But how do you deal with conflict? Do you keep quiet and agree with everything your supervisor says and suggests? When you disagree,  as a student, how do you get your point of view across without completely sabotaging your relationship? Is a harmonious relationship necessary? Or does conflict breed better work?

I asked people who have been dealing with this kind of situation if they had any tips to share…

“I think the first rule is having the confidence to stand up for your self, and the second is knowing when to pick your battles.  There is no point breaking out into war over little things, but you have to put your foot down sometimes, otherwise you will lose complete control of your project.

There are times when my supervisor (Prof A)  asks, “why have you done that?” And I want to reply with “because you told me too”, knowing fine well Prof A has simply forgotten that she told me to do something. I shrug and keep quiet,  for a quiet life.

When Prof A tries to take control (when I write anything) I let them make the changes and I then work through each one, and I decide if I like it or not. Then do my best to put it into my words. I have had to stand up for myself, explain that the project is mine and argue for my point of view.

An important point, always question why your supervisor wants to do something, don’t just blindly obey. Knowing the end point they want to reach, allows you to choose how to find the answer.  9 times out of 10 the student will know a quicker/better way(s) to get to that answer (or will already have it!).”

Have you ever had to deal with a conflict? Do you and your supervisor argue on a daily basis? Or are you the best of friends?

Now I’m a doctoral student, and I sit on the other side of the classroom door. Except it’s not just the module description I’m clutching, but a forest’s worth of archival research notes, a CV that needs to be populated with conference papers, publications and extra-curricular activities, and a diary mapping the next few months of my life in intricately scribbled detail.

Teaching as a PhD student clearly has the potential to be a stressful endeavour. For many it’s a new undertaking, demanding much planning and self-evaluation. If we’re precious about time – of which there’s inevitably never enough – answering the proliferation of emails from nervous first-years or endlessly photocopying resources can seem a real infringement on our primary task: research. But what if we can think about teaching and research as integrated elements of the PhD student’s role, rather than creating friction against each other? I offer here just a few reflections on my own experience of the great privilege of having a teaching role over the last academic year.

‘L’ plates all round

I wonder how I might have approached my undergraduate essays if I’d known that my lecturers were also labouring over their own critical projects — that we shared the perennial struggle to pluck the right word from a mass of jargon, the battle to shepherd our thoughts into a straight line, and the scramble to meet a looming deadline. It works both ways: if we really believe, as Ben Knights has suggested, that literature is a subject where students are ‘as capable of startling new insight as an experienced scholar’, why don’t we treat our students as peers? Exposing our work to a group of fresh-faced undergraduates might just jolt us into understanding or articulating things differently.

When teaching is research

After a few months of guiding seminar discussions, the stage persona of one of the performers I’m researching began to feel warmly familiar. Watching a recording of her show, I recognised her strategies of audience engagement as the same pedagogic techniques I employed each week in the classroom, techniques designed to promote emotional interaction and knowledge retention. Might thinking deeply about how students relate to one other and to the world somehow bring new insights to your own research?

Classroom culture

Heart beating faster, brain whirring, dry mouth… who is it? An academic about to give a controversial conference paper? Or could it be a student hovering on the edge of contributing to a lively discussion? There are certain academic conventions that we ask students to replicate, though we rarely enunciate the connections. The classroom can be a scary place; just like the conference panel, it’s a moment of vulnerability before peers. In my discipline, where practice can be individualistic and isolating, we need students to see each other as peer support and co-educators, not competition. If we teach ambitiously, taking risks by offering our own critical positions, and so sometimes publicly get things wrong, we give our students permission to do the same.

Having wondered how I’d juggle everything when I started teaching last autumn, I’m surprised and pleased to be missing the rewarding weekly encounters now it’s the summer season. What’s your experience? How have you dealt with balancing your teaching and research? Or, if you’re yet to start, what questions do you have?

My supervisor sent me a link to some papers yesterday, including one called ‘Could Do Better: A Curious Clinician Looks Back – and Forward’.  Although not particularly of any use to my PhD subject I printed it off, took it home and read it last night. It is a lovely autobiography of Dr Calbert I. Phillips. The paper turned out to be a very enlightning read (in a number of different ways!). He talks through his career, the things he learnt, many ideas he had (including ones about the national health service organisation), barriers he faced and triumphs he had. I can remember in a job I had before my PhD that people were encouraged to write personal summaries of things they had learnt and share them with others. I think this is important and more summaries like this should be written by people when they retire!  Many of the things he said rang true with me and I just wanted to share a few extracts,

‘Keep an ‘ideas’ file, although many will turn out to be nonviable’

‘Super-ultra-hyper-specialize: that will widen your horizons enormously’

‘Think the unthinkable: accept and assume nothing’

‘Collaborate with basic scientists, especially statisticians’

And my personal favourite, ‘I was invited to a party in Boston, with some biochemists, one of whom had worked for some years in “Cambridge, England”. “Did you meet Watson or Crick?,” said I. Said he, “I’m Watson”.

Most of all the paper reminded me to take time out, not to dismiss things because they are not current (many things can be learnt from the past and from elders) and to remember to read widely and often, as sometimes things can occur to you when you least expect it.

The short answer is that graphs can be used to reason symbolically about any kind of pairwise relationship between any kind of entity, and that we like to think about pairwise relationships because unary relationships aren’t powerful enough and k-way relationships for k>2 add extra complication without adding any real power.

We have graphs representing people and social networks connecting them (online friendships, sexual contacts, parenthood, coauthorship, etc). We have graphs representing subroutines in a computer program and caller-callee relations between them. We have graphs representing web pages and html links between them. We have graphs representing proteins in your body and the chemical interactions they participate in. Etc etc.

OxDE also gives a nice explanation of why abstracting problems is useful in mathematics and computer science:

Graphs are powerful because the same kinds of problems and algorithms turn out to be important in many of these different applications. So by taking away the application-specific features of all of those different problems and turning them into something as abstract as a graph, we only have to solve these problems once instead of repeatedly solving the same problems in different disguises.

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6. Let them learn to guess: guessing can be a pathway to proof (in the case of mathematics) and discovery (in the case of sciences). The key is to make more educated guesses. It helps if an easier approach can be taken. In algorithm design, we are also used to first trying out easier methods and then resort to more subtle approaches.

7. Let them learn proving: proving is indeed the central aim in mathematics. However the logical thinking involved in proofs can be a useful lesson in many fields.

8. Look for useful features of the problem: while tackling any mathematical problem, we have always been taught to identify any features of the problem which may show the way to the solution. It is almost like a detective utilizing clues to understand what happened.

9. Do not give away the whole secret at once: a teacher who kills the thinking process of the student is hardly doing a good job. It is a challenge to keeps things interactive in a class every time. However it is a no-brainer that spoon-feeding does not help.

10.Suggest but do not force: keeping a student interested is better than putting too much pressure on him or her. The power of suggestion is also relevant when a student makes a mistake. It is helpful to nudge the student in the right direction rather than drive him there. This is also better for the student’s self-esteem.

The advanced reader who skips parts that appear too elementary may miss more than the reader who skips parts that appear too complex – G. Polya

I was going through some books when I re-discovered a classic work by George Polya. Polya, who is better known for his best selling work entitled ‘How to solve it‘, wrote extensively on methods of learning, teaching and problem solving. The book which I re-discovered is more in depth and is called ‘Mathematical Discovery: On Understanding, Learning, and Teaching Problem Solving’. In one of the essays in the book, Polya proposes ten perennial rules for teaching. I’ll summarise the first five with my personal thoughts on them:

1. Be interested in your subject: This is so true! If you are bored of the subject, you are definitely not doing justice to your students or your career. Admittedly, sometimes, there are pressures on researchers and teaching the same the course repeatedly might not be as exciting as it once was. However, it is a given that showing your boredom will automatically put students asleep.
2. Know your subject: More than any other education method, it is the in-depth understanding of the subject that is most important before entering the lecture room. Polya points out that interest should come before knowledge because true knowledge only comes with genuine interest. This makes sense.
3. Know the ways of learning: A basic grounding of learning methods and psychology is considered essential for any kind of teaching or mentoring. Moreover, Polya makes an excellent observation that self-discovery of a concept is the best way to learn and then teach it. It is easy to see that working out a proof from scratch makes one aware of the critical arguments instead of just reading a proof.
4. Read faces and empathise: If one is observant enough, it is easy to notice which students are following you and which ones are nodding off! If the whole class is nodding off like that, it might be a good idea to explain things again. Being able to put oneself in the place of the students is critical for communication. As a teaching assistant during my undergraduate years, it was easy for me to explain matters to students because I was in their place only a couple of years before.
5. Give not only info but ‘know-how’: With easy access to information online, good guides and textbooks, the teacher’s responsibility is increasingly toward directing the student than giving information. As a seminar tutor, I try to go over general methods to tackle problems instead of going over each case study or problem.

I’ll be back with the final five golden rules.

The course has the following aims:

A broad conceptual and practical understanding of the nature of learning in higher education, and how relevant educational and disciplinary literature can inform one’s own academic and professional practice.

1. Skills and competencies in the planning, delivery and evaluation of teaching and learning activities,
2. Open and positive attitudes towards continuing professional development, and the ability to plan one’s own academic and professional development

The syllabus includes the following:

1. Key ideas about student learning in higher education
2. Approaches to large and small group teaching
3. Evaluation techniques
4. Undertaking classroom observation
5. Giving and receiving feedback
6. Assessment practices
7. Inclusive education
8. Reflective practice
9. Professional development
10. Working in the academic environment

The course consists of group meetings, self-reflection and some lectures. I have realized that I have already started utilizing some of the insights gained from those lessons in my every day teaching. Getting a deeper understanding of inclusive practices is a skill which is also useful in settings outside the lecture room. One also starts to be more reflective about one’s methods. It augurs well for further development. I have also been told that such courses are a requirement for gaining teaching fellowships.

I am glad that my university has very good teaching support facilities. Most universities have similar courses in academic practice and if researchers can take time out to at least sample such courses it will definitely help them and the students they teach.

(The photograph is taken from http://download.srv.cs.cmu.edu/~pausch/)

Just when one starts to take degrees and careers too seriously one realizes that there are more important things: life itself, for instance! Lance Fortnow has an entry about Randy Pausch who passed away due to pancreatic cancer on 25th July 2008. Randy was a distinguished computer science professor at CMU with contributions in human-computer interaction. Randy had been commenting on his last days on this webpage.

His last lecture video puts many things in life in perspective. Randy gives us important lessons on courage, living to the fullest, pursuing one’s dreams and giving back to one’s family and community. Randy made an insightful comment that ‘We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand.’ His other quotations are:

The brick walls are there for a reason – they are not there to keep us out, they let us prove how badly we want things. Brick walls are there to stop people who didn’t want it badly enough; they are there to stop the other people.

Wait long enough and people will surprise and impress you. When you are pissed off at somebody and are angry at them, you just haven’t given them enough time. Just give them a little more time and they will come to impress you.

It’s not how you achieve your dreams; it’s how you live your life. If you live your life the right way, the karma will take care of itself and your dreams will come to you.

Randy’s last lecture was attended by Jeffrey Zaslow, a columnist for The Wall Street Journal who wrote a column about the lecture. Zaslow was so much inspired by the lecture that he has written a book about it and how Randy showed dignity and courage in his last months. I definitely plan to buy the book.