[? ANGELIA: ?] Yeah.
Hi, I'm [? Angelia ?]
from Jakarta, Indonesia.
BRIAN: Nice to meet you.
ANGELIA: Yeah.
My question is, I see,
from the [INAUDIBLE],,
that Brian and David are really
[INAUDIBLE] when they are teaching.
So my question is how to develop such
[INAUDIBLE],, like public speaking
and teaching CS combining and
[INAUDIBLE] and also technical skill.
Thank you.
DAVID: Well, thank you.
You're too kind, I think.
So one of the reasons I, at least,
went into teaching 20 years ago
was honestly because I wanted to
get better at public speaking.
As you may have heard me say in
one of CS50's classes, at the time,
I had run for the undergraduate
council at Harvard,
or the student government, if familiar--
student council at this school--
just kids that generally try
to accomplish goals on campus.
And I ran for this election
and lost miserably.
I did not win the election.
And part of that, I do
think, was because I
was very ineloquent at the time.
I had trouble conveying my ideas.
I performed very poorly in
one of the on-campus debates.
And so I was really angry at myself
that I wasn't better spoken at the time.
And so I started
volunteering as a teacher
for one of the undergraduate
student groups that
allowed me to teach
classes to other students,
like HTML, and CSS, and
other such technologies.
I then was a teaching fellow,
or teaching assistant, my fall
of my senior year of university.
And then I was fortunate to
be able to teach my own class
spring of my senior year.
And so it really, honestly, was
just practice, practice, practice.
And teaching, particularly, really
helped me organize my thoughts,
allowed me an opportunity,
again and again,
to try to communicate
clearly to other people,
more so than if you're just giving a
speech or just presenting in a class.
Having to teach, I think,
was really a key ingredient.
And I think it helped,
technically, that I just
enjoyed what it was I was teaching.
I really enjoyed programming.
I really enjoyed computer
science on the whole.
And so being able to
teach something I was
passionate about just really helped.
Brian, what was the case for you?
BRIAN: Yeah, I think I would
agree with just about all of that.
I think that practice is the key thing
that helps make you a better teacher.
Just getting experience, even if it's
just explaining something to a friend
or to a peer--
that helps you to start
to think about how
to take the ideas that
might exist in your head
and put them a little bit
more precisely into words,
and, in particular, to be
able to explain something
in a way that is accessible to someone
who hasn't seen the topic before.
But I often think
about, when I was first
learning some of the material, the types
of explanations that worked and didn't
work for me, and trying to
come up with explanations
that can help to explain
very technical topics
but, hopefully, in a bit
of an easier-to-understand
and more accessible way.
And it definitely helps that
the topics that I get to teach
are things that I find
really interesting.
With the artificial intelligence class
that was released this month on edX,
I had a lot of fun preparing
that class and thinking
about what topics I wanted to
cover, because [INAUDIBLE] all
topics that I personally find very
interesting and exciting in computer
science right now.
And so the opportunity to be
able to teach about those topics
and to talk them through in a lot
of detail, I found very exciting.
And so I hope that does
come across in the classes.
And I'm glad that you've
been enjoying them.
