Mike Hewner's Homepage

I’m a big believer in student feedback. Even though students often can’t articulate the source of problems, going through and reflecting is an essential part of figuring out what I want to try going forward. So even in an environment like GHP where I’m not asked to formally collect evaluations, I always do. Of course, it really helps that at GHP in particular students are relentlessly positive. Seriously my worst review this summer was “not my favorite class by any means, but still good”. I wish that’s what my worst university eval looked like.

BUT, looking at the feedback ( and ), one thing that I am struck by is how much more satisfied by student feedback that is about course content and not about me. This is something that I think the Wicked Teacher of the West said first…but I can’t find the blog post now. When I student says “It’s a really great course” that of course makes me a little happy. But when a student says “I thought it was really neat how you could prove problems are incomputable by reducing them to other incomputable problems” that makes me think I did my job. It’s always about the student’s relationship with the content, not the student’s relationship with you.

I see that a lot more in my theory of computation course than I do in my fractals class – that makes me suspect I’m doing a better job in ToC.

Theory of Computation was different this year, I think because I didn’t have the same core of super-strong students who were really loving the course. There’s definitely a class culture that develops, and I’m not yet attuned enough to think seriously about how I can help its development. The course was still good, and I think I was able to smooth out some rough edges for some students. Remaining challenging however, is the issue of the two main proof techniques we do in class: the pumping lemma and incomputability proofs. If I teach this course again I’m gonna at least crack the pumping lemma.

Fractals was better this year. I found it less stressful, and I think the students learned more. Fractal dimension seemed like a big hit this time around, so I we can explore that a little more. We kicked things off with some very simple feedback functions and Chaos – I think that helped people get on board at the get go. I think affine transformations needs more exploration discussion and play. A little tricky without computers some times.