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If you& #39;ve spent any time engaged in instructional design or learning engineering-if you& #39;ve consulted with educator as s they work to build or improve instruction-you& #39;ve asked an educator some variant of "Why are you teaching this?" or "Do students really need to know this?" 1/x
I& #39;ve asked these questions A LOT. I& #39;ve watched my colleagues ask these questions, over and over again. What& #39;s most important? What MUST your students be able to do? What MUST they know? 2/x
Which is why today& #39;s work on Big O notation and quadratic growth is just embarrassing. In my Intro to CS for non majors, I inherited a fantastic set of slides, including a nice unpacking of the math involved in determining Big O for insertion sort (n^2 if you didn& #39;t know) 3/x
But every year, I find that despite these great slides, my students struggle to understand how we move from the counting of iterations and operations to getting to n^2. So every year I expand this section...more details and a slower pace on how (n-1)*n/2 4/x
becomes (n-1) * 2n + (n-1)*n/2 which eventually becomes n^2. Which becomes O(n^2). And so every year I try to break it down into smaller, easier to understand pieces. More slides. More explanation. More lovely diagrams. 5/x
Our covid-inspired move to online is demanding a more thoughtful use of synchronous time, and I& #39;ve been working hard to throw overboard all the stuff that& #39;s non essential this summer. This is hard. It& #39;s harder than you& #39;d think given the way I advise other educators. 6/x
So, I realized in prepping our next class meeting that as I& #39;ve worked to provide more bite-sized steps on the move to quadratic growth, the math explanation has grown...and grown. 34 of my 74 slides on this topic are now devoted to UNPACKING THE MATH. 7/x
I& #39;m teaching intro for non-majors -- I don& #39;t expect my students to do these mathematics. I don& #39;t assess them on it. Some fraction of my students are in domains that this section puts them to sleep. The rest are seeing this detail and are terrified. And confused. 8/x
So: I don& #39;t care if my students can do this. I don& #39;t expect my students to do this. Why am I spending more than 50% of the meeting (and a lot of time and sweat on better slides) trying to teach it? This is bonkers. 9/x
How we teach...how we engage as educators is so deeply personal. And some days it may simply reflect all the neurosis we carry as educators. And this is a case study; I& #39;d have never let an OLI course author I was advising get caught up in this. Awake at the podium...10/x
