Teaching Fundamentals

Remember that textbook I reflected on accidentally writing?  Ostensibly, it was to be associated with a course called “SATCOM Fundamentals,” but the final course was little like my original vision for it when I heard it referenced (it rather stopped being a “fundamentals” course at all), and the textbook was never revised nor applied.  Well, aside from a few people who knew I wrote it and were interested in reading it, as if I would have some extra insight into SATCOM that they would not already have gained through their own experience and exposure to the field.  Then, well, I was bored at work again, and so were some of those same colleagues, and since we had some new arrivals waiting around for training that, in some cases, hadn’t even been scheduled yet, they suggested I should go ahead and teach my own version of SATCOM Fundamentals unofficially, as it were.

I’m not new to teaching.  It’s something I’ve long practiced and enjoyed, as far back as teaching scouts to tie knots before I was even in high school (underrated skill, knot-tying – understanding knots comes in handy more often than you might expect).  Since then, I’ve done curriculum development and instruction in various professional capacities in more and less formal roles, and I continue to enjoy it.  Teaching is often a great excuse for me to talk about the subjects I’m passionate about to a captive audience.  Perhaps because I’ve looked at it in those terms, I missed that I enjoy the teaching itself.  Since the “students” in my fundamentals course were attending voluntarily, I realized that, not only do I actually enjoy teaching for teaching, and not just teaching about the subjects about which I am particularly passionate, but also, I might be pretty good at it.  At least, people kept coming to my unofficial class – in fact, attendance grew over time.  Maybe people were just exceptionally bored.

As I was teaching what was supposed to be a fundamentals course, though, I realized what is “fundamental” can be challenging to isolate.  It’s a problem of baselining, which I actually considered extensively in how I wrote the textbook.  I thought I’d solved the problem in the textbook by establish an assumed level of knowledge equivalent to roughly a high school level of education, but trying to teach a class based on that assumption proved the fallacy in my thinking.  First, obviously, not everyone’s high school educational experience is equivalent.  Things that I thought were standard are not necessarily standard elsewhere.  More significantly, basing the textbook around that level of education presumes that people remember what they learned in high school.  This probably should have been an obvious problem, but I didn’t recognize it until I found myself backtracking in my class to cover foundational mathematics I unreasonably assumed people would remember from a decade ago.

Thus, the question of what constitutes fundamentals.  If there are previous foundations which a course builds upon, can it really be considered fundamental?  Is it nonsensical even attempt to refer to an emergent subject like SATCOM in a fundamental fashion?  The answer cannot be to adapt my “fundamentals” course to cover mathematics from number theory to algebra to calculus – it would make the course a matter of years, not months.  A course designer must make certain assumptions about the background students will bring to the course.  Easy to do in an academic sense, or at least easier, since students follow typical, known, shared progressions through various course paths.  Far more challenging for a professional course, where the “students” are people coming to the material from all walks of life and at different points in their careers.

The course designer must make certain assumptions, but the teacher has more flexibility.  At its best, teaching must be a dynamic process.  Just like storytelling, even in the written form, is a dialogue between author and reader, teaching is a dialogue between teacher and student, instructor and learner.  It is an adaptive process, and the best teachers are those who best adapt to the needs of their students.  Sometimes, that means providing miniature lessons in calculus that are nowhere in the syllabus but will augment a conceptual understanding.

Of course, I say that from the luxurious position of teaching a course to students who are attending voluntarily, where there is no set schedule beyond what I impose, where mine is the only course they are taking at the time, where I have full control over the curriculum, there are no outputs required other than a vague goal of “learning,” and I can spend two or more hours on a single lesson if I so desire.  That is not how teaching usually goes, and it is part of why I’ve long been hesitant to assert that I enjoy teaching itself.  Almost everything I’ve taught has been somewhat bespoke courses, where I have a fair degree of authority over the course material, and I’m only teaching a few cycles of one class before moving onto another role or another course.  Teaching the same subjects to a captive audience of students based on someone else’s curriculum, year after year after year…I tend to convince myself that’s what “real” teaching is, and that just doesn’t sound as appealing.

That’s a limiting view of teaching, though, so I think it is fair to say that I do enjoy teaching, even if I’m not sure I could see myself being a schoolteacher in a traditional sense.  There’s a reason, though, that education and learning have long featured on this site, whether through the abortive discussion series we ran for a few months, or through the in-depth articles I try to post on occasion.  If I ever do make IGC Publishing into something more robust than a simple author’s website – if I make it into a publisher, for instance – I envision running courses through the IGC Publishing imprint.  Courses on history, astrodynamics, electromagnetism, mathematics, electronics…whatever peeks my interest (or my teachers’ interests, if I were ever to get to the point of collaborating or hiring).  Not a traditional “school,” in other words, and not traditional courses in the sense of those designed to provide you with a specific skill and fancy piece of paper at the end.  It would be something as polymathic as I am, courses designed to be opportunities for the curious.

Such a format, though, would have the same problem, in more extreme form, of fundamentals.  I don’t think there’s an engineer’s solution to the fundamentals problem, short of requiring specific prerequisites and educational attainments, which is rather contrary to the goal.  No, the solution here comes from the writing side, from the notion of a dialogue between teacher and student like that between author and reader.  It’s not a luxury that can exist in all educational settings, but it’s one I shall strive to preserve in the courses I teach.