Stuff I taught and then forgot (#1387)

Topics/tags: Teaching

The other day, an old friend let me know that Kumail Nanjiani mentioned me in a podcast at about 1:06:50 [1]. For those who don’t know, Kumail and I started at Grinnell at about the same time. I also served as his Computer Science advisor and research supervisor.

When Kumail mentions me, it’s usually in one of a few contexts. It can take a form like, I had two advisors, Johanna Meehan and Sam Rebelsky. Johanna changed my life. Sam was ok. Or he might mention summer research. I was supposed to be in the lab that summer. But I spent a surprising amount of time sitting under a tree, reflecting on philosophy and religion. Perhaps he’ll apologize to me. Sam, I’m sorry. I don’t remember anything about recursion. Or he might compare his two majors. I was a Computer Science major for my parents and a Philosophy major for myself. Oh, I guess that last one doesn’t include me.

I don’t mind the comments; he says them with fondness. And he always seems happy to see me. Plus, he babysat my kids when he was a student.

In any case, this commentary was a bit different. Kumail reflected positively on me as a teacher [3]. Here goes.

I’m going to sound so old here. When I was in college, I was a Philosophy maor and I was a Computer Science major. Now, in the Computer Science major, we also had to write papers [4]

And Sam Rebelsky, who’s still a professor at that school, he would take a third of a grade away if you ever used a cliché, like suffice it to say, it goes without saying, or at the end of the day. He was like, Every sentence has to be something that only you would write.. So that. I remember writing papers and being like, How do I express this is a way?

That all comes exactly from that. And to me, this is going to sound old, the idea of GIFs and memes is so against everything that I consider to be like good communication. Like you’re just literally repeating stuff that other people have done, or sending the same Sure Jan GIF or whatever.

That’s become wit now. I think it’s so—I sound so old—but when memes were coming up, I remember someone telling me about them, and I was like, wait, so you’re just saying stuff that people have said in exactly the same way? And they’re like, yeah, isn’t it great?

I’m like, That sounds like death.

Sorry, I had to go a little bit beyond the part of the story that involves me. Eldest will tell you that I laughed loudly when I hit that line.

In any case, I shared the podcast with my offspring, along with a note saying, I don’t quite remember saying this. Eldest responded quickly with, Dad, you said the same thing to me a decade later. Now, I’ll admit that I had some persnickety policies about writing, such as Don’t use interesting; it’s a vacuous word. But I’d forgotten that I encouraged my students to eschew clichés. Nonetheless, it’s good advice. I’m glad the advice had an impact.

I suppose I need to learn once again to follow the same advice. I know that I use the word interesting far too frequently. Arguably, using it at all is too frequent. I like the advice to avoid clichés; I should pay more attention to how many I use.

Since Kumail is a comedian (as well as many other things), I suppose I should attempt to end the musing with a funny story.

I know!

As Kumail mentioned, I required him (and his classmates) to write essays as part of his work in our data structures and algorithms class. And I had strict policies on word choice. It appears they had an impact.

However, I never graded any of the essays! That’s right. Students spent hours fine-tuning text that I didn’t make the time to grade. Now, I was doing other things at the time, such as writing a new lab assignment for each class period. Still, it would have been nice if they’d gotten some feedback. The best part? At the end of the semester, I apologized that I failed to find the time to grade and asked them to grade themselves. No one gave themselves a grade higher than a B!

No, that’s not the best part. The best part is that they all gave me the highest possible rating in our end-of-course evaluations. In doing so, they taught me that grading is far from the most essential part of teaching.

I suppose that you may not find any of that funny. I do.

In any case, you can also laugh at the forgetful old fogie.

[1] Very approximate.

[2] More accurately, he was part of a group of students who babysat my kids.

[3] At least I heard it that way.

[4] As I recall it, I had students in our Data Structures and Algorithms class write papers reflecting on the development process. We also had students write papers in software design.

Version 1.0 of 2025-12-18.