given to every new teacher their first couple of years to "stress test" them and see if they survive. If they make it past those years, then the school "allowed" them to teach high school (grades 9 through 12).
Anyways, the classes I TA'd for this teacher were pretty uneventful through most of the year. We handed out coursework in PASCAL (this was in the days before C/C++ and Java were the norm), graded tests, answered programming questions, and generally tried to offer these kids the chance to break free of their "gangbanger" mindset, and grow both mentally as well as spiritually.
The gem of this class came one day when, while the other kids were at their stations working on the latest programming project, one young black girl just refused to move from her desk, saying she just "couldn't do it any more," all the while sobbing, tears streaming down her cheeks. At the time she was dressed in a thin pair of sweatpants and a Raiders jacket, attire not uncommon among the streets of Southeast San Diego (Golden Hills). While I took care of the more mundane tasks of the classroom, our instructor sat down next to her, took her hand, and slowly built up her confidence in herself and her own abilities. By the time the bell rang, the girl was still a bit shaky, but had stopped sobbing, and even smiled at a joke or two the teacher sent her way.
Fast forward one year.
I revisited my old high school stomping grounds to say hello to some old friends in the faculty and staff, when I saw the same girl, now in the 9th grade, walking down a hallway talking with two friends. Her appearance had totally changed. Now, instead of wearing ratty clothing, she wore tasteful, brightly-colored clothes. Instead of holding a thin, nearly-empty paper folder in one hand, she gripped at least two textbooks and a Trapper Keeper stuffed with notes and assignments. Instead of walking the hallways with her head down, avoiding contact with everyone, she held her head high, her eyes bright with intelligence as she talked cheerfully with her friends.
The change was absolutely stunning to me. She stopped when she saw me, and we talked for a little bit. She mentioned plans to go to college after graduation, something that would have been totally unthinkable to her a few short months ago. I could hardly believe the changes she made in her self-confidence, and when I asked her what made her re-think her future, she referred to the incident in the computer classroom the year before.
When people ask me if I would ever consider becoming a CompSci teacher after I finish college, I mostly just shake my head and say, "I'm just a software guy. Teachers need to have so much more ability than what I can offer." I can definitely see why people would take a 50% pay cut to get their teaching credentials and enter the System though, especially when the rewards for success are so great, no matter how sporadically they may come.
Miss Pereira, if by some twist of fate you're reading this, know that you've been the most influential teacher in my life--and you weren't even one of mine!
-Tex