I Taught Python to Students at ‘Code in Place’. Here’s What I Learned.
I recently got a chance to teach Python to 12 international students and here’s what I learnt.
One fine day, a friend shared a teaching opportunity with me and I went ahead with the application. The opportunity was Code in Place 2021 — an online course organised by Stanford University during the COVID-19 pandemic to introduce students to Python programming. After my application got accepted, I taught 12 students for 5 weeks and learnt a lot about teaching and communication in general.
Dealing with intertwined concepts
Teaching is exactly when you realize that so many concepts are intertwined. To teach one concept you need to explain another but sometimes, the other requires some advanced knowledge. What to do in that case? Is “You will learn this later” the best answer? Should you just skip the part and wait for the students to ask if they don’t know something?
With trial and error, I figured that treating something like a black box till it is taught in depth is a good way to go about it. I realized that we don’t always need to explain all working at that very moment. Some things should be left for later too!
I figured that leaving it altogether can be a dangerous thing to do! Especially if your students are learning it for the first time. That’s because students then assume that they need some background knowledge which they don’t have currently and hence tend to ignore the whole session.
I feel it is important to acknowledge the absence of knowledge of one concept and treat it like a black box. This helps the student know that they’ve not missed out on something and they are on track with what they should know and can understand the ongoing concept.
Should I extend a session or not?
I can think of three reasons why a session would require to be extended:
- Over-enthusiastic instructor — a timer for each part of the session would help in this case.
- Too much material — if it’s too much material it can anyways be carried over to the next session with no harm.
- Under-prepared instructor — this is the most dangerous one in my opinion because an under-prepared instructor would take x+y time to cover material that can be covered in x time. That is a waste of the student’s time.
I learnt a general life lesson here — always prepare for presentations!
The thing with presentations is that they involve not only your time and mental energy but also of another person/other people. So it is important that none of this is wasted (to be fair, no one really likes to stay beyond the stipulated time).
In short, a session extension can be prevented by preparing well for it. If there is still a need for an extension (due to any unexpected circumstances) make sure to ask if the audience is okay with it.
Should I tell the student the whole solution if they ask a doubt?
This is something I particularly learnt during the application process. The prompt had a piece of code that had a logical error and I had to write steps to guide a student on how they can correct it. The prompt explicitly mentioned not to write the direct solution and this got me thinking.
After much contemplation, I realized that this is done so as to build a thought process in the student’s mind. If we spoon-feed a solution, the student has no idea how to arrive at that solution and they just take it to be some kind of magic. This leads to under-confidence since they are not able to debug on their own. To deal with such a situation, I realized the best way is to fragment the thought of how I reached a solution and give hints for each fragment/some fragments.
With this, I realized that teaching is not just about speaking about a bunch of concepts. It is also about making sure that a student can recreate a similar thought process and become independent.
My overall experience
This was my first teaching experience and I enjoyed it thoroughly. It reminded me of the time I was introduced to the world of coding and the joy I had in discovering something so magical. It was great to meet students and instructors from different places, pursuing different fields. The most beautiful aspect was how coding brought together people from such diverse backgrounds. I would love to take up more such roles in the future!
Hi there! Thank you so much for giving this blog a read. You can reach out to me via mail (miloni.mittal@gmail.com) for any queries or for a small chit-chat. :)
More content at plainenglish.io
