UCT’s teachers are a special kind of dedicated. Most of them are here because they recognised room for improvement, and here more than elsewhere, they can fight for this improvement. For this progress. This certainly seems to be the case for Ruud van Damme, a member of the core team at ATLAS, and a teacher of mathematics.
Having been here since before the start, he’s had a hand in most design choices for the course. When asked why he chooses to teach here, he had this to say:
“When you’re teaching in another programme you have a director who says you should do this course, and the course should be given like this, and this is what they should learn.
When I came here, I had to decide what you’re going to be taught, and why. Why do they need to know this, do they need to know this, or would they just need to have knowledge of it for a later masters? Why would you have these skills if you have mathematica and books?”
This kind of approach isn’t always popular. Some think you need to know as much depth as possible in mathematics. He talked of creating a programme with another mathematician previously, both of them going away, agreeing to meet later with what they think needed to be taught. Ruud came back with a small booklet, the other, an entire book.
Ruud’s approach is more practical though. He understands the broadness of the UCT. He recognises math is not something everyone wants to go into. He also sees he doesn’t have to be concerned over how ATLAS students take this kind of approach, given the perspective ATLAS promotes.
“The people who are going to do a more scientific masters, they should have extra math.The nice thing about ATLAS students is they know they have to think about that themselves, they need more math because they want to do physics, for example. That’s self regulating.”
This isn’t necessarily an intuitive approach, for a teacher. There are still doubts involved, but that’s a part of the process of improving. Just as ATLAS constantly pushes its students to reevaluate their point of view, it does the same for its teachers. Ruud is currently doing research into what people of industry actually want from it’s new engineers, in conjunction with another course on teaching. The adaptiveness of Ruud and staff can be illustrated with how they’ve changed their approach so much, so often since 2013.
“I started to teach math, and I thought, well all of these are brilliant students, so I started so high, but after two weeks I saw it wasn’t going well, I just saw these glaring eyes, “what are we doing here”, but then I realised this was wrong. We should do it differently. That kept on going, it was a sort of roller coaster through the first year. We’re constantly changing, constantly discussing. We’re getting a consensus at to how the course should look. ”
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