Code is a brittle medium. There's a steep cliff of failure; a simple, easy-to-miss syntax error will often prevent a program from compiling altogether. All software educators will experience this publicly at some stage and find themselves sweating in front of a room full of impatient students while desperately debugging. Teaching media arts also demands that instructors constantly keep abreast of ever-changing development environments and new technologies, many of which are likely to be peripheral to their primary field of expertise. Meanwhile, operating systems update themselves, familiar tools abruptly become obsolete or incompatible, and cherished references unexpectedly disappear from the Internet. For these reasons the creative programming teacher is particularly prone to having to work through mistakes and errors live in the classroom, often while attempting to maintain the interest of skeptical and apprehensive pupils. Our respondents discuss the days when stuff breaks and nothing goes right.
I have moments where nothing is working and I can't figure it out, but apparently these moments are useful. People tell me this about the [Coding Train] videos all the time. Like, “My favorite part was when you couldn't figure it out and you got stuck for like ten minutes, because I like to see how that happens to everybody,” or “I like to see the way you tried to fix it.” Even so, these moments can be really bad and stressful. There've been times when I get completely tripped up in my own head, trying to explain something like a Markov chain and just feeling like, “That was the worst explanation ever; it made no sense! I should have practiced that.”
Golan Levin: It's interesting how you do practice your explanations. It's very obvious in your case, because you live this out more publicly than the rest of us through your video channel. It's quite clear that all of your explanations are very patiently refined and revised through practice.
I've been doing the videos for a while, but recently they clicked for me as I was just more mentally focused on them. I used to do the videos to get ready for class, but now I use the class to practice for the videos. I'm like those comedians who go to comedy clubs to try material out before their TV specials.
Also, if I have the same class that meets two days in a row, I can never have them both go well. It's either that the first day is amazing, and then I try to force that to happen again the second day and it fails—or the first day kind of goes haywire, and it motivates me to fix it all the next day.
I just had one two weeks ago. The worst day is where nothing works. You think it works and then when everyone runs it you find all these different problems and you have to follow up and figure out if it's their system, version, or browser, and you even don't know why it's not working. And then you need to pretend it's OK and actually in your heart you're like ARRGH, how come it's not working? Maybe it's good to have this kind of disruption because it allows the students to see the imperfect aspect of programming, which is also the reality, but at the same time you need to be mentally strong to handle this situation. You also have to know how to turn it around and make up something on the fly so that you can still cover the content you have to cover.
I've had classes where things just fail. My first attempt at setting up a cloud-like Node server was the perfect storm clusterfuck. I wanted to show how to do a socket IO thing where we could all kick something up to a cloud and get a response. And that fucker just didn't want to work. I had some problem with my .ssh directory that wouldn't allow me to log into the thing and it took me 45 minutes to debug. Well, it felt like 45 minutes. It was probably only 15 minutes, but it was right in front of the students. Everything was a mess. It was bad.
On the music side I once taught a terrible, terrible class involving a Disklavier [digital piano]. Its default is that there's always a half-second delay on the song, and there's a safety switch that you flip off, and I could not for the life of me figure this out. They built this into the hardware to prevent feedback, to prevent you from hitting a key and then getting drilled down and grinding the whole thing and breaking it. I had this beautiful piece of repertoire by Kaija Saariaho, who is the composer laureate of Finland and has a really great Disklavier piece. And I, Luke DuBois, with four years of piano and graduate studies, can actually play this piece, as it's not hard and it's part of an undergraduate pedagogy study she wrote in the ‘90s. But I couldn't get this fucking 500-millisecond thing off and I went ballistic on the piano. I went into this psychotic cursing fit, where there was no stopping me. I sounded like fucking Don Rickles at one of those comedy roasts in the ‘70s. I was like, “You lousy fucking half-assed goddamned piece of shit, I'm going to fly to Tokyo tonight and single-handedly beat the shit out of the entire drum, guitar, and motorcycle division of Yamaha for foisting this piece of garbage on us.” That was my worst day of teaching.
This is not necessarily my worst day but more a realization of something that was not working. I used to go through a lot of code in class, like line by line, and I would dissect code and explain it. When you know how to code, it's clear as day, but it's like noise for the newbies. Many of them create this narrative in their head that they're not good with programming or with math. Then I'd say to somebody in the class, “Tell me what I just said,” and they can't regurgitate it even one minute after I said it. I realized that actually explaining code line by line is such a waste of time. So I guess my worst days were those days when I thought I was teaching something but I wasn't—it was all just noise.
I think the worst days for me were the days when I was teaching a programming class in the English department. I had lost half the students, like half of the students were not really keeping up with the content of the class, but I still had this very strict schedule that I wanted to follow so that the class could reach its conclusion conceptually. So there were one or two days when I was just like gritting my teeth and doing the tutorial even though I knew that half the students weren't able to follow along.
Much of my teaching experience has been in grad school environments at schools like ITP, where the students are so internally motivated to keep up and wanting to extract value from the class no matter how poorly it's coming. Undergrads, on the other hand, will check out if you are not connecting with them. So having that experience in the English department and having students check out on you for the first time kind of sucked a lot. But I learned from that experience.
I think it is worth saying that as a teacher, you are there to motivate and encourage everyone, and sometimes that's hard. It's tiring, and it doesn't always feel OK to admit that. In other jobs somehow it feels easier to talk about how it's hard, and I guess we do that too sometimes with fellow teachers. But often it feels like there is a pressure to always be like: “Hurrah! Everything is great!” Maybe that's a buzzkill, but I think it's good to say sometimes.
I taught a programming class for a few years at Vancouver Film School. It was a required class, and that sucked, as half the students didn't want to be there. You're always able to recruit some of them, but some of them don't care. This is a school where most of the parents pay the tuition and throw them in there because the kids don't know what they want to do. Being in a roomful of students who don't care is really hard, even though I think I'm pretty good at getting people who might not otherwise care to care.
I once brought resistors to class to make a flip-flop memory unit. It's made from just two transistors, two resistors, and one LED; it's a really simple component. Some of the resistors are colored brown, but they can look red when it's dark. I think I might be a little bit colorblind or maybe I was in a hurry, so I accidentally brought the brown one, which has a different value than the red resistor, and none of the examples worked in the classroom. I was going nuts because I tested it so many times. It was so frustrating and I was just sweating like crazy and I was so embarrassed. Not only did it make me look bad, but [I feel like a public mistake like that] discourages students from exploring electronics and technology.
At the start, students need to have immediate feedback, like, the thing should work. Luckily I figured it out at the end of the class and some students had resistors of the right value and we switched them and everything worked. But I was definitely underprepared and got totally lost, and was hating myself for not being prepared.