It is finished. I am done teaching CMPUT 229. It was one of the most intense, rewarding, and challenging times of my life. I am happy I did it, but happier still to see the end of it.
CMPUT 229 is the course where a computing science student will typically first learn assembly language, and low level details about how a CPU works. From the course catalog:
Number representation, computer architecture and organization, instruction-set architecture, assembly-level programming, procedures, stack frames, memory access through pointers, exception handling, computer arithmetic, floating-point representation, datapath, control logic, pipelining, memory hierarchy, virtual memory.
CMPUT 229 holds a special place in my heart. It was the class which most set me on my current career trajectory. Through this class I discovered my enjoyment of working low in the stack, and after this class I started into a pipeline of opportunities which eventually brought me to where I am today. My mind was blown when I realized that I had actually taken this class exactly 15 years ago.
In November 2021, my Master's supervisor Dr. Amaral reached out saying that he would be taking sabbatical, and they needed to find instructors for CMPUT 229 for Fall 2022 and Winter 2023, and asked if I would be interested. I never really got an opportunity to teach during my time at university; I always had enough funding that I never needed to TA, and it's not common for a Master's student to teach any courses. I have nevertheless always been interested in what teaching would be like, and so I jumped on the opportunity. I would teach Fall semester.
The plan was that I would teach the course largely following Nelson's previous editions of the course: I would use his course outline, topics, slides, quizzes etc. Each year, Nelson has students build new labs for the course, so I would select from some that were ready to use, and build the course around that.
In preparation for the course I reviewed the material, and planned out the lectures in a spreadsheet. I was happy to note that if I managed to keep a brisk, but in my opinion managable, pace I would be able to keep some extra time for some lectures of my own design by the end.
When we figured out that we were expecting our second child, I figured that I would be able to manage the workload, and so didn't change my plans to teach.
Teaching
I truly enjoy teaching, especially things I find fascinating. I've known this for a while, as I used to really enjoy mentoring junior employees and interns when I worked at IBM. There's something extremely satisfying about seeing someone gain skills and understanding.
Lecturing went fairly well for the most part. It was occasionally quite challenging to teach someone else's slides where the way the slides worked didn't match my preferred way of telling the story, or where there were errors in the slides. I tried to fix this where I could, but editing slides is an enormous time sink (made worse by the fiddly failures of PowerPoint), and so I didn't do nearly as much as I would have had I more time and energy.
I really enjoyed getting to do office hours with students. The ability to hash out understanding 1-1 in front of a whiteboard is so enjoyable; it's something I really miss from working remotely these last 5 years.
I was very happy I made some extra time at the end of the course. I really enjoyed the fact that I was able to give a lecture about computer security, and that 229 had provided enough background that I was able to give a cogent overview of how the Spectre family of attacks work.
Stupid Questions
Roughly once a month at work we have a meeting we call "Stupid Questions". The goal is to make sure we're willing to ask all the questions we need answered, even if we think they might make us look silly or funny. After a couple of years of having these meetings, I found a description of this process from the science blog Slime Mold Time Mold which now forms the preamble to the document we use for these meetings:
Stupidity is all about preparing you to admit when you’re facing a problem where you don’t know what is going on, which is always. This allows you to ask incredibly dumb questions at any time.
People who don’t have experience asking stupid questions don’t understand how important they can be. Try asking more and dumber questions — lean in on how stupid you are. You will find the world opening up to you. Ignorant questions are revealing!
Fairly early on I was sure I wanted to bring this tradition into the classroom -- though I'll admit I was nervous about it; you really don't want to offend your students by calling them stupid. Eventually I made myself sufficiently brave to take a half an hour of class and present the idea of "Stupid Questions", and get students to ask them.
This went remarkably well. I truly appreciated the ability to re-explain concepts from another persepective, help students clarify their understanding, and generally have slightly off-topic discussion. I think we only did two or three stupid questions sessions, but I thought they were some of the best teaching I did.
Student Reactions
I have to say, I'm happy with the student reactions I got to my teaching. While I still don't have access to my official "Student Perspectives On Teaching" report for the end of the course, in general feedback in-person or via the midterm-evaluation I received was quite positive. Students were certainly annoyed at the level of difficulty and the workload of the course -- but to an extent, that's unavoidable for a course as ambitious as CMPUT 229. The challenges students highlighted are challenges I was distinctly aware of while teaching (slide issues, lectures that weren't as good as I wanted them to be, etc). I think I got better as a lecturer over time.
My RateMyProfessor page I think is a good testament to the work I put into this course, with uniformly high ratings.
Administration
Adminstration was a bit of a thorn in my side throughout this process. There were hiccups with the university (ask me about contract issues over a beer one day), and then there was the actual administration of the course itself. Managing students absence requests, clarifications about assignments, requests for extensions etc, all ate a surprising amount of time. There's far more work involved in managing a course than I ever expected.
Examinations
While assignments and labs were marked by the TAs for the course (each of whom has my eternal gratitude for reducing the workload on me), midterms and finals had to be written and marked by me.
Marking 150+ exams is a very painful process. I put more effort into marking the midterms than perhaps was necessary, as I tried to give part marks and highlight where students made calculation mistakes. Still, each exam took days to finish marking, crammed into evenings and weekends around my work. Suddenly Scantron exams seem horribly tempting.
One of the lessons I learned this semester is that I need to have a writing partner to write exams. It's far too hard to write and edit my own exams and correctly identify drafting errors. That problem where you, the author, read your intent not your words, struck me badly on each of the midterms and the final exam. It was truly embarrasing to have to provide clarification to students live as they wrote their exams.
Alas, while it is really interesting and I plan to write more about AI stuff, ChatGPT won't suffice. While I think that it would have just-about passed my final exam, it was unable to identify missed information in some of the questions. Should I ever teach again, I think I would lean more heavily on my TAs, getting each of them to help with the drafting of a question for the exams. This would spread the workload, while helping make sure the questions were correctly done.
Workload
I'll be the first to admit: I definitely underestimated the workload of running this course. Part of this was my own fault; I never asked what the course enrollment was. So when I found out I was going to be teaching a 250 person section I was a bit gobsmacked.
Combine that with the new baby, and all the disruption to our lives that brought, and it's a wonder I didn't have a meltdown this semester. On the plus side, the section size dropped continuously until the final withdrawal deadline, and which point we stabilized at the final student count of 148.
When I went back to work with Mozilla, I was effectively working 60 hours weeks, every week. This had a real impact on my family life, my health, and my relationships. I definitely was not a fan. I let more things slip in my personal life than I am proud of, trying to manage all the pieces. While we've come out the other side intact, it was not nearly the light workload I had planned on, and much more stressful than I expected. Combine the stress with comparatively low pay, and it's a hard thing to argue in favour of. If someone is teaching casually, they're teaching for non-tangible reasons, that's for sure.
Lessons For the Future
All that being said, I sort of hope I have an opportunity to teach again, sometime in the future (5-10 years from now perhaps?). As such, there's some lessons I'd leave myself:
- Definitely don't have a baby two weeks before class starts. That was a rookie mistake on my part, and shouldn't be repeated.
- Dedicate enough prep time to ensure the assignments are in a good shape. I was embarassed at how many times students would ask me questions in office hours about their assignments, only to realize that editorial work on them previously had removed improtant information, or made it unclear where information needed to come from.
- Do more work on expectation setting with TAs. This was my first time teaching, and I was a pretty bad manager, because I had an unclear set of expectations that were poorly communicated. Thank you to my TAs for sticking it out with me. Having said that, the next lesson is:
- Lean more heavily on your TAs.
Conclusion
Teaching CMPUT 229 was a fascinating experience, that was extremely stressful and more impactful on my family than I would have like. I learned a lot about myself, and I think that I would do it again, but only if I was in a better place to manage the workload. Hopefully though, should I ever teach again, the experience I had this time will make the course substantially easier to the second time around.