M.S.U.
Michigan State University
East Lansing, Michigan
(1966 - 1970)
Teaching Computer Science as Graduate
Assistant at MSU
Course Taught: |
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My Experience Teaching at M.S.U. |
| I decided to pursue a math
doctorate, but Western Michigan University where I was working as assistant director of the Computer Center in the Mathematics Department did not offer the PhD degree, so I enrolled in Michigan State University at East Lansing to earn my Mathematics doctorate. I was awarded a graduate assistantship in the University's acedemic Computer Science department in the Engineering School to help teach the beginning Computer Science class. My assistantship duties were first helping Professor Jim Burnett teach a basic computer science class. There were so many students, that he taught one recorded lecture that was replayed on video at various classrooms. I wrote multiple choice exams for the class that I would help administer at the classrooms. I taught the video class once, but my biggest job was manning a help desk to help tutor students having difficulty with the assigned exercises that I often created myself. I promoted my position that we should not show how to solve the problem, but only assist in finding the solution. It would have been much simpler to show the solution, but I was convinced that would be a less effective teaching approach. Jim appreciated my help, and we became friends. He drove me in his tiny red Corvette to a few photography shows in Detroit. I was next assigned to teach alone a special technical computer programming class for engineers. I created technical exercises typical of engineering problems. My brother is a Licensed Surveyor, and he helped me design a problem in calculating results of realistic field surveying. MSU had a much bigger computer than we had at Western, but the students' programming exercises were done similarly. I was often found at all hours helping students in the Computer Center solve their programming exercises. Late one evening, the night shift employees brought to my attention that many of my students were cheating. They were apparently getting copies of another student's successful solution card deck. The cheating was obvious because the printed programming was identical. Since students invent their own names for the many programming variables, this never happens. I asked for the offending students' card decks and outputs. The workers left notes to those students to meet their instructor. They asked if they should treat cheaters in other instructors' classes the same way, and I agreed. But those other teachers were annoyed at me because of the extra work it required of us to meet and resolve the stealing issue; they would have preferred not knowing about the cheating problem. In my second year at MSU, I was having doubts about pursuing that PhD. I found that I was not enjoying my math classes, but the Computer Science classes I was also taking were fun. I was enjoying teaching Computer Science classes. And I was realizing that the abstract math I was learning was relatively useless compared to the extremely useful programming skills I was learning. I decided to drop out of the math program and earn another Master of Science degree in Computer Science and teach that at the college level instead of mathematics. I saw that there is a lot of applied math in Computer Science, and that having graduate degrees in both made sense to me, even though starting over would mean not getting that degree until after four years at MSU. |
