Teaching
Today I’m spending half the day at KTH, after having had a group discussion session with my PBL students. Personally, I like the programming sessions much better, it’s more fun to help students solve problems themselves than to question them to see if they’ve done their homework.
I’ve been programming for ten years and I used to help teaching programming for years when I was a student, so I tend to underestimate the amount of preparation needed for me. I always do the programming assignments beforehand as they’re new to me, but reading up on what the students are actually learning is something I’ve overlooked.
I’m programming a quite advanced Python application at the moment, so it’s easy for me to believe that I know all about Python. But for that application, I focus on system architecture, performance, subprocesses, queues, error handling, using external applications and logging and that’s not really what’s taught in this course.
Python syntax and datatypes is something I google when I need to, but after the slightly embarrassing realization that I didn’t know the answer of one of the homework questions today, I’ve decided to read the course literature. It’s probably good to know the difference between a tuple and a list anyway, even if getting away with being clueless is easy being a PBL teacher.
How to question students without having a clue about the answer:
Me: “What is a tuple?” (pointing at a student)
Student: “Bla bla bla”
Me: “Mmmhmm… Is everyone satisfied with this answer or does anyone want to add something?”
Another student: “I think a tuple is more like bla bla bla.”
A third student: “Yes, that’s what I answered too, look here in the book bla bla bla.”
Me: “Those are all good points! Can we now agree on that a tuple is bla bla bla?”
Naturally I would never use this method. Never. ;-)
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Networks
