| Date | Speaker | Talk |
| Mar 7, 2006 | Gregory Kesden, Lecturer and winner of the "Herbert A. Simon Teaching Excellence Award", Carnegie Mellon | Teaching from a Box of Chocolate |
Teaching is easy: If the students arrive interested, motivated, and homogeneously equipped, if the course of study is both compelling and accessible, and if time is unlimited. But the real-world classroom presents us with students of different educational backgrounds, different talents, and varying levels of exposure and motivation. And, of course, Carnegie Mellon is a candybox: Even the best prepared and motivated students make choices.
In this talk, I discuss my own educational philosophy, one that emphasizes, where things are to be built, building them from the ground up. And, where things are to be understood, demonstrating that understanding to others in dynamic and adversarial ways. At the end of the exercise, the student should be able to point at the product, with pride, and say that's mine -- all mine, or walk away feeling challenged and then successful.
I enjoy carpentry. And, I can tell you -- the right tool for the job surely helps. I've built many a jig to solve exactly one instance of one problem -- and to solve it well. But, the truth is, I've solved many more with an alternative approach: "Beat to fit. Paint to match."
Computer science isn't about the tools. It is about what we, people, can achieve. And, at the end of the day, I try to keep the emphasis on the people -- what we built, what we learned, and what is now, for the first time, within our reach.