Planning for the First University-Level Teaching Position

“She made herself a wall and told the kids to overcome it. Students who do not hit that wall are inferior and weak to failure. Nowadays the kids do not take instructors seriously anymore because the instructors do not try to build that wall. […] They will be quick to forget me but they will never forget Akutsu-Sensei.”
(Namiki-Sensei about Akutsu-Sensei, じょおうのきょうしつ - The Queens Classroom EP11)

Fortune smiled at me this term. A key professor took a parental leave from the ECE department and they were looking for a new instructor. This course is relatively tough to teach. I suspect because none of the faculty was willing to jump in and previous sessional instructors were also unavailable, they actually considered getting in some foreign aid. Having assisted this course before, I was taken into consideration for the interview process.

The interview process was straightforward. It was a series of interviews focusing on the overall capabilities of an instructor. First they want to see you in person and assess that you are not a moron. Self presentation-, listening-, and observation skills get you through that. The next thing they focus on is teaching quality assurance. In my case the interview was targeted at a specific course. You should know what your course will be about and have a detailed plan how you would organize the lecture. That includes not only the content of the lecture but also managerial considerations as to where to allocate TAs and how many TAs you get / are expected to work with. Finally someone will be invited to assess your background knowledge about specific topics of the course. This one could eventually be your biggest thread. You should now your stuff well. Some interviewers might drop you like a hot dish: “How can this guy dare to teach , if he doesn’t even know ”. Other interviewers might be leaner and still think you are smart enough to prepare well for your assignment.

If you pass this stage they will ask you to perform a demo lecture about a sub-section of the course. Mine went well and I was notified that I got accepted.

So now you got the job and your schedule for the next term will be shot. I expect to have little time for anything else than teaching this term. Trust me, you should not do this for money as you will end up putting far more hours in it than “expected”. If you are really short on cash consider Teaching Assistantships. If you screw up as instructor, you not only have an angry mob of undergrads after you, but you also risk your reputation in the department. Since academic communities are usually small, next time you apply for a faculty or instructor position that will be considered. An angry mob of undergraduates cannot really hurt you as long as you obey university policies and master some martial arts skills ;), but they can be really annoying. To have your peace of mind and be able to look back on an effective term those issues should, however, be avoided in the first place.

The first thing I worried about is, what resources and additional man power I would be getting. The next thing is to get in touch who-ever was instructing and or supporting the course before. The more old material you can get, the less stuff you have to prepare next term. In my case I was very lucky to connect with the previous instructor and lab instructor of the course. Most of the materials were obtained, slides, past exams, quizzes, and lab materials.

Engineering the Wall

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(by some unknown very geeky ASCII artist)

Since the students have to metaphorically overcome your wall, you need to engineer it in the first place. The design depends on your resources (strength), the students’ experiences (height) and their cultural background (slope & approach) and your objectives.
Most of the findings in this section are a team effort and arose from discussion and high commitment from lab instructor, previous course instructors and TAs.

Thoughts on Wall Strength

I was in the lucky opportunity to get three excellent TAs and an experienced lab instructor. We have three lab sessions of three hours each every other week and weekly tutorials. With the lab you can get the students a deep dive on operating systems and acquiring practical development skills.

Thoughts on Wall Height

Traditionally, and in our case, we let them develop a simple embedded operating system from scratch. Given that they only have less than four months to complete the assignment is (expectedly) challenging. They are software engineers and come with some background in embedded assembly programming and C/C++ programming. Since they are software engineers, I also have no reservations exposing them to the full breath and depth of the operating systems subject.

Learning operating systems is not a mentally challenging task. The algorithms are relatively simple (scheduling, I/O interaction, concurrency) and easy to grasp. Most of the technical material is closely tied to the advances in the hardware community and ends up a lot to learn but is not really mentally challenging.

What is, however, quite challenging is putting the learned material to use in the lab. Therefore, I the course was traditionally worked to make the students make focus a large part of their effort on the project. Given the short lab timeframe, only the basics are covered in the lab.

Passing the lab will not let the students pass the final exam and just learning for the final exam will hardly make them pass the course. Lately the department enforced a minimum 50% weight on the final exam. If it was according to me, I would put much more weight on the project because these skills will certainly pay most of the dividends in their later career. In the past, instructors tried to combine these two areas, to have them evaluate code samples in quizzes/exams as well, which generally dragged the exam average down.

Thoughts on Wall Slope and Approach

As I mentioned before designing this part is the most challenging and depends on your objectives, the environment, and also the cultural background of your students.

Let’s start with the cultural background (or better university culture). Going to a traditional German university for my undergraduate and graduates study (well I fought at the European Council to have my Diploma recognized as MSc…long story), you come from a very different end of university culture than you see in North America. Nowadays the system is changing in Germany, but when I was doing my degree, the five year study were divided into two parts. A section of four basic semesters (i.e., there were only two terms per year) and a section of four advanced semesters. At my time the tuition was bogus, I paid like 70 EUR per term, and the study was largely government financed. As a result the student had no economic stake in pursuing the study and “the system” had great interest in letting unfit students fail early. Therefore the students would usually be sent through hell and high waters during the first four terms to extinct anyone who is not fit or does not commit to their studies. Operating systems would potentially fall into this primary study. After these four terms all course marks would be merged to establish a mid-examination mark. During my years it was not unusual to barely pass this with about 4 out of 5 where 1 is best (that would account for about~55% - 60%, on a grading scheme that is usually tougher than Canada). After that your program grades are reset and you pursue advanced studies that are usually comprised of several electives. During the advanced studies, exams are usually carried out orally, which have their own flavour but are, from my perspective, easier. To have an idea about the practical implications: my course of studies started with about 50 students. After the mid-examination we were about 12, who barely made it. As of today, I know about 6 who eventually graduated.

Many of them now work as research engineers in German automotive companies, pursued PhDs in Germany (actually all of those guys finished already… time to hurry up for me), or entered the middle or higher management of software companies like SAP.

The courses at my school usually consist of a lecture and occasional labs or tutorials. The courses spanned sometimes multiple terms before you had an exam and were back loaded. That means there was only one single final exam, which you would only be allowed to write after you finished all terms of the course. In my case, I had to wait one year to be able to write my math exam. Exams usually spanned multiple hours. This math exam for instance took five hours. Labs, tutorials and assignments were usually not marked; there were a few exceptions for practical courses like Embedded Systems, which usually occurred at the advanced level. All that counted was the final exam. Procrastination or trying to learn everything 2 weeks before the exam was in almost all cases fatal. Most lecturers were also following the traditional Latin meaning of “study” = “studere” in German: “nach etwas streben, sich um etwas bemühen”: To pursue something yourself; to make an effort yourself. Therefore, it was not usual to ask for problems in the exam that were not covered in detail in the lecture or tutorial. Lecture and tutorial were used to “illustrate” the material not necessarily to cover it in enough depth for the exam. The student was expected to read the course text, optional materials and develop the necessary skills to survive the exam. Only then they’d be valued as an Engineer, or otherwise extinct and thrown out of the program early. This property actually provided you with several freedoms that are hard to recognize first. Only a few instructors cared if you attend the lecture, tutorials, or labs, as long as you survive the exam. This could actually buy you plenty of free time, if you were well organized and skilled. Unfortunately, thanks to EU, austerity, and the introduction of student fees this original tough system has lost much of its traditional flavour over the past 5 years.

Then you come to North America, specifically Waterloo, and see a very different picture for undergraduate studies.

First, students here are actually heavily financially invested into their studies and the university runs as business. Therefore, letting them fail early seems to be big taboo here. The university does not seem to want to disgruntle students. Also university evaluations are carried out in a very different manner. If you had a few very bright people graduating from your program in Germany, you have many people graduating in Canada, with a few being very bright and starting off businesses. The few very bright individuals in both instances would dominate the news and be the selling point of your university. On the other hand, you still have a large mass of students who do not end up becoming CEOs or top-managers in Canada. Out of those, it is quite surprising how many people in Canada actually end up doing things that are totally unrelated to their initial study. It is in so far a surprise to me, because they not only spend a lot of time on it, but they also blew a lot of cash on it. Actually, most of this money comes from student loans, enslaving them for years to debt (another “business model” from the Canadian government).

Second, this is something that I would call North-American culture that has also been analyzed in the (controversial) research community.
These are some ideas that apply to the emergent mass and not necessarily individuals, however, may become emergent for an entire course.
Canadians seem to have the highest level of individualism (IDV), a low level of uncertainty avoidance (UAE), a low long term outlook (LTO) and a low power distance (PDI) compared to other regions.

As a result of LTO and UAE, studies tend to be more applied here and focus on the short-term “market” instead of fundamental research. Also hard-core corporate research labs are found elsewhere than in Canada. Thus, the study is much more applied here and incorporates more labs than in Germany. Therefore, the students also prefer a higher level of practical guidance, instead of leaving them to themselves and punishing them hard if they get it wrong. They also seem to work more ad-hoc here.

That may make them very prone to procrastination (i.e. ignoring the course/lab). They will eventually focus their attention where the pressure/fun comes from (other courses, evening activities …). Other areas may not have this problem. An instructor of mine in Germany, was teaching university-level math courses 20 years ago in Japan… he had trouble setting the standards high enough not to bore the students. Unfortunately, their system also lost much of its flavour over the past 20 years.

Talking to people about this issue there are a couple options to mitigate procrastination and promote continuous participation...

One option is a front-loaded course where most of the efforts are spent on a mid-term examination. You communicate to them that they should focus their attention on the mid-term and that will get burned there regardless (say scores in the high 60s) and an easier final (say scores expected in the high 80s). On the lab side, you also force them to focus their efforts in getting the project design right very early. This was done in the past by having them deliver a comprehensive software design document about half-way through the project. This approach seems to be the favoured option for many instructors here; well some are leaner on the mid-terms and still burn the students on the finals. However, for the actual lesson this does not provide optimal value. At the time the students write the software design document they have little idea what they are going to implement. It was usually communicated to them during the marking, how good or bad their design was and how the real thing should look like. Another issue is, because many instructors follow this model in other courses as well, the students will experience load surges during the term. Here is a good one, try to get hold of a UW undergrad during mid-term periodJ.

Another option is an even workload. Instead of making them write a mid-term, you let them do multiple short quizzes. That way you enforce continuous participation and give them a bit more time during mid-terms. Because the main lab-take-home is acquiring the development skills, we skip the SDD and focus on code deliverables right from the start that are spread out in multiple milestones. Finally, they will include the written design and the lessons learned in a final report. This poses more workload on the TAs and lab instructors in terms of marking, but almost entirely avoids procrastination on the student side and over the long run provides them with more insight into the course material. The risk of course failures is therefore reduced because they are implicitly prepared for the final exam and final course deliverable if they follow through. If they do not, they will eventually feel the pain of low marks right from the start and need to react and presumably catch up with the workload.

We (my lab instructor and me) favour and will use the even workload option, even when this means that I need to share some of the TA workload myself. I want to provide these guys with a high-quality course and ensure that they actually acquire skills in the lab and remember some of the course materials.

Summary

Teaching a course is not going to be a walk in the park. It takes plenty of effort and a good team of TAs and lab instructors. If you teach a course, consider the crowd, their background, their skills, and the established university culture. Be sure to work for the students and not against them. If you are from a different background, noticing such deviations is sometimes hard.

Also thanks to the previous instructors and the current lab instructor for in-depth discussions and input on the subject.

We will see how well that plays out in my case. As Clausewitz once said: “No plan survives the first battle!” … we will see if they tear my wall down J

References

• Willmanns & Hehl, “Praxis und Paradoxa des Innovationsmanagements” (In German).
  This is a good book for innovation and research management in Germany. After reading it, you notice the imprint that you’re educational and cultural background makes on you and how to deal with it.
• Hofstede, Cultural Dimensions.
  He quantitatively tries to analyze different cultures. The measures should not be stereotyped on individuals but give a rough idea what to expect, when you travel to a different background. His research is however quite controversial.
• じょおうのきょうしつ - The Queens Classroom.
  This is a TV series that I came across on a trip to Japan. The teacher has a great interest to prepare the kids for the tough and terribly competitive world in Japan, where bullying and forced subordination are a constant. The methods applied are very traditional and hardly represent what’s actually happening today. It is also exposing how traditional values are now ridiculed over there. Such draconian methods would obviously fail in adult education, specifically in Canada. It’s however a very curious TV series.
• Pink Floyd – The Wall.
  A song of the late 70s. It deals with the abuse by teachers and the situation of schools in Britain at the time. The wall in this case is however used as a metaphor for isolation and not effort (as in the citation before).
• Various management adult education books.