Category: Teaching

And gladly wolde he lerne, and gladly teche.

After a PhD

I am not depressed, but I definitely feel a lot of what this video from Andy Stapleton discusses:

I have certainly experienced the odd stutter-step ending of the program, which never brings a single day or moment when you are really done. There is such a moment, but it is mundane, private, and undramatic — probably the last time you make a formatting correction for the unknown administrator who reviews your dissertation for conformity to writing standards like which page numbers in the front matter are Roman numerals. That creates an odd sense of the thing being unfinished, even when there is nothing left to do.

The points about needing to prove yourself in the job market after finishing, as well as anxiety about whether a PhD was necessary, are also familiar from my recent thinking.

I wouldn’t say the video provides any useful and non-obvious advice, but reading within the broad category of writing by current and recent PhD students actually has immense psychological value by demonstrating the reality of shared experience and shared struggle, engaging about all the things we didn’t known when we began and (even more juicily and importantly) all the things your university will lie to you about to keep their business model going. A post by Bret Devereaux is a fine example of the genre, and was discussed here before.

Resisting fossil fuel recruitment at universities

A tactic that has developed in parallel to campus fossil fuel divestment campaigns has been activists resisting on-campus recruitment by fossil fuel corporations. With an industry that needs to be rapidly phased out to avoid climatic catastrophe, it doesn’t make sense to be training new people to join.

The UK eNGO People & Planet has a fossil free careers campaign. Birkbeck, University of London has banned fossil fuel firms from its career service. This month, three other UK universities did the same.

UN secretary general António Guterres recently said: “My message to you is simple: don’t work for climate wreckers. Use your talents to drive us towards a renewable future.”

AI that writes

Several recent articles have described text-generating AIs like GPT3 and ChatGPT:

I have been hearing for a while that the best/only way to deal with the enormous problem of plagiarism in university essays is to have more in-class exam essays and fewer take-home essays.

With huge classes and so many people admitted without strong English skills, it is already virtually impossible to tell the difference between students struggling to write anything cogent and some kind of automatic translation or re-working of someone else’s work. It’s already impossible to tell when students have bought essays, except maybe in the unlikely case that they only cheat on one and the person grading notices how it compares to the others. Even then, U of T only punishes people when they confess and I have never seen a serious penalty. If we continue as we are now, I expect that a decent fraction of papers will be AI-written within a few years. (Sooner and worse if the university adopts AI grading!)

Considering student coaching

To further develop the student coaching idea:

It would be student-driven, not curriculum-driven. The starting point would be who they are, why they’re at university, and what they aspire to do in the medium- and long-term. That’s the basis for helping them find worthwhile extracurriculars and networks, as well as thinking about course planning and major selection from a holistic perspective.

I would work for the student, not the university. As a TA I have spent many hours with students one-on-one reviewing their written work either before or after submission and grading. This has all been essentially unpaid, as I didn’t have so many hours of student contact in my TA contract. I enjoyed doing it though because it felt like the only time when I was really teaching. Up in front of a tutorial I am doing am improv act, trying to weave together my prepared material with the organic discussion of the students willing to talk. One-on-one we can take our time and establish that the student is really following along. It becomes possible to see if they can repeat back the salient idea to you.

As a TA, I was chiefly paid for grading and administrative hours like keeping track of attendance. Neither is an activity that much serves to educate. They are part of the university’s sorting function rather than its residual educational capabilities. Switching sides to serve rather than sort the students is appealing.

All the student support they get at U of T is a bit like going to an emergency room doctor. Their only priority is to deal with the narrow issue in front of them, because they have no long-term relationship to any patient’s health and need to triage patients by degree of need. This student coaching service would be like a family doctor, reminding you of things it will be important to to before you’ve missed a deadline and it’s not possible, and when to get started in researching each batch of papers.

Personally, rather than pedagogically, I see great appeal in employment where I need to maintain clients but not to report to any bosses.

Teaching and writing

While my dissertation work is overwhelmingly done, the combination of residual writing up tasks and TA work is making this a pleasantly busy term and a reminder of Septembers past, including my own starts at UBC, Oxford, and U of T.

As of last night my dissertation is off to the external external examiner, whose six-week review is the last step before the defence: now expected in the last days of November or first days of December, right around my 39th birthday.

Writing advice for undergraduates (2014)

Fortunately, the conditions under which a TA will read your essay are much like those in which everything else you ever write will be read, from reports written for your future employer to love letters written to your future spouse. This means the skills required to write these papers are generally applicable in life. Especially with dealing with an inattentive reader who isn’t especially interested in your thoughts, a special effort must be made to put forward an argument that will lead the reader along while rewarding their attention. In every case, the reader will have other demands on their time and other things on their mind. Your purpose is to convey something convincing and scholarly under those conditions. Your two real tasks are to develop an argument and then to convey it in as clear a way as possible.

Essay writing tips for undergraduates (2013)

This year’s kick of September enthusiasm

I know I will feel differently when teaching and research deadlines start to overlap and the stress compounds, but the experience of the last few days makes me think I had so little energy lately because I had too little to do. There is something very different between having a solitary (but supervised) project where you are always meant to be getting as much done as possible and the social need to be present when expected by others, teach, answer questions, grade, and so on. Even non-academic obligations like recording a recent podcast have cost me standard hours of sleep but added rather than subtracted energy.

Teaching in 2022

With my dissertation largely done and PhD funds much depleted, I am taking a final TA job in POL106 “Contemporary Challenges to Democracy: Democracy in the Social Media Age” (Professor Ronald Deibert).

The subject matter is obviously at an introductory level, and it relates to courses where I have been a TA before: POL211 “Intelligence, Disinformation & Deception: Challenges of Global Governance in the Digital Age” (Professors Jon Lindsay and Janice Stein) and ENV381 “Social Media and Environmentalism” (Professor Steve Easterbrook).

Ron Deibert is the founder and director of U of T’s very interesting Citizen Lab, which will add to the interest of the course.

My brother Mica is starting this term as a teacher at the Bodwell High School in North Vancouver, and Sasha is starting his second year at the Chief Jimmy Bruneau Regional High School. It’s neat that we will all be teaching this term.

Slides in academic presentations

I have seen hundreds of academic presentations, the great majority with slides. Unfortunately, I would say that the most common practice is one of the worst: putting all or nearly all of what you will say on your slides. Since nearly everybody reads faster than you will talk, this gives the whole presentation a dragging sense of going over the same ground slowly and repeatedly.

Putting totally different text on your slides is in some ways even worse, since now the audience needs to follow two simultaneous narratives which may not combine perfectly or benefit from being put forward in parallel.

The approach which I use and have found successful is to make myself a Powerpoint deck with speaking notes in point form. With the slides on a screen that only I can see, I can be sure to follow my overall outline and not miss any points. It also lets the audience concentrate fully on what I am saying, without the distraction of comparing it against text on slides. Generally I think it sounds more engaging and human to turn point form text into full sentences on the fly, rather than read a speech verbatim, but if the presentation is very short it can be best to have everything written succinctly in advance and then to try to read it in a way that doesn’t sound like a recitation.

A couple of ways to have slides with fewer problems are to only include very brief summary or conclusion text, which the audience will be able to read so quickly it isn’t a distraction, or using slides more-or-less exclusively to show charts, graphs, and photos. That is what I tried to do with my recent lesson on the robotic exploration of the solar system.

These approaches do detract from the viability of a slide deck as a standalone presentation which can be understood without the accompanying speech, but I would argue that a deck meant to be used that way should have a totally different design from slides meant to support a spoken talk, whether it’s in-person or online. If the priority is the live audience, the talk should be designed to engage them in the moment and not to be a set of reference materials that would be equally comprehensible to someone who hasn’t heard the talk.

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