As a professor, I appreciated this article; the poignancy from the ending reminded me to reflect on how I choose to spend my time. I think the one nuance that’s

As a professor, I appreciated this article; the poignancy from the ending reminded me to reflect on how I choose to spend my time. I think the one nuance that’s missing is the concept of “prerequisites”. Most courses at a university have them - other courses or concepts that are expected to be understood before the current material. While I completely agree that it’s almost always a good idea to review the prerequisites, there is a dark underbelly that goes unmentioned here. I don’t know if this is just more prevalent at a smaller university, but I’ll occasionally encounter students in my (graduate level) machine learning class who are excited and passionate to learn the material, but who’ve chosen to forgo taking the two or three prerequisite courses. (Note that this is often undergrads who can’t fit the sequence into their schedule, rather than because of simple arrogance.) In these cases students often would like to spend a lot of my time outside of class learning the material they were supposed to know already. While that is a more efficient way for them to learn the material better, it takes time that I need to allocate to other things. (After all, it’s well known that 1-1 tutoring is the most successful form of teaching!) So usually at the beginning of class I’ll threaten and harangue to try to convince them not to do this.