Thread by @HeyChelseaTroy

I'm thinking about something teacher-y today.

As teachers, how do we approach the first day of class?

The approach I've found myself trying to emulate, lately, is an immersion one—inspired by a few teachers I've had who approached Lesson 1 with the absolute audacity.

/1

In college I took my first Arabic class. The teacher opened class by saying some stuff to us, presumably in Arabic.

"Ismi Muhammad, w ma ismok?" he asked of someone in class.

Now clearly, that person had no f'n idea what was going on. So the teacher pointed to himself.

/2

"Ismi Muhammad." Then he wrote "muhammad" on the board.

"wa", gestures towards student. "Ma ismok?"

Eventually the student took a guess: "Uh, Bryan?"

"BRYAN!" Teacher drew a map on the board and, above the square that corresponded to Bryan's seat, wrote "Bryan."

/3

"W anti, ma ismoki?" the teacher gestured to the next person.

"Uh, Amanda."

Teacher writes "Amanda" on the board above Amanda's square. And so on, until the whole class has introduced themselves.

Teacher then points to the board. "Look at that! You're speaking Arabic!"

/4

Now, were we fluent in Arabic? Clearly not. But I appreciate the effort that this teacher made, on minute 1 of day 1, to get us to think about ourselves as *practitioners.* For all the flaws that this specific implementation might have, I think the approach itself is useful.

/5

It happens to be ESPECIALLY useful when teaching a language because, turns out, it's easier to learn a language through immersion, with translation as a backup, compared to the other way around.

Why?

/6

Because translation is a separate, difficult skill. Making translation a prerequisite to learning a language slows things down.

This teacher knew that, and took time out of class to start with immersion.

My intro to CS teacher did a similar thing.

/7

On Day 1 of class, he rolled out a table with peanut butter, jelly, bread, and a knife on it. Then he asked us to instruct him how to make a peanut butter sandwich.

He did this exercise to like 60 nineteen year olds before he even told us his name.

/8

Why? Because he wanted to introduce us to computational thinking without requiring a programming language—a separate, difficult skill—to demonstrate the concept.

This teaching technique of recognizing and stripping away prerequisite skills is, IMHO, invaluable.

/9

@dabeaz does this too. In his classes, we write verifications for our code. Do we drag unittest or pytest into this? Nah. We use the builtin `assert`.

His classes inspired my decision, in my Python Programming class, to have students build a test framework, step by step.

/10

This way students learn a lot about API design, but they ALSO learn that the libraries they use in a job are not magic tools.

Students have built one of those themselves. They're *practitioners.*

/11

I found myself in a similar negotiation while preparing this @UChicagoMPCS / @UChicagoCAPP sample lecture.

"How do I get students to see themselves as software risk analysts WITHOUT prerequisite skills?

chelseatroy.com/2021/04/03/lar…

/12

This looks easy when done well and is, in fact, extremely difficult.

It's even harder when you are talented at, or a longtime practitioner of, the subject you teach, because you forget what the prerequisites even ARE.

(luckily I don't have that specific problem 🤪)

/13

Conveniently, practice with this translates out of the teach-o-sphere to other disciplines (as do many teaching skills, IMO).

I talked more about stripping prerequisites in this piece. Hacker News hated it, which is how you know it's good:

14/14

chelseatroy.com/2020/12/18/how…