I teach a little like a preacher

I’m talking about employing mnemonic devices, not turning my classroom into a pulpit

I like to use visual analogies and clever comparisons to things in the real world to best communicate a concept, not unlike what preachers do, and if I’m lucky I can get a few students to shout and sing.

I teach at a journalism school and my course covers ways that students can use data to improve the accuracy of their reporting, plus web design basics so they can produce their reporting online. To convey ideas about these subjects, my favorite figurative references are houses, cars and food.

For example, I’ve helped students understand the way that building a website works by saying, think of it like building a house — HTML is what gives it structure, CSS is akin to interior design, while JavaScript relates to things that you can turn on and off like lights, water and heat. Then I watch as their heads nod and eyes light up because they get it now and they get how to approach learning each of those things.

In a particular lesson that I use to teach SQL, I show students that queries are already so familiar to us that that we run them whenever we order lunch. Before I scare them by saying that we’re about to learn SQL, I have them interpret the meaning of:

SELECT soups, salads
FROM menu
WHERE soups = “noodle” AND salads = “caesar”

I’ve used photos and videos to illustrate a point. Here’s a video that tries to show how queries happen all the time in movies, that’s how they usually find the bad guys:

Here’s a quick way that I illustrated the differences between Classes and IDs in CSS. This mock-up suggests that a car’s model name differs from its license plate number in that a model (like a Class) applies to many identical things, while a license plate (like an ID) is absolutely unique and applies to just one thing.