Pleasant and helpful in teaching

Hello! A year ago, I wrote an article about how I organized a university signal processing course . Judging by the reviews, there are a lot of interesting ideas in the article, but it is big and hard to read. And I have long wanted to break it into smaller ones and write them more clearly.

But writing the same thing twice somehow fails. In addition, this year have made themselves felt significant problems in the organization of this course. Therefore, I decided to write several articles about each of the ideas separately, to speculate about the pros and cons.

This null article is an exception. In it - about the motivation of the teacher. About why teaching well is useful and pleasant both for yourself and for the world.

What stimulates me

First of all, I find it interesting and pleasant! I will try to formulate exactly what.

I like to come up with some rules by which others will have to live for at least a semester. I like to improve the ready-made rules, already existing or built by me. So that they become better, solve some problems that arise for me or for students.

For a good course you need a lot: pick up the material, it is reasonable to arrange it for the semester, learn to understand clearly and interestingly, think over the reporting system that is adequate and stimulating students. Designing such a course is not only a very interesting, but also practically useful task. It can be solved without end. Intermediate improvements in practice can be observed - in research tasks with such improvements observed in practice, usually poorly, teaching can compensate for this.

I also, of course, like to share my knowledge - it seems that this makes me look smarter and more attractive. I am somehow at the head of the audience. I like that at least someone listens to me, and attentively. Does what I think is right. Plus, the status of the teacher in itself creates a pleasant halo.

But interesting and pleasant is not everything. Teaching makes me better: more knowledgeable, more capable.

I have to submerge significantly deeper into the material. I don’t want the students to look at me condemningly and think: “here’s one more thing to do except to read us some nonsense, which he himself doesn’t consider necessary to understand”.

When students roughly understand the material, they start asking questions. It happens that the questions are clever and bring to the unknown. It happens that already in the question itself contains an idea that had never occurred to me before. Or somehow it was incorrectly taken into account.

It happens that new knowledge emerges from the results of student labor. For example, students doing practical tasks or improving course materials offer new algorithms for me, quality assessment formulas. Maybe I even heard about these ideas before, but I still could not bring myself to figure it out. And here they come and say: "Why not add this to the course? This is better than what it is, that is why ..." - and you have to figure it out, not run away.

In addition, teaching is an active practice of communicating with students. I answer their questions, trying to be clear and not to go into the jungle.

In the course of communication, I involuntarily assess the abilities and diligence of students. Then a reconciliation of these assessments automatically takes place with what the student actually did. In itself, it turns out that I am learning to assess the potential of other people.

It happens to learn interesting facts about the structure of the world. For example, this year I had a chance to feel how much the flow of students can differ with a difference of just one year.

How else can teaching help someone who teaches?

There are a few ideas.

• Students can be used to test research hypotheses. Yes, I do not think that it is not ethical and bad to use the work of students on the subject of the subject for their own purposes. On the contrary, students feel that what they are doing is really necessary. This is a pleasant sensation, it stimulates to better fulfillment of tasks.
• You can understand how different people will react to your words. Learn to communicate more effectively.
• You can conduct experiments on the organization of teamwork.
• You can meet with future experts in their field. You may have to work with some of them later. And perhaps some of the students will like it, and then you will invite him to your job. Observing a person during a semester can be learned much better than in a few interviews.

Well, in sad moments you can remember that you have shared a part of your knowledge and experience with many people. They are not lost =)