If they love to teach, they should also get good at it, because being a good researcher doesn't necessarily mean that you're a good teacher. I'm saying this because, at least from the OP, Dijkstra doesn't strike me as a terribly great teacher.
The first key is the ability to recognize that a student or class of students is not understanding an explanation, and generalize it further or change the example to make it more clear. Do that ad infinitum (a really good teacher can get it right the first time).
The second key is the ability to use examples that pupils find relevant and introduce topics that might not fit directly in the class description, but enhance overall knowledge with the intended discussion's knowledge.
The third key is intangible. And that's the ability to make learning interesting, if not downright fun.
That definition would hold for the kind of teaching where the teacher transfers knowledge and skills to the pupil.
Dijkstra was probably the type of professor that aims to inspire/provoke students into teaching themselves.
I have a degree from a universities in Europe and one from the US and the European one had a much stronger emphasis on asking students to teach themselves (it was a Dutch university, Dijkstra was Dutch so I expect that's where he got the attitude), the US one had more "hand holding" in explaining what you needed to do.
As an aside, the drop out rate at the Dutch university was over 30%, while at the American university I think maybe 2 people dropped out in my year. So while there is some consensus that teaching yourself is better than being taught it's certainly not very efficient.
> So while there is some consensus that teaching yourself is better than being taught it's certainly not very efficient.
So under which conditions is expecting your students to teach themselves better for them exactly? It seems to me that there's some sort of selection bias going on here if the best students are the ones that successfully teach themselves, and then reflect on the fact that they were able to teach themselves as the cause for why they were able to learn so well. I'm pretty sure that if you stuck a self-learning student in a hand-held environment he would learn equally well, but might risk learning less due to the natural time cost such a teaching style has. The logical conclusion for this are the whole 'advanced placement' classes and such, because like it or not, not all students are going to be equally well-suited to teach themselves, and thus endure poor teaching. A self-learner meanwhile, will
be able to endure such poor teaching, regardless of whether they're even aware of how bad the teaching is.
Teaching is not a fixed methodology, it's really an art that's quite broad in scope and requires honing in on each specific batch of students' needs. If you're going for 'mentor' style inspiration teaching, great -- but make sure you're applying it to a student that'll be receptive to it. If they're not, then maybe try to figure out how you can make them be receptive to it, but I guarantee you that it's going to require some level of hand-holding at the onset; and if you're a good teacher, you should be able to pick up on that.
Self learning allegedly yields better understanding and retention then other types of learning, so in that regard students who do not drop out would be better off.
I agree that not every student may be able to get into the self-learning mode, although the success of Montesorri schools show that most kids can at least be able to at some level. If you are smart enough to make it into one of Dijkstra's classes, and aspire to comprehend the subject matter he teaches, then you should not need to much hand holding.
>The first key is the ability to recognize that a student or class of students is not understanding an explanation, and generalize it further or change the example to make it more clear. Do that ad infinitum
Em, that's spoon feeding knowledge to a group of random people, with no expectations from them or their previous qualifications.
Might be OK for elementary school, but it's not a good definition for a university professor.
Effective communication is not dumbing down "ad finitum" as the parent comment suggests.
That said, the major part of a professor's job description is knowing his shit, and being able to convey it clearly.
This has nothing to do with whether the students can understand it easily or not. He could be communicating effectively (e.g as Knuth does in his Art of Computer Programming books) with the students still not getting it.
Science is hard -- you have to work up to it. Merely getting some high level view spoon fed to you because you cannot/don't want to study and understand the actual science is not "effective communication".
I didn't say nor suggest the "dumbing down." An effective communicator gets his/her point across - that's the definition. Trust me, if you can't create another example or analogy off of the material you are supposed to be teaching, then you actually don't know it as well as you think. Simple as that.
> if you can't create another example or analogy off of the material you are supposed to be teaching, then you actually don't know it as well as you think
This is actually a fairly good metric for telling a good teacher from a bad one. Constant use of analogies without making things too convoluted is a pretty good strategy to become an effective communicator.
People love seeing/matching patterns, so if you give them patterns that they can associate with, that'll do like 90% of the communicating for you, then all you have to do is just fill in the blanks.
"""the ability to recognize that a student or class of students is not understanding an explanation, and generalize it further or change the example to make it more clear. Do that ad infinitum"""
You never examine the cases of students owning up to the work they have to do to understand in the first place.
It's like as you describe a world in which they do everything perfectly, and the only factor in getting that knowledge into their heads is the professor and his "further generalizing".
You're describing the complete other end of the pendulum swing from me. You're placing the burden on the student - and when it comes to new material, that is the absolute last place you want to place the burden of learning on. Look at oblique's last post under your response to him/her and you'll see what I mean.
> This has nothing to do with whether the students can understand it easily or not. He could be communicating effectively (e.g as Knuth does in his Art of Computer Programming books) with the students still not getting it.
If the audience doesn't get it, then the communication is ineffective, period. You can't just send corrupt data to a server that doesn't understand it and say that the communication was successful -- same deal with humans. [1]
Maybe there are some topics that the students will need to 'sleep on' in order for it to really sink in, but that's not the same as them 'not getting it'. Being someone who's taught myself, I guarantee you that not only is there a difference between those two states, but that you can actually see them in action - as a teacher. If you get to know your students, you can tell when they successfully process enough of the information to be able to figure it out themselves later, from when they just don't get anything you're saying. If you leave things off thinking they could figure it out themselves when they actually got no meaningful data to work with off you, then it doesn't matter how long you give them, they still aren't gonna get it. That is faulty communication. Good teachers can sense this happening and correct for it. Unfortunately, a lot of teachers seem to rely on this idea as a crutch to prevent them from the work of trying to dig into their students' psyche, when the reality is that you really need to be able to do that to become a good effective communicator/teacher.
[1] There is also the fact that the audience may not be fully prepared to understand what you're telling them, but hey, prerequisite knowledge is part of communication too (like a server protocol would be). Fact is, if you're failing to communicate effectively as a result of some unmet prerequisite knowledge, that means some other teacher down the line in the student's life must've dropped the ball on communication too. As you might expect, this can easily snowball quite quickly and lead to a total communication breakdown by the time a student enters the higher levels of education. Thus, effective communication should be a hugely important part of a teacher's skill set, cause even the slightest communication screw-up can trigger a whole chain of breakdown events for a large number of students in the future, which only serves to bite all of society in the ass.
>If the audience doesn't get it, then the communication is ineffective, period.
The communication in the sense of the end-to-end transfer of information might be ineffective, but that does not mean the professor's contribution to it was inffective, period.
You seem to only check the professor for failure. How about failure of the receiving end to parse the information. Because of lazyness, entitlement, easy grades acquired in other classes, and sometimes even pure stupidity.
>You can't just send corrupt data to a server that doesn't understand it and say that the communication was successful -- same deal with humans.
Only you had to use the "corrupt" qualifier for the data. Who said they are corrupt in the first place.
I can very well send perfect data according to some protocol to a client that is incompetent to parse them (e.g because he only implements a simplified and ad-hoc subset of the protocol).
> that does not mean the professor's contribution to it was inffective
To the particular student that doesn't get it, yes it was ineffective. In any given group of students, that'll yield different percentages of effective communication, but it should be the teacher's duty to maximize his communication ratio. As such, the teacher as an 'effective' communicator is purely a function of how many effective communications he actually establishes.
Like I said in my first post, it could be that the student isn't up on the prerequisite knowledge and communication could suffer because of that. The important thing to note here is that:
1) Teachers are usually the ones that trigger this chain of communication breakdown somewhere down the line in the student's career.
2) That effective communication is a verb, and stands on it's own outside of both the teacher and the student, but it should be the teacher's duty to maximize it as much as he can, because that's effectively what he was hired for, and if he doesn't, then other teachers that have his students later on will suffer because of it.
> You seem to only check the professor for failure. How about failure of the receiving end to parse the information. Because of lazyness, entitlement, easy grades acquired in other classes, and sometimes even pure stupidity.
There are plenty of things that could go wrong in the pipeline, and that's why it's impossible for a teacher to ever have a 100% communication success ratio. But let me say that 'laziness' and 'stupidity' are almost never gonna be the reasons a student fails.
First of all, there is such a thing as 'general intelligence' [0], and it should be the teacher's (or management's) duty to account for it, because by definition, the student may not always be able to.
Secondly, 'laziness' is actually the lack of motivation, and the lack of motivation as seen in students is usually a product of poor teaching. Not necessarily on behalf of the student's current teacher, but as an accumulation of bad qualities on all the teachers the student has had. And what could those bad qualities possibly be? You guessed it: bad communication.
If a student feels he's not getting what you're saying, and then he goes on to find the same thing from another teacher, and then another, what on earth is he supposed to conclude other than that he's just stupid? If he's allowed to come to this conclusion, guess what he's gonna do... he'll become lazy. Because why bother trying in a system that you've already been trained to understand you won't be successful in? 'Laziness' as a concept almost never appears in isolation -- nobody is ever lazy "just because", it's just not human to be so. The fact that this is ever used as a legitimate reason for anything is quite indicative of the current state of society.
Entitlement could be an issue, but at least in my experience, it's relatively rare for that to actually be a legitimate hindrance because it's usually a symptom of something else (see: 'laziness' above).
> Only you had to use the "corrupt" qualifier for the data. Who said they are corrupt in the first place.
Alright, I'll agree, but it was just an example. The flip-side of it would be that the data isn't corrupt on the sender's end, but that the server just hasn't been set up to understand the protocol yet. Same deal. Both are key components to effective communication, so if either one of them doesn't work, the action of 'communicating' isn't happening.
You can measure how much the students learned. I know that's not very easy though. You can also take feedback from students which could be useful, if you know how to collect the feedback.
