Teaching Statement (Oct
2021)
Given COVID-19, these past 2 years have been difficult. Even though I
have working on online teaching for many years, so the switch to online
teaching was relatively straightforward, COVID has inflicted a lot of
overheads and inconveniences. Being more or less cooped up at home probably
does not help.
There are no good solutions to online exams and cheating has been a huge
headache. Computer Science has also become the rage because the pay is high
and our enrollment has more or less tripled in recent times and my teaching
workload has become extremely punishing.
At this point, I have now been teaching at NUS for more than 15 years. As
a matter of discipline, I take time to reflect on teaching every 3 years,
since the day I started. I think it is helpful to take snapshots of our
thinking of our work periodically.
This is me "walking the talk." I have always been an advocate of
reflection and metacognition.
Teaching is the Business of People
Given COVID, there is now a renewed focus on edtech, but I do not believe
that this interest will be sustained -- and progress will still be slow.
The reason for this is that from my many years of experience teaching,
the real limitation in teaching is fundamentally the human mind. Unless
people can get brain transplants, things cannot improve overnight.
The key to using technology to
improving teaching is pedagogy, not technology. We need to first
master the psychology of the students (and teachers!) and also understand
how people learn. Those who think that technology is a silver bullet are set
up for failure.
On this note, I decided to set up an AI Centre for Education
Technologies that focused on developing and deploying software solutions to
solve practical teaching problems on the ground. I am grateful to the people
believe in what I have set out to do and who were willing to support these
efforts.
Predictions about Online Teaching
It is risky business to try to foretell the future, but it's probably
still a helpful exercise to put our understanding of reality to the
test--basically, if we do indeed have a sufficiently deep understanding of
what is going on, then we should be able to make some meaningful and
(mostly) correct predications.
COVID has caused quite a lot of disruption to our way of life. MOE
teachers and profs were all "forced" to teach online at some point.
Nevertheless, my prediction is that MOE schools and the universities
would likely revert to regular classroom teaching soon. MOE teachers will
use the SLS as a "regular" Learning Management System, much like IVLE was
used at NUS in years past, but that in itself is not going to cause any
disruptive innovation. That said, classroom teaching is not a bad word and
online teaching is not superior (though it might be equivalent for skilled
teachers, who unfortunately will likely remain uncommon).
But I do believe that COVID will cause parts of the tuition industry and
also Continuing Education and Training (CET) to go online. I am teaching
some Masters students this Semester. Many of them are part-time students. I
am not convinced that it makes sense to drag them to campus after work to
take classes. This will be a change in the mode of delivery, mainly because
of logistics and convenience (and greater public acceptance of online
teaching), but I think it will unlikely lead to significant improvements in
the quality of teaching. In some cases, the quality of teaching is likely to
become worse.
If I am right in my above claim that teaching is limited mostly by our
brains, then we cannot expect education to change overnight. Change will be
evolutionary (and slow). Good things take time.
修身，齐家，治国，平天下
I will probably not do justice to Confucius, but this phrase translates
loosely to "self cultivation, unify the family, rule the country, and bring
peace to the world."
By most accounts, I am probably considered successful in teaching
technical skills to my students. Many of them have since become highly
successful in their careers. However, what I have also come to realize is
that for them to continue to do better and to live good lives, there is a
need to do more and help them develop people skills. I am not fond of the
term "soft skills."
My belief is that the key in leadership and relationships lie in first
dealing decisively with what is internal, starting with self awareness and
progressing to self regulation. As such, I recently decided to start a
new
leadership programme for my students, which we will eventually extend to
the alumni.
First, we teach students the basic principles of leadership and encourage
them to reflect and develop self awareness. Concurrently, we also try to
promote metacognition. Subsequently, we will move on to leadership coaching
-- and I guess we will figure out how well our approach works only in the
years to come. If we try, we might fail; but if we don't try, we fail by
default.
Leadership should not be about position and power. I believe
that leadership should be about service to society and to our fellow man.
Our students need not only develop the mindset for success, but also the
right values. To this end, I recently also started the
Centre for Social Good and
Philantropy. The goal is to promote volunteerism and community service.
Because leadership cannot be learnt in a vacuum, we plan to use community
projects as the context for leadership
training.
Dealing with Ambiguity and Context
Notwithstanding the criticisms (and complaints about PSLE Math
questions), I do think that we have relatively successful and good education
system in Singapore. What is however unfortunately also true about an
exam-focused system is that the students often end up becoming overly
focused on grades and not so much on learning.
What is probably most damaging that is this relatively prevailing
thinking among the students that there is a correct or model answer to every
question. Some students ask for the "correct" method to design algorithms to
the chagrin of my tutors.
So, one thing that I seek to do is damage control by
teaching my students that the correct answer to
almost every question is: it depends. I am not trying to
teach relativism and that there are no right answer. Rather, I teach my
students to always work from first principles and that the context matters.
The ability to understand and take into account context is absolutely
necessary in working with ambiguity in our VUCA world.
Most of my students build software for a living. One of the
lessons that I try to make sure that they learn (and that I hope that they
learn well) is that we are not here to build
software. We are here to solve problems. Sometimes the right
solution to some problems, is *not* to write code. Also, while
doing things right is important, it is much more
important to do the right thing(s).
The Search for Meaning
I observed very early in my teaching career that
our students are generally very lost and do
not know what they want. Back then, I thought that this "lostness" was
normal given their youth -- and it probably still is.
What seems to have changed is that the general mental health of our
youths seems to be getting poorer. Some blame social media. Others blame
poor parenting. It probably does not matter what is the root cause because
teachers are generally not in a position to address that. The only thing we
can do is to see how we can mitigate and make things better.
I remember sharing with a young teacher that
our greatest gift to our students as teachers is
not knowledge. It is our time. I always make time for my students
if they need help. I also check on them from time to time.
My current hypothesis is that the anxiety among the youth is likely
caused by some confusion over the definition of success and also by
perceived competition and/or the fear of falling behind (commonly referred
to as FOMO). Many tell me that their parents tell them that they need to
study hard and do well in school, so that they can find a good job when they
grow up. This ostensibly sounds completely reasonable, but then what? Is
that really the meaning of life? I suspect that many feel lost because deep
down inside, many of them are probably not convinced.
I try to convince my students that
the only real wealth they have is their time--and life is
somewhat fair because regardless of king of pauper, we all only have 24
hours a day. We can convert time to money (that's called a job). It is also
possible to convert money to time (for example, by hiring a helper or by
eating out instead of cooking), but there is a (relatively low) limit to how
much time money can buy. So what they need to think very hard about is how
they want to spend their time.
The other key lesson that I try to impress upon my students
is that not everything that can be counted counts
and not everything that counts, can be counted.
My hope for my students is that they will eventually grow up
to find jobs such that (i) when they get up in the morning, they are excited
to go work; and (ii) when they go to bed every night, they can look back on
their day and convince themselves that they done something meaningful and
not lived their lives in vain.
Closing Thoughts
Teaching is not about the transmission of knowledge. While it is probably
extremely helpful to equip our students with market-relevant skills to help
make a good living, I think that teaching is more than that.
Not every job that pays a lot is necessarily fulfilling. Some people make
a lot of money and yet lead pretty miserable lives.
As teachers, I think our duty is to help our students become the best
versions of themselves and to lead meaningful and fulfilling lives. I
hope my students go on to live good lives (and marry nice spouses).
