Teaching

Teaching has come up a lot for me lately. I gave two weeks worth of lectures for a 400-level course at the start of this term, someone asked me about something I had done in a teaching role (they were one of the students) when I gave a guest lecture, I had to count my TA appointments for a application, and I've been reading a lot of teaching statements as a part of being on the faculty recruiting committee (where we are looking for the next UBC CS profs!). It's made me think about my teaching experience, especially as I am planning to pursue academia.

Despite my goal of being a researcher (meaning a lighter teaching load), I really do enjoy teaching. That is, I enjoy teaching in the right conditions. I personally find it very hard to succeed pedagogically in classes that prioritize scale, meaning those that just try to find ways to cram as many students into the course without needing to hire more staff. Going this route tends to mean increased automation and standardization and less face-to-face time between students and staff, which I fundamentally disagree with. Throughout my many years of being in school, I have found that by far the best educational experiences were those where the class was small, the students got to know the staff well, and the course content and assignments were customized to meet the students' needs and interests. Some examples of great educational experiences are my Latin 102 class, my 200-level Swedish classes, and my Educational Psychology 500-level class on qualitative research.

In the future, I hope I can teach small, creative courses that I really customize to the students. Unfortunately, I don't really get to choose what I teach at this point in my career. But I can still think about everything I have taught and ponder what I value from it! That is the point of this visualization practice after all.

Anyways, in the visualization below, I added one "sticker" for each teaching-related position I have held. It turns out I have held a lot of teaching-related positions - 34 to be exact. It started in 2017 when I first became a teaching assistant (TA) for CPSC 110. I later got other opportunities such as being a course facilitator for the Extended Learning program on software development and lead proctor and invigilator for the computer science department. Nowadays, most of my teaching happens for my supervisor's courses: CPSC 447 and CPSC 547. Sometimes I get to lecture as part of these appointments, and sometimes I hold a more senior role like lead TA. The size, shape, colour, and texture of the stickers show all of this information. The stickers are laid out in a spiral pattern, with the inner stickers being my earliest teaching jobs and the outer ones being the more recent ones.