one of my computer science requirements is a course called cs51. although the professor is extremely nice, he is also known to be rather dull and confusing. to make matters worse, he knows that he is dull and confusing but this does not manage to eliminate this problem. every day i enter his class feeling semi-confident about the topic at hand only to be utterly confused by the discussion or shall we say lecture. i get angry at his inability to teach and am always smacking my head thinking “how can this man be allowed to teach?” i know that he is nice but i still always walk out of the class being pissed.
on a regular basis, i speak with both the tas and the professor about this problem, ask him to be concrete and he goes about his merry way. i depend on the tas to “reteach” me everything that i do not gain from class.

like any other day, today was a repeat of these problems. i walked into class feeling rather confident of my understanding of fsms and was quickly confused by every word that exited his mouth. i asked questions and he seemed annoyed by my confusion. my mental response was to get annoyed- pissed that he did not try to relate to his students, angry that he constantly told us that we understood and that is why the class was good (even though every person in the room had some form of perplexity on their face), frustrated that he did not try to make it better.

then something dawned on me. i was being completely unfair. he knew that noone understood and was frustrated himself. he truly had no clue how to help us. he felt out of control of the class because of the distance between us and him but he did not know how to fix it. rather than verbally acknowledge the problem, he constantly tried to convince himself that we really did understand by verbalizing this. when students asked questions, it was obvious of the gab and that flustered him. he was afraid of the truth and of the fact that he was doing a poor job. more than likely, he will never be able to communicate with us about models of computation. even his book that he constantly admires is only a way to cover his fear of our confusion and the reality that he is not getting thru to us.

so, i sat back and relaxed, no longer angry. i am now fully aware that, for me, the class is pointless. i will continue to go (and continue to be confused) because it would hurt him so much for us to not go. but, i will not worry about the material. i will talk to the tas and try to understand outside of class. and i will continue to give him advice but i will not expect anything from him. it is the expectation that makes me frustrated. when i expect him to teach well and he lets me down, we both lose. if i expect nothing but gain knowledge then i will not be at a loss.