I try hard to change to help those students who don't enjoy my teaching but I keep getting similar comments from year to year so I now suspect there is somthing fundamental about how I teach which does not suit some people. This page is to help you work out if you are likely to be such a person and to give you realistic expectations about my teaching so can can make an informed decision about taking one of my subjects.
I believe that a subject should be ambitious in its coverage and that you excel best when you are stretched. I dislike vauge, lite, or wishy-washy subjects. I want you to be an expert when you finish. I want you to have mastered the theoretical background, and to be experienced in applying your new knowedge. I think a strong underpinning of theory is essential. I think we all learn best when we apply our knowledge as soon as possible after we have learned it - or, ideally, when we can use our new knowledge to solve a problem we already have. I am a strong preponant of "problem-centered learning"
Over the years I have taught many subjects and at many institutions. I have taught a number of very popular subjects. I have NEVER had feedback that one of my subjects was too easy...
All this means I expect you to work hard. To acquire new skills and to stretch your brain. It is my job to make you want to work hard, to make you feel proud of what you have achieved, and to feel that all the energy you invested into this subject was worthwhile.
Summary: Don't do this subject unless you are interested in the material, interested enough to work hard at mastering it. If you are just after a few credit points: do another subject.
I believe you don't really know something until you apply it. To that end the subect has some practical assignments. The assignments will force you to re-evaluate what you have learned and acquire a deep understanding. You will need to master numerous small details which are easy to gloss over when you first learn something. Doing an assigment is its own reward. You will learn vitally important skills as you work on your assignments.
Assignments are also, incidentally, worth some marks. I only do this to give those of you who are a bit disorganised (aka busy) an incentive to spend time on them.
I have a dream ... of a time when assignments are worth no marks, and students still do them ...
Don't do the assignments for the marks, it would be a sheer coincidence if the marks allotted to them reflected the amount of time you spend on them. Do them for what you will learn. I can still remember the (best) assignments I was set at uni. I have never forgotten the things I learned in the doing of those assignments. I have forgotten many dry facts stated in inumerable lectures but never applied.
Summary: Assignments will be frustrating at times, but ultimately they will be what you carry away from the subject.
I don't write out all my lecture notes in book-like form and give them to you on the internet.
It would be great if I did wouldn't it? You could print them all out in stuvac, put them in a nicely bound folder, and study them for the exam. In my first degree I was able to summarise, learn, study, and memorize about 10 pages an hour in stuvac. Another advantage of such good notes is you would be able to catch up on lectures you missed becuase you were sick or you could even skip lectures altogether.
And notes like that would make my life easier too. I could just stand up and read them out each year. I would have to spend no more than 1 hour preparing each lecture. Wow!
For these reasons amongst others I write no lecture notes. I write rough notes to prepare for each lecture and I throw them away each year and write new ones in the following year. I give you rough bullet points on the web as a skeleton for your notetaking. I try to put these up in advance so you can print them out and write your notes on them. I don't always manage to get them up in time but I try hard to do so. I do write more detailed notes retrospectively in the cases where I think I have given a bad lecture and not explained somthing well. When I have given a subject before I usually make the previous offering's notes available online also.
You'll need to take your own detailed notes in lectures and catch up from friends or others if you miss a lecture. I'm going to experiment with a wiki this session to help with this and to see if it results in better notes generally (ad hoc samples of student notes I have seen after lectures are somtimes a bit worrying...) But in general you need to take detailed notes in lectures.
Summary: If you only like subjects where you get detailed notes given to you: don't do this subject.
I believe you can only concentrate for about 10 minutes. I try to teach in small blocks of 5-10 minutes with seemingly random diversions between the blocks. Sometimes the diversions really are random; and sometimes they tie into what we have just learned, what we are about to learn, an assignment, or somthing else which is relevent.
I usually don't make the transition from teaching to diversion explicit which some students find frustrating. Even where there is a link between the diversion and the subject I usually don't explain what it is. I like to leave it for alert students to puzzle out. Little puzzles and easter eggs scattered thoughout the lecture.
I do this because that's what I'm like. It's just me. I loved this style of learning when I first encountered it from an inspirational teacher in high school, and in the (wonderful) book: "Godel, Esher, Bach" and it has become a core part of my teaching style. I hope you enjoy it too.
I also expect people to learn during the lecture and to participate. I believe you learn better if you engage in "active learning". I'll do all I can to get you to think during the lecture. Don't expect to come along and sit up the back and take notes with 1% of your brain and switch off the other 99%. This is a shared responsibility ofcourse. It's my job to make you want to switch on the other 99%.
Summary: If you've had me lecture you before in some other subject and you've found my lecturing style frustrating, if you think I waste too much time on things that seem irrelevant, then don't do this subject. I haven't changed.
In lectures I give you the outline of the material you should know. I give you the context and how it all fits together. I give you some examples and some motivation. It is then up to you to study and learn in your own time to master the material and pracise the skills.
I am skeptical as to the amount of learning one can do in a lecture. I see my job in the lecture as motivating you to want to learn the material. You will need to do more work after coming home from the lectures (or with friends or in a study group, or...) in order to master the material.
Summary: If you want to stop thinking about the subject once you have left the lecture: you will find this subject frustrating.
In addition to tutorial exercises + solutions covered in tutorials each week I try to give a number of optional self-test questions. You can use these to test your understanding, for revision, and to guide your private study. I do not give worked solutions to these optional questions. You can ask your tutor about any you are unsure of and they might be able to have a tutorial discussion on the topic (time permitting). Note that tutors won't have worked solutions either so in many cases they will not know the answer on the spot.
These optional self-test questions are questions I expect you to be able to answer after mastering the subject, perhaps after some thought or research. This doesn't mean that you need to answer them all however. Indeed as the bank of self-test questions builds up over the years there may well not be enough time to answer them all even if you were so inclined.
These questions are to give you additional questions to practise on in your study time. Most of them would have been good tutorial questions, but there is a limit to how many questions we can cover sensibly in a tutorial. Sometimes I come across or invent particularly hard or challenging questions. I'll mark these with a star to identify them as challenge questions. Unlike the normal self-test questions you don't need to be able to answer challenge questions. They are just there to stretch students interested in that particular topic.
Some students find having questions with no answers unsettling. Some find the sheer number of optional questions daunting. If you find yourself feeling this then it is quite ok to just pretend that the optional questions aren't there.
Summary: Self-test exercises are not tutorial questions and you are free to ignore them if you wish
Assessment serves two unrelated purposes. Accreditation (you prove you do know something, you prove how good you are) and assistance (it helps you learn). Education jargon for these aspects is "summative" and "formative". I regard the second aspect as far more important. All your assessment before the exam has assistance objectives. Final exams tend to be about accreditation but they do have a small chance to assist your learning via guiding your exam study.
I tend to set exams to focus less on the assignment material. I figure you've had a good chance to learn that already. The only times I tend to cover much assignment material in the exam is where I suspect assignment cheating has occured and I wish to catch or at least penalise those who cheated (on the theory that they will not do as well in such questions).
I will tell you in some detail in the last lecture which topics are in the final exam so you can have do productive study in stuvac.
I never try to trick students in final exams. I try to make the exams easy exams. It is hard to get clear feedback after the exams, but I never seem to get feedback saying I have set an easy exam. I do try very hard to set fair exams with no surprises. I sometimes get indications that I have succeeded, but I sometimes get indications to the opposite.
Some students are very concerned with marks and mark fairness. Some students are very concerned with learning and acquiring skills. Some students are a mix or fluctuate from subject to subject. Students concerned more with marks sometimes feel it is very unfair not to assess the assignment material in the exam since they have devoted so much time to it. I appreciate their feelings and I understand where they are coming from. However since I have formative rather than summative leanings I am inclined to continue with this approach. My current plan is to put a few assignment related marks in the final exam, but not a lot.
Summary: Richard cares more about learning than about marks. If you are very concerned with marks this might annoy you.
If the above concerns you then you should think carefully about doing this subject.
If not, then hang on tight! We are going to have a lot of fun together - and by the end you'll be excited by what you have learned and proud of your new skills.