Communications of the ACM

Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/blogCACM The Communications Web site, http://cacm.acm.org, features more than a dozen bloggers in the BLOG@CACM community. In each issue of Communications, we’ll publish selected posts or excerpts.

DOI: 10.1145/2716345 http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm

1. The most important thing is tone and attitude when answering questions. Many of us in CS (I include myself in this) have to fight against lapsing into a very patronizing tone. It is easy to slip into the “I cannot believe you don’t understand that” tone of voice, or say things like “it is so obvious.” Every time we use that tone of voice, or those sorts of phrases, we send the “if you don’t get it already, you shouldn’t be here” message. While this is likely more of a problem in lower-level courses, it can happen in upper-level courses as well. An interesting exercise for TAs and lab assistants would be to sit down and collect a list of the sorts of things they have heard over the years (or even said) and then actually say those things in a patronizing tone of voice. That should serve as a good reminder of what it sounds like, hopefully making it easier to avoid talking to students in that tone.

2. If students are working in teams,
keep an eye out/ear out for problematic
dynamics amongst the team members.
Suggest to teams ways of rotating re-
sponsibilities so that everyone has the
opportunity to play a leadership role.

3. The electronic submission deadline for homework should be set so that it does not encourage macho behavior. Have homework due no later than 11:00 P.M. or midnight. The problem with a 6:00 A.M. or 9:00 A.M. deadline is that it encourages very macho “I stayed up all night, I’m hardcore, I’m a *real* programmer” behavior. People who do not handle their work that way are seen as not being a true hacker, as not having real “programming chops,” even if the person who did not stay up was incredibly organized, completely solved the homework problems, and turned in the assignment hours early!

4. It is fine to suggest the use of Github or others, but understand that not everyone wants to put their work out in the world in that way. If it is required of all students, fine, but do not encourage the use of public repositories as a way of measuring people’s abilities. I am always distressed when I hear that employers are grouping résumés based on what they find in code repositories— this automatically knocks out of the running anyone who does not choose to display their work in that way, and we know that women tend not to use repositories as much because of the level of attack they experience in that world.

5. Periodically look over the grades as a group and see if any implicit bias is in evidence. Are grade distributions roughly the same across all groups of students? Check in about who is com-

Valerie Barr “Some Thoughts For Computer Science Teaching Assistants (and Faculty)” http://bit.ly/1yBDMbb January 4, 2015

I was recently contacted by a student
who will be working as a teaching as-
sistant for an upper-level CS course. He
remembered that, during a visit to his
campus, I had said that the way cours-
es are taught is just as, if not more,
important than the race, gender, eth-
nic background of the instructor. His
question was whether I had any advice
for him and his fellow TAs about how
they could “conduct ourselves or talk
about the course material in order to
help foster as inclusive and welcoming
an environment as possible.”
Here is the advice I gave, which I
think can be helpful for faculty as well
as for TAs, lab assistants, student help
desk workers, and others.