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Education: Are there any questions?. Yale N. Patt, teacher The University of Texas at Austin. Universidade de Brasilia Brasilia, DF -- Brazil August 13, 2009. For example:. Does distance learning make any sense at all? Guidelines for being a good teacher
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Education:Are there any questions? Yale N. Patt, teacher The University of Texas at Austin Universidade de Brasilia Brasilia, DF -- Brazil August 13, 2009
For example: • Does distance learning make any sense at all? • Guidelines for being a good teacher • What should be in the FIRST course? • Why JAVA is the wrong answer • What about the rest of the courses? • Object oriented is good …or, is it? • Can programmers learn to think in parallel? • How important is writing? • What about humanities courses? • Terminate with BS, MS, or PhD? • How to get and keep a job
My Ten Commandments for Good Teaching • Know the material • Want to teach • Genuinely respect your students • Set the bar high • Understanding is good; memorizing is bad • Take responsibility for what gets taught • Don't even try to cover the material • Encourage interruptions • Don't forget those three little words • Reserved for future use
On technical writing • Writing is for the benefit of the reader • Short sentences are better than long • Small words are better than big • The verb is the most important word in the sentence • Active is better than passive • OK to end a sentence with a preposition • OK to use the same word again in the next sentence • Not ok to make spelling mistakes.(Spellcheck will not ketch awl mistakes.)
About students • Freshmen can handle serious meat • Students don’t need glitz • Students will debug their own programs • Good students memorize for only ONE reason
…and more: • Engineering education (No substitute for): • Design it wrong • Debug it yourself • Fix it • See the working result • Avoid the latest fads • C# will probably be replaced by D-flat • Abstractions are great • AFTER you understand what you are abstracting
Some questions to me from a teacher in the US(I do not know how many apply to Brazil) • What are the worst numbers games, and how do we stop them? • What can we do to help non-serious students leave CSE? • How can we be sure Distance Learning students don’t cheat? • How can we get more experienced faculty to teach freshmen? • How can we get non-researchers on tenure-track positions? • How can we do a better job of teaching engineering design? • Students show up for attendance credit and then they “laptop.” • What do I think of multiple-choice tests and quizzes? • Why do we react to fashions in research and teaching?