1st year courses

Michael Arnsen over at PEDABLOGUE (I'd say "Pedablogue" but for someone forcibly trained in the art of pedantry by programming language compilers, that is too case insensitive) has some interesting things to say about the dangers and challenges of getting jaded in teaching 1st year classes. His article Back to the Front refers to English composition courses, and it set me thinking about our 1st year programming courses, which are the bread and butter of undergraduate computer science degrees.

Like many academic subjects, computing too has many academics who would prefer to teach their own pet subject, or one of the advanced topics, rather than teach the 1st years basic concepts. It is the attitude of the departments that varies, interestingly enough. From what I've heard, whilst some departments don't take any particular care over 1st year teaching, some departments will actively seek to ensure that their 1st years get taught by some of the professors, or well-known names in the field. Some other departments will try and make sure that the best and/or keenest teachers in the department get assigned to 1st year courses, on the basis that teaching beginners to program is difficult (more about that in a later post) and important, so using the best lecturers is a good plan.

What Michael says at the end of his post is very true, even if for me, the "comp" stands for computing:

For every freshman in my comp class, I am their first (and sometimes only) [...] teacher ever. I need to remember that. Likewise, these are not the same students I've taught in the past. I can probably learn quite a bit from them -- even quite a bit about teaching from them.