An Experiment!

I’m blogging over the next two weeks

• So I’ll be blogging some notes over the next two weeks here. Specifically, I’m a (1 of 4) participant(s) in a fellowship and I’d like to do a TIL for each day I’m here to process things. I expect to be learning a lot. I expect to make a lot of mistakes, and I’ve heard that each day, we get a review, and there is also a midpoint check-in, and a final check-in before we leave. I think it will be good for me looking back.
• It’s something along the lines of “How do you think you did” and “what do you think worked?”. I love that for this particular opportunity, they encourage us to try new things and fail a lot with pedagogy.
• I won’t mention specific names of people, but just general “larger / big picture” thoughts in a sentence (or at most a couple sentences) each day.
• It will all be here, in this post, so I can use it to grow and become more thoughtful in my own journey.

Some pre-advice

• I wanted to put some of this here as a reminder of some things I’ve heard from seniors who have a lot more experience. One of the most recent things I have heard from one seminar I recently attended was “Put as much structure for the students who need it, and those who don’t will ignore it.”. Another word of advice I have heard from some of the professors guiding us is: “Give adequate support. Give the benefit of the doubt; Reach in so the student doesn’t have to always reach out.”
• Most recently, I’ve also been exposed to some methods I had never heard of before (even with a lot of coaching in the Grad Writing Centre at my university; Nancy did a great job with respect to that), so again, I’m learning a lot.

Debrief

• Thursday 22nd: being rooted in the real world while living in Academia. A driver heard I was going for a fellowship, and thought it was a religious fellowship :D. Completely agree that that could have been the case, but I guess I’ve been in Academia long enough this semester that at first I assumed he would know what I meant. Mistake on my part for not being clearer via communication. Was fascinating that compared to where I am (living), there are deeper discussions on things like how being disadvantaged societally affects people in communities. In particular, people speak about who gets to tell history, how that affects what we learn, perspectives and they think about misinformation as also a rewriting of history to suit a particular agenda. One of the fellows is working on this with respect to refugee communities and museums (how are their stories told, and by whom), which is fascinating, too. I really like that people in the group seem pretty worldly here, too; it’s refreshing.
• Friday 23rd: your passions can be a relatable tool for pedagogy. I saw an alum of the fellowship teaching students programming using a drum machine to talk about how music loops are like loops we use in programming. I thought that that was really cool! Went to an amazing restaurant for dinner and found a lot of similar stories between participants on the (amount of) labour of outreach and expectations in Academia, which was interesting. It’s nice to be able to share that and not be gaslit for just speaking up about something that is so clear to me, just because it makes others who don’t have those responsibilities “feel uncomfortable”.

Main TIL Week One

• Monday 26th: Slides or visual tools are helpful, especially when there is a lot of information. Also games are great (we did the PBJ exercise today, which students enjoyed!)
• Tuesday 27th: Some days are better than others, especially when working with software. It’s okay to take a step back and evaluate whether there are different levels in a classroom, and if co-teaching, perhaps think of splitting the groups into two (based on comfort-level and pace).
• Wednesday 28th: We tried splitting into two groups. It is useful to give a choice, not giving any judgment or tradeoff between groups (no group is “less than”), but rather that it’s about building specific toolsets. It was also helpful to learn to ask the students to install things ahead of time. Also, just standardize the tool; it isn’t worth the hassle of going between two tools. Live coding is risky. Another way of working with variance within a group is to perhaps have the entire lesson to be worked through for students who feel comfortable / want to move ahead, or have the students have access to the lesson and then indicate if they are stuck. The stickies method might be a good approach (so they don’t have to raise their hand for assistance / it’s more low-key). There was a lot of good feedback and I really appreciated that they told me approaches to improve (I definitely want to get the technical side down better), but in particular, one high-note was that I was told that I was a good teacher. I couldn’t imagine hearing something like that at my current University, and I want to take the time to celebrate that little compliment today.
• Thursday 29th: Met Dan today (from Chapman) and asked him about how people put themselves into teaching the more senior they are. Had a good session and spoke with Joe about not just about it feeling rewarding, but that I did my own thing today, rather than a pre-pre-planned lecture, and that felt good. He said that that was a powerful thing and that I should continue to trust in that / myself more. Being here has been so empowering and such a great decision, and as Joe said, when he was on the faculty market, he was the only faculty of colour, and part of the school is to have a network of people they think are excellent and for those people to know they have a community that is supportive and that they can lean on. Also paddleboarding!
• Friday 30th: Used a pre-survey, slides and the notebook today. I loved giving this lecture today because I got to talk about graph data, including nodes, edges (yay graph theory), adjacency matrices, bipartite graphs, and even things like dark patterns and the Page Rank Algorithm, and finally about Maths having a “bad PR problem”. I’m enjoying this so much more, and already am excited for some activities next week! They’re a great group! (including the fun activities like BBQ, karaoke, paddleboarding, barcades, etc). Also was on the panel today and spoke about my path to grad school; it made me realize how much I had gone through, and that I never took the time to really acknowledge / value that, because I’ve gone through so many spaces where I was just devalued. So now that I’ve had the time to appreciate that, I’m grateful, and I feel really supported here.

Main TIL Week Two

• Monday 3rd: A survey is a great way of motivating how to move forward in terms of time (lab vs lecture).
• Tuesday 4th: one can give autonomy and gentle guidance (like letting them do whatever they’d like, while giving them a template of what the final presentation might include). Play and fun is fine, too (like the Audio files stuff we did). It was nice to use some of my audio background in today’s class! I thought the direction I was going might have been a little weird but heard it was much appreciated!
• Wednesday 5th: I did a lecture on classification.
• Thursday 6th: I did a lecture on glitch art and generative AI
• Friday 7th: I cried a lot. It was very moving to see how personal and beautiful their projects were, and they incorporated a lot of the stuff we learned. It was so worth it!

Post Notes

• It was an incredible experience. I learned a lot and the students and everyone was so awesome! It was so much more than I could have ever imagined!

Other Stuff

• Take a rest the evening you get back (especially as you fly out again the following evening!). Take time to celebrate!

That’s it