My teaching style

In order to be successful at anything, you have to play to your strengths and downplay your weaknesses. Being an effective lecturer is no exception. There are several tried and tested styles of teaching that have been proven effective for other people. Unfortunately, none of them are entirely suitable for me.

For example, there is the disciplinarian. These educators lay down the ground rules along with the penalties for breaking them, enforce them strictly, and impress the students with integrity and fairness. The rules usually relate to professionalism issues like punctuality and in-class behaviour. When the students follow the rules, it creates an atmosphere that is conducive to learning. The best practitioners of the disciplinarian approach are also excellent communicators who are able to deliver their material in an engaging manner, so that eventually the students want to listen and following the rules is no longer a chore.

A classic disciplinarian educator. Notice the smouldering glare. Staring deep. Into your soul.
(source: www.imdb.com)

I am poorly suited to the disciplinarian approach. I'm just really bad at keeping a serious tone when scolding someone, so I'm not an effective scolder. It's also difficult to come up with a punishment that is proportional to the crime. Suppose a student is late; other than marking him absent, what else would be an appropriate punishment? Taking marks off seems too harsh, and barring him from the class defeats the purpose of getting him to learn. Me, I just pause the class and greet the tardy student as brightly as possible, and hopefully his classmates will heckle him a bit.

Another method is to be a dynamic educator, to come up with some interesting and innovative hook that keeps the students coming back for more. If you're an ex-marine, you could display your karate skills. If you're an award-winning stand-up comedian, you could teach MacBeth using your John Wayne impersonation. Or, if you're like one of the lecturers here at Ngee Ann Poly, you could entertain the students with magic tricks (seriously - and by all accounts, he's an effective and well-liked lecturer).

Dynamic educators. The fact that a student died in all three movies is probably a coincidence. Right?
(source: www.imdb.com)

Being a dynamic educator is pretty tiring because you need to constantly keep it fresh with new and engaging tactics. There are excellent lecturers who have a complete utility belt of tactics that they employ with ease, including the use of technology, activities, audio and visual materials, etc. I'm trying to be more dynamic in my teaching (e.g., by using games), but I'm not there yet.

Of course, it helps if you look like Sidney Poitier, Michelle Pfeiffer or Robin Williams. Me, I'm a 1.62m (5 ft 4 in) nerdy guy with glasses who looks barely out of puberty. Some educators overcome this problem by being an expert. The expert educator is an authority in the subject, and the students feel honoured just to have the opportunity to tap his wisdom. This works best if you've created a seminal work on the subject, or have a theorem or mathematical constant named after you, or had your life story made into a movie by HBO. Unfortunately, I'm just not that smart.

An expert educator. At everything.
(source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Stephen_Hawking.StarChild.jpg)

Therefore, I had to develop my own style of teaching, which I call the excited puppy. Allow me to explain.

One of the main elements of my teaching philosophy is to be enthusiastic when delivering the material. The idea is to try to show the students that the concept being taught is fun and exciting, thereby raising the energy levels of otherwise uninterested students who would much rather be scrolling through Facebook. I do this by giving examples of ways to apply the concepts to real-life situations so that the students can better imagine their applicability. Furthermore, I don't mind overselling the "coolness" of the material and making a bit of a fool of myself if it keeps my students' attention.

My inspiration.
(source: http://www.chumpysclipart.com/)

I suspect I take this tactic to extremes sometimes. I actually use the word "cool." I gesticulate in a way that justifies the use of the word "gesticulate". I have even been known to unconsciously perform a little hopping dance in the midst of a particularly enthusiastic exposition. A good friend of mine, Prof Michael Jahn, once said of my teaching style that "you are so enthusiastic when you teach that the students just get carried along for the ride." Or, as an amused and bemused Computing Mathematics student so succinctly put it last year, "why are you so funny?"

The excited puppy strategy suits me perfectly. My less-than-mature looks are actually an advantage, because if someone who looks like Lee Kuan Yew acted the way I do, it would look incongruous and possibly creepy. This strategy also provides a solution to my inability to scold people; instead of showing displeasure at a transgressing student, I show my disappointment. If I do it properly (I stop just short of actually giving a sad puppy whine), hopefully the student feels enough guilt that he'll correct his behaviour in the future. Nobody likes to disappoint an excited puppy.

"Was it something I did?"
(sources: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/okay-guy; http://www.123rf.com/photo_10120743_sad-puppy.html)

In all seriousness, the way I teach is not a calculated tactic. This is simply the way I naturally act, and it just happens to have some benefits. I think the main difference between my teaching style and most other lecturers is the fact that I de-emphasize the teacher-student divide, i.e., I don't act like the boss of the classroom. I prefer to conduct a lesson as a collaborative effort, where everybody's working together to achieve the objective of learning the material. Nothing would make me happier than giving A-pluses to everyone, and I want the students to know that.

That's why I'm so "funny".

Classroom game: Wits & Wagers

At the end of my first Advanced Object-Oriented Analysis and Design (AOOAD) lessons back in October 2012, I divided the students into groups of 3 or 4 and played the party game Wits & Wagers:

Image from http://boardgamegeek.com/image/521431/wits-wagers

Wits & Wagers is a trivia game with a twist (you can get the official rules here). All the answers to the questions are in the form of numbers (e.g., In centimetres, how tall is Yao Ming?), and the questions are difficult or obscure enough that nobody is likely to know the exact answer. The participants try to guess a value that is as close to the correct answer as possible without going over, and they each write down their guess on a small erasable board,. The answers are then arranged in ascending order, and each answer is assigned a payout (e.g., 2:1 or 3:1); the highest and lowest guesses pay out more than the middle-of-the-road guesses.

Here's the clever bit: the participants then get to wager on up to two answers, and they don't have to bet on their own answer. If the answer you bet on is the closest without going over, you get the corresponding payout (the one who made the closest guess also gets 3 bonus points).

This game is essentially a multiple-choice quiz in disguise, except that the participants come up with the choices themselves. It also mitigates one of the main problems with trivia games, namely the tendency for the class genius to crush everyone else with his savant-like knowledge of trivia, because if you suspect that someone knows the answer, just bet on his answer. It's a really cool mechanic.

Like any trivia game, how fun it is depends heavily on the questions asked. Unfortunately, the questions that come with the commercial game are extremely USA-centric (will you guys go metric already???), so I came up with my own questions. I also spent some time coming up with a nice Powerpoint presentation with a ticking timer for the game (I had some problems with the sound effects though); you can download it here. The most boring question is probably Question 2, which is the only question that related directly to AOOAD, but hey, I had to toss a relevant question in there, right?

How did my students like it? Well, the response was generally positive I think. There were a few students who didn't really participate, but those who did seemed to have a good time. I might make a few changes if I do this again though. For one thing, I would allow more than 45 seconds for guessing and 30 seconds for bidding. I might also use the Wits & Wagers Party Edition rules instead, which simplifies the payout process.

All in all, the game did ok. I admit that it wasn't a great match for AOOAD, and would probably work better for a topic where more questions with numeric answers could be asked (e.g., math). I'm not teaching Computing Mathematics this upcoming semester, but I suspect Wits & Wagers would be a better fit there ("Given these 200 numbers, what is the mean? You have 45 seconds...").

What is love?

(...baby don't hurt me, don't hurt me no more...)

I've only ever been in one relationship; my wife and I got together when I was 16 and she was 14, and we've been together ever since. We've had our share of ups and downs, but we've never really even had a serious quarrel. Honestly, we're disgustingly happy.

Maybe that's why I've had quite a few people seek me out for relationship advice. Well, I haven't done any research or anything, but I've got a very simple Theory of Love(tm) that is composed of two parts, which I will be sharing in this post. For ease of discourse, my pronouns assume that I'm talking to a guy who's possibly in love with a girl.

Here's Part One of my Theory of Love: "When you love someone, making her happy makes you happy."

Read that sentence again. It is VERY different from "You're happy when you're with her." The key is that when you're in love, your happiness is tied to her happiness, not her looks or her actions or whatever. There is nothing wrong with enjoying someone's company, but if you love her, you'd enjoy doing things to please her, because seeing her happy makes you happy. Naturally, seeing her sad makes you sad. If you enjoy going out with her to a party, that's fine. But if she wants to leave because she's got a bad headache and you'd rather stay than send her safely home, maybe it's time to re-evaluate the relationship.

Here's Part Two of my Theory of Love, which is just as important as Part One: "The relationship only works if she feels the same way."

Duh, right? Well, it's amazing how many people forget this part. I see many budding relationships where both parties are happy: he's happy because she's happy, but she's happy because he's doing stuff to make her happy. Unfortunately, she isn't really interested in making him happy, or at least she wouldn't go out of her way to do so. I'm not saying that the girl in this scenario is the villain of the piece. Most likely she is just enjoying herself and not analyzing things too closely.

If both parties feel the same way, then the relationship has every chance of working. Take the example of a guy I know who had a smoking habit of 100 sticks a day. His wife doesn't smoke and hates it when he does, so she wants him to quit. Since he loves his wife, he's willing to try his best to at least cut down; last I checked, he's down to 10 sticks a day. Since his wife loves him, and she knows how difficult it is for him to quit, she encourages him when she can and isn't too hard on him if he needs to puff a stick or two after a stressful day.

See how this works? It's just making mutual compromises because both parties want each other to be happy. And that, to me, is love.

Classroom game: Smarty Party

In the final tutorial session of the semester for my Advanced Object-Oriented Analysis and Design (AOOAD) classes, I decided to run a trivia game adapted from the commercial boardgame Smarty Party.

Image from http://boardgamegeek.com/image/72266/smarty-party?size=original

The rules are simple: I provide a category that describes a list (e.g., Best Picture Academy Award Winners 2000-2011). On their turn, each student (or team of students) has to try to name one item on the list. A student who makes a guess that is not on the list gets a number of penalty points. The sequence of penalty points is 3, 2, 2, 1, 1, 1, 1 (i.e., the first to miss gets 3 penalty points, the second gets 2, and so on). The round is over when there have been 7 misses or all items in the list have been guessed. The winner is the one with fewest penalty points at the end of the game.

For this game, I prepared a Word document with 5 lists. The colour of the text for the entries is white. When a student guesses an answer, I highlight the corresponding entry and change the text colour to black in order to reveal it. I also printed out the document so that I know which entry is which. Overall, the game took about half an hour.

The success of this game depends heavily on the categories chosen. I did my best to make sure the categories were age- and culture- appropriate because nothing is more boring than a trivia game where you don't know any of the answers, or worse yet, where you get crushed by some know-it-all. Even so, it turns out that not many of my students were movie buffs who knew about the Oscars ("no, the Fast and the Furious never won Best Picture"), so I'll probably replace that category if I run this again.

Because it's the final session for the semester, my objective was mainly to let the students have a good time, so all the categories were somewhat whimsical. I was particularly interested in the students' responses for the Teaching Award Winners category (these are second-year students) because it let me know whom they felt were good lecturers. I think some of the students were genuinely surprised that some of their favourite lecturers never won the Teaching Award. However, this game is one way that you can test the students' recall ability in class. You can conceivably ask nursing students for the warning signs of shock, or chemistry students for the first 20 elements in the periodic table. My advice, though, is to not have the entire game involve serious topics, because after the first couple the students will figure out that it's just a thinly disguised review exercise and lose interest.

For the record, the winners were...I honestly don't remember (any of my students reading this are welcome to remind me in the comments section). What I do remember is lots of laughter amid cries of "you stole my answer!" and good-natured ridiculing of desperate shots in the dark as the obvious guesses were taken. If nothing else, my students now know that the most viewed youtube videos are not necessarily the best ones. :)