CS61B application
Describe your teaching experience.
This might include previous experience from any of the positions above or from taking CS 370: Introduction to Teaching CS. Feel free to copy from your official application and elaborate as much as you want. If you have a teaching experience that might differentiate your application, include it here. Please list in order of most recent to least.
- I was involved with CSM 70 for three semesters, including one semester as a Junior Mentor, one as a Senior Mentor, and one as Co-coordinator. (Fall 2018 - Spring 2019)
- I co-taught a CS70 CS Scholars section in Spring 2019.
- I was a reader for CS170 in Spring 2019.
- I was an academic intern / lab assistant for Data 100 in Fall 2018.
- I was an academic intern for CS 61A in Spring 2018.
Why do you want to teach CS 61B?
I want to teach CS61B because it’s the class that cemented my decision to become a CS major, and was the reason I started working on side projects as a hobby and later a passion. It was the first class that made me realize how powerful software engineers truly are, and the impact we can have on the world. I’d like to share those insights with my students, and help them learn what being a CS major is all about. I’ve also been involved with teaching math-y related courses for 3 semesters now, so I’d like to try something different.
What makes you a good computer science teacher?
I’m proud of two main aspects of how I teach computer science. First, I emphasize teaching intuition very highly, over (almost) everything else. Since I’ve relied heavily on intuition for most of my academic success, I understand how valuable it is for students to gain intuition the first couple times they learn about a topic, and how it gets harder and harder if/when students develop a mental block. Therefore, I’m usually willing to sacrifice going through the entire worksheet if it means that I can cover the topics I’ve chosen clearly, thoughtfully and hopefully intuitively. Second, I try very hard to be as personable as I can for my students. Everyone has things that they’re good at in terms of social interaction—for me, I’m interested in a lot of different things, so I’m pretty good at holding conversations with different kinds of people, and I have a good memory, so I can remember the stories people tell me and follow up about them later. I use both of these traits to my advantage with my students, and try to ensure they feel comfortable enough with me to let their guard down.
What do you think is the biggest barrier to student achievement in CS 61B?
I think the answer to this question is one that (somewhat surprisingly) does not vary depending on the professor teaching the course — stress. Whether it’s cheating on assignments, over preparing but ultimately underperforming on exams, or generally just being miserable while taking the course, I think stress is the biggest barrier to achievement in 61B. I understand that the workload that students take upon themselves, and the academic implications of the class, are not under course staff’s control. However (not claiming to have concrete answers) I think there’s a lot of work still to be done in alleviating and preventing students’ mental health problems on a course-wide level.
Is there any individual who can speak to your teaching experience? If so, how have you worked with them in the past?
I think Professor Chris Hunn can speak to both my teaching expertise and dedication in a position of leadership. As CSM 70 co-coord, I worked closely with him in resolving a point of friction that developed at one point during the semester with the professors of the course. He saw first-hand how my co-coord and I worked tirelessly over a number of weeks to correct the situation, developed sweeping changes in course content in line with the professors’ requests, and ultimately reached an effective compromise that has paved the way for much better interaction between CSM and course staff in the future.
He also hired me as a tutor for CS70 CS Scholars. While he wasn’t too involved in my teaching, he occasionally dropped in to observe how section was going. He told me that he received positive feedback from students, which I’m sure he could speak to as well.
If you’ve created any teaching material on the web, provide a link.
Here’s one of the worksheets I created with CSM 70 as a supplement for my students, a write-up about random variables: https://www.dropbox.com/s/4a2p1nqrn6vszng/random_variables_writeup.pdf?dl=0
uid: 202005111503 cs61b application date: May 11, 2020 tags: #applications