A taste of teaching

Last week, it was our last class with Prof. Foster Provot for this semester. This is a PhD level seminar discussing all kinds of topics related to data mining and machine learning. As the only three registered PhD students in Stern, Xiaohan, Mihaela and I were "pushed" to give (bi-)weekly presentations and lead discussions for every paper on those topics.

Oh, god! That was hard! I couldn't understand this. When I sit down in the class and listen to the professors, they are all talking and smiling, making all kinds of jokes, writing gracefully and drawing nice pictures on the board. They are teaching as if doing something really really really easy. However, when I stood in front of the class, no matter how hard I had prepared, I felt nervous, awkward, and then suddenly forgot what I should say. My tones got wondered and my voice became frozen. My confidence was quickly fading out... In fact, I was pretty confident in my presentation skills because I already had some conference/workshop presentation experiences before. I always felt proud of my cool behavior in front of a group of people. But now the truth was that it did not work here! Teaching in class is totally different from giving a short 20-minute talk, at all! For this, I really admire Foster! He is such a sharp person and a great professor. He can always notice the key point in our thoughts and help us sort it out right away. Often times, his questions are actually helpful and informative "hints", which inspire us to think what we have neglected and then better organize our thoughts.

Prof. Anindya Ghose once told me that when you talk to people, you should try to make your point as clear as you can at the first time. Do not wait for people to find themselves confused and then ask you. I believe this is important, but it is not easy to achieve. Sometimes, when we explain something, we have a tendency to either describe it too much that makes the redundancy, or speak too little that leads to the ambiguity. (It seems that the distribution for the intensity of our explanatory words is "bimodal", either too high or too low.) I like Prof. Panos Ipeirotis's teaching, because his way is highly logic. You feel like you are led into a room, and then get to explore by yourself with encouragements time by time. He does not show the whole picture at one time, but leave to us ourselves to find it out. That is coolest part. You never know how big the picture is! Just like an adventure game!

I sometimes was imaging myself in the future, can I do this well when I become a real professor? Will my students enjoy my teaching too? Yea, I believe so! That is my goal and just keep going:-)