I fear that a large portion of computer science education comes off exactly like this for students:https://
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I fear that a large portion of computer science education comes off exactly like this for students:
https://xkcd.com/3003/“Hi! I, your instructor, have lost sight of where this thing came from, what problem it solves, what tradeoffs it incurs, and how to use it wisely in practice. But you’re learning the vocabulary and you can repeat the pattern on an exam, and that’s the important part!”
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(Not just CS, of course; I’m just broadcasting from where I live here)
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@inthehands When I was a teacher, one thing I prioritized (and which was polarizing for students) was putting things in historical context. Before showing how virtual memory worked, for instance, I'd go through how the older partitioning systems worked - both static and dynamic. I'd try to *not* present them as "dumb old stuff", but instead have the students figure out the weaknesses (eg. internal or external fragmentation). And *then* we'd start talking about virtual memory.
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I really love getting context myself. Though perhaps others might be impatient and want to get to the thing already. But the context is part of the thing.
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@inthehands Some students loved this (they kept saying they got an understanding of *why*, rather than just *how*), and others disliked it ("why waste time with dumb old shit I won't work with?"). But the ones who disliked it would often (but not always) end up saying that it still got them "handles" to understand the stuff they *did* need, because they turned out to be better at recalling the actual insights when thinking about the problems, rather than just memorizing "how things are".
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Paul Cantrellreplied to Martijn Faassen last edited by
@faassen @datarama
One of the best courses I ever took was a semester on measure theory and the Lebesgue integral. We studied it entirely through the history, in chronological order. This meant that we’d often prove a theorem one week, then find out the next week that the proof was flawed and there’s a counterexample: making the same mistakes actual mathematicians made.It was •fantastic•. I still remember details decades later.
The prof wrote it up:
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@inthehands @faassen I did that with software-only mutexes! We'd go through a range of actual, historical flawed attempts and find the mistakes, and eventually get to Dekker's Algorithm.
