It’s that time of the week again, and a new “Ask an SBer” question is out. The question is: “What makes a good science teacher?”
\nAs usual, since I’m the only math blogger around here, I’m going to shift the subject of the question a bit, to “What makes a good math teacher?”. The answer is similar, but not quite the same.
\nIn my experience, what makes for a good math teacher is a few things:<\/p>\n
There are two teachers that come to mind when I’m talking about this, both in mathematical specialties of computer science. It’s that time of the week again, and a new “Ask an SBer” question is out. The question is: “What makes a good science teacher?” As usual, since I’m the only math blogger around here, I’m going to shift the subject of the question a bit, to “What makes a good math teacher?”. The answer […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-39","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chatter"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4lzZS-D","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nOne is Eric Allender, a professor at Rutgers University, who taught my first course on the theory of computation. ToC is a field that can get incredibly difficult, and can often push abstractions so far away from reality that it’s hard to see what the point of it is. Eric had everything that I said above nailed down perfectly: he had the ability to stand in front of a classroom full of people and explain difficult concepts in a way that made them comprehensible; and he caught us up in his enthusiasm for the subject, so that we caught on to why these difficult abstract things were interesting; and he always kept things grounded in a way where it was clear to us why<\/em> we should care about it.
\nThe other is Errol Lloyd, a professor at the University of Delaware, why I did my PhD, and a member of my dissertation committee. Errol is a professor who studies algorithms – not quite as abstractly mathematical as ToC, but a subject that many computer science students dread. I certainly wasn’t looking forward to it coming into the class: my undergrad experience in the topic was awful. (The main thing I remember about it was the professor who seemed to only own one shirt, which he never washed. It was a running joke among the students, because every time we saw him, the shirt was dirtier. Same stupid blue turtleneck, which was almost more grey than blue by the end of the semester.) In contrast to the dreadful undergrad experience, Errol’s class was one of my favorite classes ever. Errol has the most astonishing teaching method I’ve ever seen. He doesn’t directly tell you anything: he gets up in front of the class, and starts asking questions. But the questions guide you through the process of discovering<\/em> the subject that he’s teaching. And as he does it, he’s excited and happy and very, very kinetic, bouncing around the classroom, peppering different students with his questions. So as a student, you’re involved, and you’re caught up in his enthusiasm. (For those who understand what I’m saying: imagine a professor who can lead you through the process of inventing<\/em> LR parsing from scratch, without ever telling you how to do it – just asking the right questions to force you to work through the problems that led to the invention of the LR parsing algorithms.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"