Thu, 02 Apr 2009
Withrow Award for Teaching Excellence
Just a short note with characteristic inhumility (ahumility? abhumility?) -- for my Concepts in Database-Backed Web Programming course, I received the Withrow Award for Teaching Excellence from the students.
This means a lot to me, because I spent a huge amount of time on that course (and will have to do so again next fall!) I trace the students' relative happiness with my course to a few particular issues:
I gave almost everyone an A or a B. This will change next year ;)
I was as close to "five nines" available as I could be: e-mail, office hours, etc. Next year, twitter?
I did my best to make the lectures entertaining and informative. (Anyone who watched me publicly insult Django's test framework at PyCon just for the hell of it knows what I mean by "entertaining".)
I'm particularly proud of my repeated references to "evil Chinese hackers" -- next year, it will be "evil Canadian hackers", however. Sorry, Greg.)
Continuing the inhumility, I will also mention that the Dean of Engineering said that he'd never had a student come to compliment him on a professor's teaching before -- normally they just want to bitch.
No matter how nice it is to have the students like my teaching, though, I definitely have a lot of work to do on the class; I rather failed to teach proper programming practice, looking at some recent student work. Sigh. Fall, here I come!
On a separate note, Ryan Wagoner posted about the MSU CS program. I am trying to address at least two of the four problems at the end...
--titus
p.s. Re Django, that was all Jesse Noller's fault. He made me do it -- remote control via Twitter.
p.p.s. Django's test framework is, in fact, mildly fscked. I haven't yet figured out if it's for a good reason or not -- that's another post ;)
posted at: 07:20 | path: /apr-09 | 8 comments
Comments:
Posted by Istvan Albert at Thu Apr 2 07:56:40 2009:
Congratulations.
Teaching a course like this is a major undertaking and probably took an immense amount of work. It is really nice to see that it has made a difference.
Congratulations again.
Posted by Jason at Thu Apr 2 07:59:01 2009:
Congrats Titus! Great to see that your enthusiasm and application practical tools was so well received.
Posted by pam at Thu Apr 2 13:12:18 2009:
I'm telling you, Facebook. Possibly even MySpace. Think of all the vitriol you'll get to spew forth!
Posted by Andrew Perry at Thu Apr 2 15:43:48 2009:
Congratulations. It's great to see those who put some real effort into course development and teaching recognized.
Posted by Steve Holden at Sat Apr 4 13:09:24 2009:
Congratulations, Titus! I am not surprised, since your enthusiasm is so evident in your work for and with the Python community. As a teacher myself I always value positive student feedback the most: as our victims the students are best able to assess whether our work has a positive effect on them. So well done, and keep up the good work.
Posted by Paul Hildebrandt at Tue Apr 7 11:55:26 2009:
Congratulations! It's a job well done. Anyone that knows you would assume that you would do a good job inspiring and directing those seeking knowledge. It's nice to see that confirmed by the very people you are trying to effect.
Posted by Charles R. McCreary at Sat Apr 11 13:39:02 2009:
Well done. I don't know how you do it, do your days have 36 hours?
Posted by Charles R. McCreary at Sat Apr 11 13:49:35 2009:
Well done. I don't know how you do it, do your days have 36 hours?