As a teacher, you have to decide how challenging a course ought to be. I recall, once, when a non-faculty teacher was teaching a senior data structures course. Notice I said senior. Most universities teach data structures to first or second year students, not fourth year students. Indeed, if you pick up a data structures book meant for college use, you see data structures such as stack, queues, heaps, binary trees, and perhaps one or two complex balanced tree structures (red-black trees, AVL trees).
This teacher thought he was teaching at this level, so he assigned a binary search tree as a project. Part of the problem was that he didn’t seem to consult anyone about what level to teach this class. As traditionally taught, this senior level data structures course covered advanced data structures such as B trees, but also spatial data structures (meant to store coordinates, lines, etc. in 2D and 3D). There are other complex structures, such as Fibonacci heaps, and even data structures so complex that algortihms researchers generally talk about the data structure, rather than implement it.
There’s some level to go up, if you want to get really complex.
The teacher’s mistake, one of not consulting those who taught the course, was a problem. It’s certainly possible, given the unique nature of this course, that he didn’t know about these other data structures, and either was embarassed over the fact, or, even as a Ph.D. unwilling to learn the nuances of the data structures and implement it. After all, it’s so much easier to teach something you already know, even if it’s been a while since you’ve seen it, than to teach something you have to learn.
More than likely, if you’re teaching for the first time, you’ve been given a book and a syllabus from the course taught before. You can look at exams to get a sense of the level of difficulty, then decide how difficult the course should be.
Difficulty can be measured in different ways. For example, you can make the course “easy”, at least conceptually, but be a hard grader. You can make the course intellectually challenging, but make the grading easy (or hard). You can make the programming aspects lengthy, requiring thousands of lines of code, or shorter, but requiring some advanced knowledge.
All of this can be put under the umbrella of “who should you teach to”? The best students in the class? The average student? (Rarely, does a teacher say they will teach so even the worst students will understand). Perhaps take a two-tiered approach? That is, teach some things everyone should learn, but a few things only the best should learn?
Some people prefer to teach to the very smart. It has one huge benefit. It takes less work. One could argue that it’s the mark of a good teacher to make a poor student learn. However, many teachers don’t aspire to be that good. It takes too much work. Imagine you’re presenting the best explanation you can possibly think of. And still someone says “I don’t get it”. That has to be deflating, as you feel you’ve done your best, and still, it’s not simple enough.
Teaching to the smart has another benefit. They’re the ones most likely to use that information well. Even so, it can be hard to teach well, even to smart people. You can cover a complex topic in some abstruse way. Sure, the best students will work hard to learn it, but it doesn’t mean you’ve done a good job.
In the US, you can get various kitchen tools, such as can openers, peelers, ice cream scoops, and so forth, by a company named Oxo. Oxo makes grips that are largish, round, and rubbery. These tools were originally aimed at those with arthritis who wanted bigger handles. However, even those who were perfectly fine liked these oversized handles. Without the non-elderly, non-arthritic majority, Oxo would not have been as successful as they have been.
Similarly, if you teach well even to the average student, it can benefit the best student to.
My suggestion is to teach both to the average and to the best student. Doing so may be difficult. Some people have no idea how to teach to a really good student, not being really an expert. Some have no idea what average means.
Indeed, that’s my last point to make for this entry. What is average and excellent depends very much where you are. Teaching to the average at one university may be just fine, yet too advanced for another, and far too simple for another. You have to learn to adjust your teaching to your audience, which means you need to know your audience.
Thus, I leave you with this thought. Figure out your audience. Figure out who you want to teach to.
