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Ask HN: "The audience is never wrong" and university teaching

3 points by impendia ↗ HN
I saw the quote "The audience is never wrong. Never." on PG's website, and I thought I might ask the HN community for advice.

I am a first-year assistant professor of mathematics in a second-tier state university. I have been a very effective teacher in the past, even in lower level classes, and I eagerly volunteered to teach freshman calculus my first semester here.

It is common for more than half of students to get C's and below here, so I decided to be fairly strict about homework, and to assign a lot of it. This proved extremely unpopular with my students. Worse, it didn't even result in improved exam performance, my students didn't do any better than others taking the same class with other profs, despite the fact that I made them work harder.

I spent a little time muttering to myself that my students are stupid and lazy, but... "the audience is never wrong." it is my responsibility to teach the students that I have, and I want to do it as well as possible. I measure it by a combination of: student happiness with the course, amount and quality of work I get the students to do (within reason), and performance on exams.

I am seeking plenty of advice from colleagues (some of which is at least a little bit jaded and cynical). However, I feel HN may well be an interesting and very different place to ask for advice -- most HN'ers have an active interest in math and science, and if you want to make money you have to somehow figure out what customers want.

I should mention that I solicited feedback from students, but didn't get much useful other than "assign less homework" and "go slower". (With respect to the latter, I should note that I have to cover a fixed amount of material and I have already gutted my course of proofs.)

I'm rather discouraged. I consider myself a good teacher, but this seems hopelessly abstract at the moment and despite my best efforts I seem to have done a poor job in the classroom this past term.

Does anyone have any thoughts or advice to offer? Perhaps, what questions to ask of myself or of my former students or TA?

Thank you very much!

12 comments

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2arrs2ells
What is the format of your class (lecture, seminar, etc)? What do you talk about in class? How big are your classes?

Do you think your students did their homework, or did they copy/cheat? What sort of resources are available to them if they get stuck?

Have you considered trying to "flip" your classroom - have students read/watch lectures as homework, and work on problems in class? You'd need small class sizes (or lots of assistants) to try this.

impendia
It's a pretty big, more or less traditional lecture with about 45 students.

The students definitely did their homework. They might have copied from other students, I did not try to prevent this or really even forbid it. There are lots of resources -- I had a TA, we also had an undergrad assistant who held special tutoring sessions, there is drop in help at certain other times of day... if anyone wanted help, it was available to them. And many did try it out.

Flipping the classroom seems like a very interesting idea, I've thought about it in principle, but I feel like many students wouldn't watch the lectures. In any case, I probably need to gain a reputation as an outstanding teacher before I can pull off anything unusual.

Thank you!

keithflower
It's tough beginning teaching. I teach some science classes to grad students (who I've actually been incredibly impressed with, so my experience is a bit different). Here are a few of my thoughts/questions:

-First, thanks for your teaching. It's a tough job. I suspect this particular class will get better, and the fact you're trying to do a great job for these students comes through loud and clear from your post.

-How do you personally feel about the course material? Are you personally interested in it and enthusiastic about it? If not, it'll be hard to get others interested and it's tough to fake it. If you are, are you communicating that passion?

-Have you asked for someone to observe a class or two? Or videotaped a class for your own review? There may be some subtle things that you're not even aware of that's detrimental - extra eyes or seeing yourself teach can be revealing. What feedback is your TA giving you?

-Maybe the audience actually is wrong. I'm a big believer in "no bad students, just bad teaching", too, but I suspect we're dealing with a low N here...it's conceivable you're doing everything well and your first calculus class is just not that into the material for any number of reasons. Although you didn't say, I'm assuming this freshman calc class isn't necessarily filled with math majors.

-Great job on soliciting feedback from students - I assume you did something more than the same old dry "evaluations" we hand out and sometimes just skim over.

-Are students coming to your office hours? If not, why not? In some classes, I've set up appointments with each student at least once a semester, just so I have a chance to know them and their own motivations/plans/strengths, etc. It tends to work well. It's another great time obviously to ask them each what's working and not working in a more personal setting.

Again, thanks for your teaching and your obvious desire to improve things for your students.

impendia
Hi, thanks for the encouragement! I taught a grad class and that was awesome.

I definitely like the source material and daresay I am communicating a lot of enthusiasm. I have had successful teaching experiences in the past, so I think I need to worry about the two variables that are different: (1) I am teaching to students in a new state (South Carolina), with different background and also where the culture is very different. (I am naturally kind of a fast talker, which could be off putting.) (2) I have a lot more autonomy now, in the past someone else wrote the exams and decided what the homeworks were, freeing me to play good cop. My students here know damn well that if their homework was really long, I'm to blame.

The students are not the best in terms of either background or motivation, many are taking this class simply because it's required, but... they're the students I have.

My office hours weren't popular. The appointment thing sounds time consuming, but perhaps very well worth it, so maybe I will give it a try next time.

Thank you!

krob
My best calculus professor I had, the course was 3 hours with two 15 minute breaks in between, twice a week, tues/thurs. The first half was spent going over homework assigned the previous class. He would answer every question no matter how fundamental it was and go back to basics if it was necessary for instance synthetic division, or identity substitution. After he went over the homework problems, he would only go over the problems which were given answers to(in the book), we would cover new material and this would be repeated until we had a test, which was usually roughly ever 5 classes, so every 3rd week was a new exam. But by the time you got to exam time, you had a pretty good grasp on the material. The key for me was that he picked problems in the book which I was able to obtain a solutions manual for to help me through the mechanics of the problems. I would only ask for help on problems which were poorly explained in the solutions manual. Ironically the solutions manual was pretty worthless, It just gave you some confidence to move forward since it provided key points in the solutions. I ended up with 2 B's in his Calculus 1 & 2 courses, ended up taking Calc3 & Diff Eq, got A's in both courses because of how i learned in the first 2 calculus courses. Not sure this really helps. Just my experience. In the end, letting me go home to do my work with the perception that I could get a partial understanding of the material when I wasn't in class was a huge deal. Frustrated students don't want to study, unless they can get some help from someone who knows more than themselves. So having access to manuals which help you mechanically solve problems are beneficial until you can get back into class. BTW, I took these courses at a community college.
impendia
Hm, interesting suggestions, thank you! (I picked even problems, so students couldn't copy the answers, but perhaps I should choose a mixture.)
krob
Btw, my professor assigned homework, but he never collected it. Test was everything. Gaining the answer didn't mean anything if you don't collect it, learning how to figure it out is what counts. So being willing to help your students even when they can obtain the answer themselves is critical in my mind. Anyways.. Assign the Odd problems, then go over any problems students have and consider doing some of the most difficult even problems you see in the homework assignments. These problems are generally quick to solve unless you are doing transforms, or Eigen values.
keeptrying
Google "tophat monocle" ... Use something like that to get the pulse of where your students are. Start from there.
impendia
Interesting! I don't think I can reasonably (for now anyway) require the students to bring iPads or whatever. But this does look cool.
keeptrying
I'm surprised that most of them dont already have a smart phone. Its a great way to get them involved.
kellros
Lets agree on the fact calculus requires logic, imagination and foundation.

I believe in order to teach effectively you must cover the foundations and review/revisit work regularly.

I was mindblown the first time I saw how the formula for an area of a circle was calculated (via sliced concentric circles rearranged to form a pythagorean triangle).

Practice without understanding is pointless. Perhaps start off with a foundational test every class for the first 2/3 weeks to get an understanding of what the students know.

If the foundations are set, then it's really a matter of studying course work (we study to remember things!) and practice and review.

Whitewashing (via practice) doesn't compensate for a lack of understanding.

We think in pictures, the best way to teach is to make everything memorable (usually by visualization).

In short, whenever you get a 'go slower', it's usually the case you actually are going to fast or there is a lack of understanding.

Assign less homework just screams of too much work or frustration that they understand how to get there, but sometimes no idea why it works.

Take courage, it takes faith to put your faith into your students. Discouraged? Encourage others - I'm sure your students could use encouraging too.

Best wishes

impendia
Hi, thanks. I have no doubt that there's a lack of understanding... indeed, one big problem is that students come in with poor background in algebra and trigonometry.

Certainly I don't handle this perfectly, but I always keep it in mind, and I'm much more explicit about algebraic calculations than I would be if I were confidence the students had mastered algebra.