Motivation
My primary motivators are engaging personalities, challenges, and tight feedback.
My favorite teachers have been enthusiastic, confident, charismatic, and sometimes a bit humorous. In high school, my favorite chemistry teacher walked into the classroom in the middle of a loud argument between two students, took a dramatic pause, and announced “Well, this is awkward.” He probably could have said anything, but smiling there beaming at the two students completely defused the situation. He had a magnetic personality, projected confidence, and encouraged his students to do well. I enjoyed being in the classroom with him, and I enjoyed paying attention to his material. Similarly, I had an English teacher who was so excited about poetry and authors that it was infectious. I hated the subject, but I worked hard in her class, and I’m still proud of one of the few pieces of writing I did that earned an A- mark. In high school, the material was usually not very challenging, but participation and engagement was paramount. At this level, I learned best from the presence of a strong, engaged, personality.
In college, I was so bored with most of the lectures that I rarely attended. The first lecturer I remember was my Calculus II Professor, who recognized that I was having problems because I was missing background material, and called me into her office and tried to work through some with me. I never ended up turning things around in her class but I was profoundly grateful for her attention and recognizing that I could do things, but I was missing prerequisites. This is probably the greatest lesson I try to project into my own students, that they need to be engaging me at the right level in order to learn effectively. In my college-level Computer Science courses, I learned far more from the textbooks than the lecturers. Many lecturers didn’t have a strong grasp of the English language or spoke with strong accents that made it even more difficult to understand new concepts. My best experiences in the CS curriculum were with the CS:APP curriculum that was designed by Bryant and O’Hallaron at Carnegie Mellon University. This might have been the only useful course I took in Computer Science, but even in this course I acquired all my knowledge through the teaching laboratories and the textbooks, not the classroom. The CS:APP laboratories, particularly the “bomb” exercise, are challenging exercises with a tight feedback loop. The student has to debug a binary that “blows up” when the wrong passwords get entered. Using a debugger, they have to figure out how the passwords are being checked, then break the security of the binary and work out the passwords, with successively more difficult techniques for each password. I was absolutely enamored with these exercises, and although I already had some of the skills I needed to complete them, the assignments were like being handed puzzle boxes that I couldn’t put down. At the college level, I needed well-organized lectures, continuous feedback and challenges. Having a confident and engaging lecturer certainly helped a lot as well.
In grad school, I switched majors completely to applied mathematics, and suffered through a grueling curriculum at Columbia University, ultimately being the only student in my year to fail written qualifiers (several others withdrew). I was motivated to work hard because it was make-it-or-break-it in grad school, and I wanted to know that I was smart enough, and more importantly, organized and hard working enough to become a PhD. At this point, the lecturers didn’t have to be well-organized, engaging, or motivating, I was showing up to class every day, taking notes, and spending late nights and weekends on homework assignments. The best courses all had tight feedback loops: weekly or biweekly quizzes, regular homework assignments that were quickly graded and returned, and multiple exams.
De-Motivation
I would MUCH rather see a well-presented web page, PDF, or even a transcript than watch 90% of the lecturers I have encountered. Monotone presenters with poor timing are very hard for me to follow or listen to. Disorganized presenters are also very frustrating. The worst offenders may be those who are unknowledgeableor disinterested in the material they are presenting. If you’d like some strong constructive criticism about how to improve your lecture, I’m sure I will have plenty of feedback for you!