Teaching

Real Genius movie poster

How I sometimes imagine myself appearing before my class. Yeah, I know I'm not that handsome.

Once upon a time, while I serving as a graduate student at Purdue University, I couldn’t fathom talking in front of large groups. Sweaty palms, pounding heart, quavering voice–I struggled with the symptoms of a self-conscience speaker unable to happily entertain himself with thoughts of the audience in their underwear.  Despite my fears, I somehow managed to regularly get up in front of thirty-six undergraduates and teach them the fundamentals of human anatomy and physiology, which sometimes included discussing naughty bits that civilized gentlemen don’t normally discuss. Not the most comfortable of situations, yet I did fairly well–reviews were altogether positive, the single most memorable criticism suggesting, “He’s cute, but he should smile more.”

To date this particular period in my life, we still used overheads and transparencies as visual aids. Flash forward to the days of projectors and PowerPoint, and I find myself back in the teacher’s saddle, this time at Harvard University’s Extension School. Nowadays, I find the experience more comforting and delightful. The two hours that I teach every week in the spring lends me a two-hour catharsis of sorts–day-to-day worries bleed away while I focus on helping my students. And, admittedly, I sort of enjoy being on center stage, dancing my way through slides and evoking diagrams on the whiteboard.

Not only has my attitude changed, so has the content that I teach. No longer do I list the bones of our skeleton, tour the chambers of our heart, or guide us through the labyrinth of the lymphatic system.  Instead I lead students through a different kind of anatomy, the very building blocks of the world-wide-web. XHTML elements replace cells as our fundamental unit of life, GET and POST protocols stand in for our blood, and it’s CSS, not bone structure and skin cells, that flesh everything out. This is my area of expertise now.

Until this semester, my visual aids consisted of dynamic pedagogical constructs, which is a bookish way of saying I scribbled doodles on the whiteboard and performed some online demonstrations. And that’s all that I really needed for students to learn. This semester, however, I wanted to give them something more–something tangible, something they could take home and review. My fellow teaching associates had extensive notes, examples, and slides. Our professor, David Heitmeyer, also had an extensive collection of slides and notes. I wanted to provide the same, but make mine unique from the others. So I added a dash of design and humor. And thus on ongoing project, constructing a weekly slide deck, was born.

I’ve decided to share these efforts with not only my students, but the rest of the world. I’m not certain why–on their own, the slides can’t teach web site development. But they are excellent pointers in the right direction and, in my opinion, there’s some amusing pictorials in there. I’m a firm believer in the visual learning; I’m a firmer believer in that learning should be fun. Combine the two and you’ve got a pretty powerful cocktail. Head First Labs, the publishers of my favorite textbooks, lays out this formula and is the inspiration behind my own pedagogical carafe.

So as the weeks go by and the slide decks roll in, you’ll find this portion of the web site slowly updated with summaries of my classes, along with a links to PDFs of the slides. And remember, if you’ve enjoyed watching the slides just half as much as I’ve enjoyed making them, then I’ve enjoyed it twice as much as you.

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