OK, confession. First time I taught SE I got a dozen books to read over break. I read a lot and never nap during the day. I literally fell asleep in the middle of the day. Multiple times. Because of the SE books. They are uniformly awful.
I realized part of the problem is that they're backwards in two ways. …
First, they begin with abstractions and move to concrete things rather than the other way around. One cannot meaningfully teach this way and hope to retain the attention of most students in a class of non-trivial size. …
Second, they presented everything in a "just so" manner. Everything apparently just emerged perfectly formed from the mind of Zeus, the original software engineer. …
My single proudest lecture is when we covered the Waterfall model. I had my students _derive_ the model for themselves. I gave them the historical context. I made them appreciate what an achievement it was for is time. …
Show me an SE book that does things this way and I'll gladly give it a shot. Until then, I'm sworn off of them. …
<CONTROVERSY>I conjecture it's hard to hire primarily in SE at many top US CS departments because the would-be colleagues have already been bored to death and can't imagine having a person in that field around forever.</CONTROVERSY>
Over & out
Over & out
