I’m hyper-organized when writing but disorganized when teaching.

I was talking with Yuling the other day and asked him how come I only have 15 students in my Bayesian data analysis class, and Aki has 300. Yuling said I should check out Aki’s lectures which are on Youtube. Aki is super-organized. I give fun classes with lots of student involvement but they’re not well organized.

This led me to two thoughts:

1. I think I’m great at one- or two-hour lectures or class-participation sessions. But I’m not so great at teaching a 13-week course.

2. I’m a disorganized teacher. But I’m a super-organized writer. I obsess about the organization of my books, and I think it makes a difference.

I used to try to be super-organized about my teaching but it didn’t work. I can watch Aki’s youtubes and see if I can imitate his style, but I don’t think I can pull it off. I say this based on years of experience trying to be super-organized in my teaching and it didn’t work.

Overall I’ll have a bigger and better impact by writing books that will be read by tens of thousands of students, rather than by teaching classes for hundreds of students. Still, it’s frustrating that my classes don’t work for the masses. I feel like my teaching style would work well for a large class (as long as I have teaching assistants if numbers become large enough). But that feeling must be wrong, as it seems pretty consistent that only a minority of students like my style.

Ultimately this is fine and I don’t feel so bad about this, in part because I can contribute through my writing, in part because there are great teachers like Aki who can spread the good word, and in part because students have lots of options at Columbia, so the ones who get the most out of my teaching style can learn applied statistics from me, and the students who want something more structured can get this out of other instructors.

P.S. The above title is not quite correct. I think I am an organized teacher, I do cover topics, and I engage the students in what is being covered. But my organization is not apparent, and even when I try to make it explicit, the students don’t always see the underlying structure. In any case, I accept that I’m not a great teacher for most students, and I hope that students do a good job of sorting so that the ones who can get the most out of my classes are the ones who take them.