On teaching

We’ve successfully concluded another round of our Python Basics Course for Data Scientists this week. A big thank you to all the participants for your engaging participation and the thoughtful questions that enriched our learning experience. I would also like to extend my gratitude to Miguel Fernandez (/), who not only co-moderated the course but also significantly contributed to its enhancement.

Like all previous sessions, this iteration too will contribute to refining the course and its materials. Your active participation helps us spot errors or ambiguous statements in our content, enabling us to rectify them promptly. Your questions also provide us with ideas for developing more illustrative examples. Most importantly, your feedback allows us to reassess the course content to ensure that our examples and problems are appropriately challenging and relevant. All these insights will be integrated into our future updates, ensuring that each iteration of the course benefits from the experiences and feedback of its predecessors. This process helps the course evolve and emphasizes the importance of instructors being receptive to feedback. I firmly believe that teaching is not a one-way street.

Conversely, my own learning journey continues as I prepare the course materials and lessons. For instance, while developing content for the Python courses, I found my own programming skills improving. As I ponder how best to present and explain specific problems and their solutions, I also find myself questioning my existing approaches, often leading to alternative, more effective, and quicker solutions. While striving to be a good instructor, I make every effort to ensure that solutions are presented as accurately as possible. This includes incorporating detailed comments into the scripts, defining variables appropriately, avoiding redundancies in the code, and more. This, in turn, significantly influences my own future programming efforts.

So, when I say “Thank you to all participants,” I genuinely mean it. You all play an active role in the course’s success, helping it continually evolve and improve. Moreover, I am grateful for the enjoyable time we spent together during this course.

Thank you all!