Classroom management

One of the things they don't teach you when you're getting a PhD is how to manage a classroom. And, that's too bad, because there are a lot of really smart people out there doing an absolutely terrible job of managing university classrooms.

I'll get back to mathy-type stuff soon, I just need to rant a bit.

I won't name names, because this isn't a personal attack, it's just citing an example. Modern Programming Languages is the name of the course. It's supposed to be about the underpinnings of good language design. It's an upper division course that also serves as a core course for the grad curriculum. It seems a reasonable expectation that anybody taking such a course would already know what a compiler does.

Well, one of the students doesn't. I'd say too bad for him, but it's really too bad for the rest of us. He's derailed three of the last five lectures with questions about translation to machine code. I'm not talking about the type of stupid questions (yes, there are stupid questions) that everybody drops from time to time and can be dismissed easily by even a clumsy prof. He really wants to be spoon fed a remedial course on compiler construction.

An instructor with some decent classroom management skills would simply suggest that the questions are both background and off topic and the student should come by during office hours if they need some guidance on where to read up on this stuff. Instead, we're spending 10-15 minutes of a 75-minute lecture listening them go back and forth on questions so fundamental, I'd throw them on a test in a 200-level course just so the bottom half of the class would get something right.

I think working in industry makes you a little less tolerant of this sort of crap. Derail a meeting with a senior manager in the room and you will get your hand slapped. After a few such episodes, you just learn when to shut up and figure it out on your own time. And, you come to expect others to do likewise.

Recognizing that this student hasn't been sitting in business meetings for 25 years, I pulled him aside gently after class and told him (politely, I hope) that he needed to stop monopolizing the class, especially since the tests are going to be written by the prof of the other section, which presumably has covered a lot of relevant ground in the hour we've been talking about compilers. Fortunately, by all accounts (including several profs) this isn't a particularly tough class, so it's more bothersome than a real handicap. It is, however, really bothersome.