INSPIRING STUDENTS
2015-03-07
by Richard White
Earlier in my teaching career I worked at a high school that had a depressingly low rate of its graduates going on to college. It’s the desire of every teacher to encourage students to continue their learning, and while that doesn’t necessarily mean college for everyone, for most people it should. Encouraging my students to apply themselves and to strive for something big was a noble challenge, and an exhausting one.
At my current school, I have the benefit of getting to work with a different population, and one that is almost always appreciative of the advantages that they’ve been afforded in life. In addition to taking full advantage of the opportunities they’ve been given, some of them push even farther, and in so doing, inspire me to be better myself.
A couple of days ago, I received this email out of the blue from a student who’d graduated last year:
Hi Mr. White!
In my CS106A lecture right now, and we’re learning about passwords. Reminded me of that one time you spent physics class telling us to back up our hard drives and how to make passwords :) hope everything’s going well at Poly!
The next thing I did, of course, was search for the website for Stanford’s CS106A course to see how what they were doing compared to what I do in my own CS courses, and three hours later, I’ve got some new ideas to consider for how I run things next year.
It wasn’t this student’s intention to provide me with an opportunity to reflect on what I’m doing—she’d just wanted to say hi, and I appreciated that and responded in kind. But it was the perfect excuse for me to see what my former students are moving on to, and to reflect on how I might better prepare them for what awaits after they leave my care.
Another example: a current student has been working with me for a couple of years now, and after enrolling in his second computer science course in as many years, he approached me about the possibility of helping him with an idea he had for a Python program that would:
- allow him to enter the title of a song
- search YouTube for a recording of that song
- automatically download that song to his computer
There is certainly the possibility of making something like this happen, but it’s a bit beyond his (and my) skill set at this point. I couldn’t help him with this particular project… but I could prepare a couple of smaller programs that might provide some first steps along that path. I spent an hour or so setting up a Python program that would automatically send an email to someone from his Gmail account, and another one that checks a NOAA webpage to identify the current temperature, and then reports that temperature back to whomever is running the program.
These are relatively small programs, but for a new programmer, they’re the first step in writing code that interacts with the world outside his/her own machine. And thanks to this student’s request, I’m considering including a small project on this very thing as part of my own Introductory Computer Science course.
Teaching at my current school is a refreshing change from the days when I had to lead my students through classes that they had difficulty appreciating. Now, it’s often my own students, current and former, leading me in my ongoing goal of becoming a better teacher.
I’m lucky to be able to work with these young men and women.