Ask HN: Old CS lecturer looking for advice from current and recent students
312 by geophile | 126 comments on Hacker News.
I am 61, with an academic background in computer science, and many years in industry, mostly startups. I taught many years ago, and have resumed teaching, a database course: data modeling, relational algebra, SQL, application programming and architecture (e.g. 2-tier vs. 3-tier, web & mobile), database internals. Student evaluations were pretty good for the most part, but quite a few students found the presentation a bit dry: I prepared every lecture as HTML ahead of time, made it available online, and presented it in class. A couple of times, I would do interactive things, e.g. tuning queries using EXPLAIN and playing with indexes. That proved pretty popular, but of course, it's difficult to capture this material, (I recorded a log of the session, but extemperaneous discussion was not captured). Looking for advice on how to balance prepared material and more spontaneous things. Also, any other advice on how to make material of this sort (theory + practice) easier to absorb.
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