Teaching

I may make mistakes in lectures, exercises or exams. But I make sure of one thing: students must not pay for my mistakes.

If I've written an unclear exam question or exercise, the problem isn't resolved at the student's expense. Sometimes that means everyone gets full marks for that question.

I feel that the students on my courses are my responsibility and, in a sense, under my protection. My job isn't just to teach and assess what they know, but also to make sure they're treated fairly.

Students' right to fair treatment matters so much to me that, if necessary, I'm prepared to put even my own career on the line to defend it.

That doesn't mean everything should be easy. Assessment must be fair, and the same principles must apply to everyone.

My mistakes are my responsibility. A student's mistakes are, naturally, the student's responsibility.

The best part is helping a student recognise their own worth and realise that they already know far more than they think.

I also want students to notice that nobody else in this world knows or understands everything either. Working life is full of ordinary people who constantly have to figure out things they don't yet know how to do.

You don't have to wait until you've mastered everything before you dare to apply for a job. It's enough to know something, be willing to learn more and have the courage to try.

It's particularly rewarding when a student who has doubted their abilities begins to see for themselves what they might be capable of.

I want students to understand that studying is hard work. Its purpose isn't merely to pass courses and collect credits, but to build a foundation for working life.

Learning how to learn is especially important. Technologies develop, new programming languages and tools appear, and some of today's solutions become obsolete. So the most important thing isn't simply to know today's tools. It's to understand the principles behind them, work things out for yourself and learn new things.

The early stages of a degree lay the foundation for everything that follows. If you take shortcuts and don't learn things properly then, later studies become much harder.

I don't think everyone needs to aim for nothing but top grades. What matters more is not settling for merely passing courses, but trying to understand what you're studying. Alongside a degree certificate, you need skills you can demonstrate in practice.

AI is absolutely worth using in your studies. It can help you investigate things, explain difficult concepts, find mistakes in your code and learn faster.

But if a student uses AI only to get through courses without learning anything, a question arises: why would an employer hire them to do work that AI can already do?

That's why you have to know the fundamentals. If you don't understand the subject yourself, you may not know what to ask AI, let alone whether its answers are sensible or correct.

AI can write code, but someone has to understand what the program is supposed to do, how to check that it works, and what to do when something goes wrong. AI doesn't take responsibility for the result working correctly, either.

If AI does all your thinking for you, you won't learn to think. If you use it to support your own thinking, you can learn considerably more.

Almost every course I've taught for the first time has shown me something I hadn't known to take into account. Ready-made materials don't necessarily feel like my own. If I make them myself, I don't initially know how long something will really take to explain.

There is one thing I can be sure of: if I understand an assignment one way, a student will understand it quite differently. Sometimes their interpretation is just as reasonable as mine.

Then the problem is the assignment, not the student. The same applies to communication. Saying something in a lecture or writing it in Moodle doesn't guarantee that everyone has received the message or understood it as I intended.

That doesn't remove the student's responsibility to follow instructions. But it's my job to make those instructions as clear as possible.

I've learned that an assignment isn't clear just because I understand it. Nor has something been understood just because I've said it.

One of the biggest surprises of being a lecturer has been how many different aspects of people's lives you encounter.

Students don't just attend lectures, do exercises and complete degrees. They fall in love, marry, have children, separate, become ill and experience all the other things that life brings.

And sometimes a student dies.

Before becoming a teacher, I hadn't thought about having to face things like that in this job. Students come and go, but their lives don't pause while they're studying.

It has made me understand even more clearly that a student isn't just a name on an attendance list or a row in an academic record. They're a person with a whole life outside their studies.

And sometimes that life matters far more than any course.