Teaching recitation: post mortem

I wrote previously about my insights as I started teaching 6.004. Well the semester is over, and I think it’s been a semester well done. I had a thoroughly amazing experience, and I just wanted to say a few words as I was reading through the course evaluation results that came out earlier today.

MIT makes some effort to get students to fill out course evaluations at the end of each semester. A majority of the students in 6.004 are silent this time around, but I am pleased that I believe a majority of the students attending my recitations filled it out, perhaps because I asked them for feedback twice in the middle of the semester and continued to ask them to fill out the evaluation towards the end. The takeaways here are that 1) instilling the idea that feedback is important is effective and 2) spamming works!

Anyway, I am pleased with my ratings and feedback. I definitely “Encouraged participation,” and what I need to work on most is “Stimulating interest.” “Defining goals” is another area for improvement, but that’s no doubt easier the second time around. I would have expected lower marks in “Well-organized presentations,” but shhh—maybe they didn’t notice me blundering around the classroom every 10 minutes. I find it so interesting how I have gotten to know some of my students enough to (perhaps!) identify them by the pattern of numbers and the few words they left me. There’s almost a beauty to that — the rating makes sense, and that’s awesome.

I am truly encouraged by the enthusiasm in the comments on my teaching, along with comments in personal emails students sent me after the course was over. I can sort of feel the learning that happened, the insights gained, and the new-found appreciation of the material. I know that probably only a minority of the students came out of 6.004 feeling this way, but I’m almost jealous of these students. I had to take 6.004 twice to achieve what they achieved. But then again, I found the lectures excellent the second time around, and I was certainly motivated by the responsibility to teach it to 50 students.

A lot of the comments on the class struck a deep chord with my sentiments on the course when I took it a few years ago. I did not have a great recitation, and section-hopping just got tiring after a while. Lectures caused me information overflow, and I certainly did not have an intuition on the real-world physical aspects of computer architecture (the EE side of things). The lab work seemed unconnected to the general concepts, and I, like many others, learned that it was quite easy to get an A in the course by pattern matching across old quizzes. This course, though stable, seemed less than ideal.

But I am fortunate to have had these insights into the course before TAing for it. From the very beginning, I knew I would be doing things a bit differently from the other TAs. The TA’s job is to go over the tutorial problems and cover any background necessary to talk about said problems. But I knew I would be trying, every step of the way, to connect these problems to the lectures, the labs, the big picture, the physical world, and anything I could think of, really. In theory, I was doing more than the TA’s job, but in practice, I often forwent half or more of the tutorial problems I was supposed to go over. I often just talked at them, trying my best to tell them a complete story, and yet, the material I presented was very different from lecture. And I hoped that my students could take my simple words and do the rest of the problems on their own. Just as importantly, I tried my very very best to hide the fact that old quizzes were an effective resource.

This combination of not covering the material I was supposed to and not pointing out the resources that would ensure good grades (but also ensure less learning) made me very nervous at first — who am I to come in to this class that’s been run a certain way for the last N years and, without any experience, do things another way? But the results every few weeks affirmed my teaching methods — my sections consistently did great on the quizzes and in the class overall. I certainly understand the typical EECS undergrad here better than some others. I am a typical EECS undergrad here, after all, and I taught how I wish I were taught.

I feel quite fortunate, also, in the students that I had. I do believe that enthusiasm is contagious, and that students enthusiastic about learning will seek out enthusiastic instructors. After a few weeks into the semester, if I kept up the enthusiasm and since students are free to come and go between the 10 recitation sections, I would only have the enthusiastic students left to teach. The students who don’t need recitation and the students who prefer another teaching style filter themselves out, and it no longer becomes my duty to instruct them on a bi-weekly basis. And then, life is wonderful. Teaching enthusiastic students is infinitely easier than teaching unenthusiastic students.

I am grateful to have been a part of this journey working from inside of a 200+ student foundations class at MIT. Through all the ups and downs, these past few months have made me truly realize that I love teaching, and I want to thank all of my students for that. I sincerely hope to teach again soon.

But despite all my new insights and experiences, this TAship has also reminded me to keep things in perspective. MIT is first and foremost a research institution. The professors are here because they can produce good work, not so that they can teach undergraduates. Turns out, the same applies to the graduate students, who serve as TAs for funding, and only the occasional dedicated instructor is going to devote his semester to the students in need. This is no earth-shattering epiphany, and I am no exception. My TA offer for next semester is sadly expiring in a couple days, and I am gearing myself up for the research that I am here to do.

I hope my experiences here are useful to the aspiring teacher, and I will close off my discussion of 6.004 with two fun anecdotes:

First. I daresay that incentivizing my sections with something as simple as food to complete the Beta Processor lab early worked! One of my sections was at a 80% completion rate 2 days before the due date, statistically significantly more than the next best section. I made them muffins afterwards, and a good time was had by all.

Second. I wore a friend’s pedometer a few times during recitation, and learned that I actually pace around a classroom 1 mile when I teach for 2 hours. Crazy!

Self-driving cars set for test drive in Nevada – The Salt Lake Tribune

Nevada drivers could soon be sharing the road with vehicles that don’t need them.

via Self-driving cars set for test drive in Nevada – The Salt Lake Tribune.

I simply cannot wait until Vegas taxis are driven autonomously!

Department of Motor Vehicles officials said Monday they’ve issued Google the nation’s first license to test self-driving cars on public streets, after conducting demonstrations on the Las Vegas Strip and in Carson City that show the car is as safe — or perhaps safer — than a human.

3 test vehicles (so far) with red license plates + an infinity symbol; ready to market in 3-5 years, when the plates will be green. hm!

Press Release – 2012 U.S. Automotive Emerging Technologies Study | J.D. Power

The study measures vehicle owner interest and purchase intent for emerging automotive technologies, both before and after market price is revealed. The top-five considered technologies–based on vehicle owners who indicate that they "definitely" or "probably" would purchase in their next vehicle–both pre-price and at market price are:

Pre-Price Feature Interest  
Light emitting diode (LED) headlights     70%   
Natural language voice-activation    69%   
Next-generation head-up display    69%   
Wireless connectivity system    68%   
Remote vehicle diagnostics    65%   

At Market Price Feature Interest
HD radio (at $100)    52%
Enhanced collision mitigation system (at $750)    46%
Wireless connectivity system (at $300)    45%
Surround-view rear-vision camera (at $550)    44%
Personal assistance safety services (at $15/month)    41%

via Press Release – 2012 U.S. Automotive Emerging Technologies Study | J.D. Power.

Sample of 17,400 car owners (what about non car owners?) shows that a majority of people still wouldn’t buy into autonomous vehicle technology. Also, men are more into this stuff than women.

HT Driverless HQ [src]

A2757 STATE OF NEW JERSEY

An Act concerning autonomous vehicles, and supplementing chapter 3 of Title 39 of the Revised Statutes.

via A2757 STATE OF NEW JERSEY (link no longer available).

NJ is next to introduce driverless car legislation!

Interesting: “endorsement on that person’s driver’s license to operate an autonomous vehicle,” meaning that operating an autonomous vehicle will require a special license that currently (almost) no one has.

Autonomous car: A Security risk? – Read all about IT!

Google is set to step up its road testing of the company’s autonomous cars now that the vehicles have passed the Nevada driving authority test, but security experts warn of potential dangers.

via Autonomous car: A Security risk? – Read all about IT!.

Wireless devices like web-based vehicle-immobilisation systems that can remotely disable a car could potentially be used maliciously to disable cars belonging to unsuspecting owners, said Samani, citing a recent case in Texas where 100 vehicles were disabled from a remote disable system.

Blog migration from Posterous to WordPress

Posterous was recently acquired by Twitter, so I have been twiddling my thumbs for the past few weeks thinking about how/where to transition my blog and give it a more permanent home. I finally decided to give WordPress a try. Initially, the customizability of WordPress scared me, but it is truly wonderful how modular and flexible the system is.

If you were watching my old blog, please note that this is the new home!

This post documents the migration of my Posterous blog here, both in terms of content and functionality, in rough order in which I made the changes. I looked around for tools to do most of the heavy lifting, but I also made manual changes where I did not see a clear alternative. The process was spread out over about 3 days and was relatively painless.

Importing posts, comments, images, tags from Posterous into WordPress

I used Posterous Importer, which is well done and takes care of most of the heavy lifting.

Install at the Plugins > Add New menu, or alternatively:

Upload the posterous-importer folder to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory
Activate the plugin through the 'Plugins' menu in WordPress
Go to the Tools -> Import screen, Click on Posterous

Results:

Importer Status
Posts: 28
Comments: 10
Attachments: 167

w00t!

Linking to previous posts

By default, links within posts to previous blog posts on Posterous will still point to the links on Posterous. I used a very manual process for switching these links, but I was not migrating many posts, and WordPress at least has a very nice interface for searching through previous content.

Editing the main template

I disliked the fact that my name would show up along every post on the main page of the blog (with my selected theme Typografia). This was not the case on my old blog, and it just seemed redundant. Instead of having to select a new theme that conveniently did not have this extra field, all I needed to do was go to Appearance > Editor in the menu to edit the theme and remove the following code:

<div class="post_author"><?php _e(' Posted by '); ?><?php the_author(); ?>
...
</div>

Editing the styles

There were some minor color contrast issues with the font color of the sidebar that spanned not only the main theme style (Typografia) but also the skin I selected (style4). Editing the styles of the main theme is done through the same interface as editing the main template. However, the theme editor doesn’t contain stylesheets for style skins, so I needed to ssh into my hosting server and manually edit the file at wp-content/themes/typografia/skins/skin4.css.

Tag to category conversion

Posterous uses tags and for whatever reason, WordPress has a sense of both categories and tags. This article details the distinction between tags vs categories. In short, the distinction is arbitrary, but categories can be viewed as a general bucket for a post, whereas tags can be viewed as attributes of a post. Categories are older than tags in WordPress history.

A plugin called Categories and Tags Converter (found at the Tools menu) allows for easy conversion between categories and tags in either direction.

Photo galleries

Posterous has a very nice built-in photo gallery display that takes the photos you want and displays them in gallery form with an easy way to switch between photos and download the entire set. Though the migration properly transferred most of the images, it missed some (that I needed to manually upload to WordPress) — on average 2 images per image-heavy post.

Additionally, it displayed all images without any special formatting and sort of just dumped them all our to the reader, so the images made the post a lot longer lengthier than necessary. WordPress also has a built-in gallery tool that tiles images to take up less space. My main use cases were (without the *):

Including all images associated with the post: [*gallery]

Tiling images in 2 columns (default is 3): [*gallery columns="2"]

Excluding images from gallery, to be displayed elsewhere in the post: [*gallery exclude="56,57,58"] (where 56,57,58 are image IDs)

Having multiple galleries in Posterous was trivial, but in WordPress meant creating multiple galleries that excluded all image IDs that belonged to other galleries. It was sort of a pain, but not that difficult. I did not try this, but there seems to be a better way via the Multiple Galleries plugin.

Other manual changes

Spacing between headings and text body was off in a number of posts, so that meant giving each post a quick scan for ugliness.

Publishing to Facebook and Twitter

Network Publisher uses LinksAlpha API to connect to up to 25 other social networking services. LinksAlpha allows 2 networks before trying to charge you, so that was perfect. The config documentation was very well done.

LinkAlpha’s privacy policy sounds, but regardless, from Facebook’s Account Settings > Apps, you can revoke all the authorizations except for “Post on your behalf.” The LinksAlpha web interface will give you an unhappy error about loading your news feed, but WordPress will still be able to successfully publish to your wall.

Google analytics

Google Analytics for WordPress gets this set up swiftly.

Feedburner

Posterous encouraged me to use Feedburner to publish my rss feed, which was great foresight. Instead of asking all my subscribers to update their link to the new one, I simply had to go to Edit Feed Details... and update the Original Feed URL.

Facebook Like button and Twitter Tweet button

I decided this feature on Posterous was not very meaningful and thus unnecessary to migrate over functionality.

And that’s it! The dread of migrating all this content and functionality has actually inhibited me from writing more, so I’m glad that that is over with.

This article on writing code in posts was not a part of the migration process, but it was useful for writing this post and describes the use of code and pre tags.

The Wisdom of Slime – NYTimes.com

THE United States interstate highway system is often celebrated as a simple yet highly efficient transportation scheme — one that, starting in the 1950s, transformed the American economy and lifestyle. Its network of roads was designed to maximally span the country with a minimal number of links, while still allowing for enough redundancy to help drivers overcome wrong turns and missed exits.

via The Wisdom of Slime – NYTimes.com.

Transportation networks computed using living slime, modeling and affirming the development of the interstate highway system in the United States.

HT pranjal

Autonomo 2030 Concept – The Details on the Behance Network

Autonomo is a fully autonomous vehicle designed for the year 2030 to overcome many of the major problems facing many of the world’s major cities like Los Angeles face today. Its main sources of inspiration are drawn from biomimicry, sustainability, artificial intelligence and information technology. 

Its objectives are to alleviate congestion, maximize access through the already existing road network, improve energy efficiency and create a completely carbon neutral transportation option. We can achieve all of this with minimal restructuring of the existing road infrastructure through the use of advanced smart technologies.

via Autonomo 2030 Concept – The Details on the Behance Network.

Autonomo 2030, circa Nov 2011 — design concept for slick distributed synchronized autonomous vehicle system, bringing together a lot of the ideas I’ve been toying with over the past few months and incorporating new ones.