How the View of the World Changes
I know that many of you who are reading this are going to know what I'm talking about: as soon as you learn that you are going to be teaching a certain class, the way that you view the world changes. How can you incorporate things that you know or see into your curriculum? How are you going to set up your course? If you were a student, what material would you want to know and how would be the best way to learn it?
This has now happened to me. Now, I've always had in the back in my mind the knowledge that I will eventually be teaching S & P. So that's taken care of: lots of examples and personal anecdotes for that one. But it turns out that one of the courses that I will be responsible for is Research Methods. Seeing as I haven't taken a research methods course since 1994/95, I only have a fuzzy recall about the actual content that one learns at this point of education. So for the past several weeks, I've been wondering: what am I going to teach?
Yesterday, after a conversation with Kevin, I have an idea. Well, Kevin gave me the idea, when he was hollering praises of Latex.
"Latex is awesome," he said. "I wish someone had forced me to learn it as an undergrad".
Thus my first course requirement was born: all students must submit documents as latex pdfs. This may seem like an unreasonable request, however, taking into consideration that:
a) Latex is freeware and available for all platforms
b) The learning curve of Latex can be steepened by supplying pre-formed templates, and
c) Many other sciences (eg. Physics, Computer Sciences) require all documents to be written in Latex,
I think this is a brilliant. It also eliminates all of the problems that people have with different formats of paper (how to adhere to APA formatting, for example), because it is built into the latex template.
Latex is also a great program because it teaches logic. A WORD PROCESSING program that teaches LOGIC.
Brilliant.
This has now happened to me. Now, I've always had in the back in my mind the knowledge that I will eventually be teaching S & P. So that's taken care of: lots of examples and personal anecdotes for that one. But it turns out that one of the courses that I will be responsible for is Research Methods. Seeing as I haven't taken a research methods course since 1994/95, I only have a fuzzy recall about the actual content that one learns at this point of education. So for the past several weeks, I've been wondering: what am I going to teach?
Yesterday, after a conversation with Kevin, I have an idea. Well, Kevin gave me the idea, when he was hollering praises of Latex.
"Latex is awesome," he said. "I wish someone had forced me to learn it as an undergrad".
Thus my first course requirement was born: all students must submit documents as latex pdfs. This may seem like an unreasonable request, however, taking into consideration that:
a) Latex is freeware and available for all platforms
b) The learning curve of Latex can be steepened by supplying pre-formed templates, and
c) Many other sciences (eg. Physics, Computer Sciences) require all documents to be written in Latex,
I think this is a brilliant. It also eliminates all of the problems that people have with different formats of paper (how to adhere to APA formatting, for example), because it is built into the latex template.
Latex is also a great program because it teaches logic. A WORD PROCESSING program that teaches LOGIC.
Brilliant.
posted by Anderson at 11:20 AM
5 Comments:
Awesome idea, but beware of mass bitching.
I seriously thought you were talking about condoms.
what is this Latex of which you speak? can you put all your courseware online so that i too can learn these valuable research methods? awesome. you need to teach more about this freeware stuff. it rocks.
I am also thinking about condoms (and I was wondering how Kevin didn't know about them as an undergrad....). You must teach me the wonders of this Latex so that I may back you up when the bitching commences. And it will.
BTW, I've got us an honours student. He's a good shit.
they are so going to hate you.
it's LaTeX ;-)
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