on teaching
Looking back, I’ve written a lot about teaching over the years. Some of what I wrote has involved projects, some of which I’ve worked through, some of which I’ve started, and some of which remain nascent. Yet one more project would be to go back through all of the old posts and construct an index of those past posts involving teaching.
Some of what I wrote involves my own relationship to my teaching, and that’s what I would like focus some attention on here. The teaching for the semester ended a few days ago; I gave my last lectures of the semester three days ago, last Thursday, though the marking remains.
I’m always sad when teaching ends. I greatly enjoy teaching, the structuring of the material, working through details, seeing the light of engagement and understanding on the students’ faces.
And now, through the marking, I’ll get a hint about what I need to work on for next year, topics and techniques and theorems that I’ll need to focus more attention on.
And there are the larger questions as well. The ways of education are changing. As a caricature, there was a time, long ago, when facts were rare and precious things, recorded in books difficult to replicate. The reader, the lecturer, had access to these facts and made them available to students.
But now, facts are cheap, available via any web browser. At one point, just a few years ago, we then thought it would be the interpretation of facts that would become the important thing, rather than the memorization of facts. (And yes, this is all still a caricature of a much wider, a much deeper, a much more complicated conversation.)
But now, there are tools that seem – seem – to be able to interpret as well as we expect an undergraduate to interpret, namely the various large language models and their kin. And our current conversation is, what do these mean for us? Like most of my colleagues, this is a question I’m working on locally, in my own head, and as part of broader conversations.
Things are changing. Something that I thought would be a science fiction story might actually be an approaching reality, of personalized AI assistants that take the role of tutor, but that this would be technology that would be available to some rather than to all, exacerbating the divisions already growing in our world.
But that’s a story for another day, as it barrels down towards us like a runaway train. For now, I’ll get to marking and thinking about how to make my class better for next year.
multijimbo 