Reflections on the Role of a Teacher

After six semesters of teaching 15-251, I've come to believe that for effective teaching, knowing matters a lot less than caring. A great teacher is one who truly loves their subject and, more importantly, their students.

To me, loving your subject means being able to teach a topic in a way that is not only clear, but also passionate. It means that you can teach a lesson you've taught many time before, and still be excited about finding ways to understand and explain it better. Your passion is infectious to your students, and sometimes even people who think that they don't like math will get excited about it when you see that you find it exciting!

Not everyone will be motivated simply by seeing a teacher's passion for the subject, however. Taking the time to get to know your students individually, and learning their names and needs, is a critical part of getting students who aren't in love with the material to invest effort in the course. Show them that you believe in them and that they do have what it takes to succeed in your course!

Loving students also means being willing to go beyond the call of duty to help students in need. One of the reasons that I love TAing 251 is that I see it as a chance to help students who really need help. Lots of students attend 251 office hours not just because they would like to solve the homework a little bit quicker, but because they would probably fail the course without support from TAs. S acrificing your time to support them - by holding more office hours, or preemptively asking to meet up with students who are doing poorly on the homework - can pay off dramatically when you see students who were planning to drop the course end up passing by a wide margin, or people who were expecting to scrape by with a C end up becoming TAs.

Loving students can also happen more abstractly, such as in structuring course policies and grading in a way that gives students second chances and encourage them to learn from their mistakes. I have learned a lot from the ways that Professor Ada has sought to do this in 251. Of course, loving students is easier said than done. Often there just isn't enough time to give every student the help that they deserve, and overexerting yourself as a teacher can leave you too sick or drained to help anyone. Some students are also frustrating and hard to love, and some people you just don't know how to help.

Despite all these challenges, however, I have found TAing the most rewarding part of my CMU experience by far. While trying to care for each student individually, I have ended up making a lot of long-lasting friendships, and been drawn to teaching as a vocation. Seeing students becoming passionate about CS theory, or learning that they can accomplish a lot more than they thought they could, or ev en just realizing that they aren't defined by their grades makes me feel like I've done something worthwhile while studying here. I encourage all my students to try TAing. It can change both your life and your students'.