Sub Ubi

Let’s get cranky, shall we?

I’m going to make strong statements, and see if there’s pushback. And, this weekend, I’ll try and turn comments back on. In the meantime, use the gmail address, and I’ll add your comments as they come in.

From Worker Bee, we see this post:

Today I taught my last class of the quarter (Friday is the final), in which I gave a lecture introducing computer science, the whole discipline, starting with NAND gates and how you’d coax electricity to behave like boolean logic, and ending up with the P=NP question and the halting problem. I don’t know whether my students cared about it, but for me it was great fun.

What if the entire lecture had been questions? “What is computer science?” Wait for a minute. Two. Wait until someone says something. Anything. Challenge it. Explore it. Ask other students in the classroom whether they agree or disagree. If they disagree, why? If they don’t, why? See what they know. See what they think. See if they know what they do not know.

In the end, who gives a shit about what another CS grad student thinks computer science is? Grad students in CS are a dime-a-dozen, and every one of us has our own slant, our own view, our own opinion on what computing is or is not. I personally think computing is about the creative process, but I doubt many people care about that. A bunch of first years certainly don’t give a flying duck about NAND gates, and they never will. (I take that back; some of them do. And those students probably didn’t need your lecture in the first place.) Who cares if they have that fragile knowledge about the computational tower—I want them to think!

I’m glad the lecturer’s imagination was captured by their own egotistical rambling, but I’m sure mine wouldn’t have been. Mercy. When will people start asking their students questions, challenging them to wake up, instead of selling them a crapload of bullshit facts?

For the record: Yes, I know I wasn’t there. Yes, I know I’m extrapolating from nothing. Consider Worker Bee’s blog post nothing more than a springboard for me to rant; I certainly don’t actually have any malice or ill-will towards Jacob. The post was nothing more than a foil. But still, why wasn’t the post about the great discussion they had in that classroom, instead of a lecture that the students may or may not have cared about? How much longer until our classrooms become conversations, not pulpits?