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?

Are there any questions?