I'm teaching two courses during this summer term (which ends at the end of next week). The first one is a beginning programming course, and the second one is an introductory networking course. I've taught both of these classes before, and the results have been satisfactory, but not what I'd call spectacular. I'm still finding my groove with both of these classes. But something happened today during my networking class, that taught me a lesson.
I've been teaching this term from a textbook authored by a member of my department. I only have 11 students in my class, so we've been working through the material at a pretty brisk pace -- some of the students are getting enough attention and help and are getting the concepts down, or they've given up and are just waiting for the cram session before the final exam. So I got to the end of the textbook today with seven more hours of class instruction left before the final exam period.
What do you do when you run out of book? I could go back and review everything to make sure everyone catches up with the main concepts of the course. But three days of review seems like overkill and doesn't seem fair to the students who are ready to learn more. I could go into more detail into the technical nature of some of the internet protocols and networking devices, but that didn't seem to fit with the introductory and cross-major nature of the students in the course (I have IS, CS, and IT students in my class). I wanted something that would be beneficial to all the students. But I also wanted it to be something I was interested in teaching.
As I was pondering over the issue before class this morning, I remembered another networking textbook that I came across while looking for some material related to a research project I'm working on. This book, Networks, Crowds, and Markets looks to be a promising integration of network related topics from various disciplines including computer science, economics, sociology, and systems theory. I've been trying to teach my computer networking students that they can often look to other types of network to find patterns and solutions that will help them understand and work with local area networks and other internetwork technologies. This text seems like it can be a useful tool to help reinforce that point with my students.
Now for the lesson. I'm really enjoying myself. I'm interested to see what the rest of this textbook has to offer (the writing style is really accessible for undergraduate students as well). And my interest and enjoyment is carrying over to my teaching. The longer I teach in the classroom (I've only been doing this for about 2-3 years), the more I realize that if I can construct learning experiences that I enjoy, I can improve my teaching. If I'm not excited about what I'm teaching, even if I can find clever ways to presenting it / helping my students understand it, I can't expect to get my students excited about it.
And I'm realizing that cultivating passion (in both myself and my students), more than conveying knowledge, is really what I'm trying to do here.
