Scot Aaronson on Teaching Undergraduate Computer Science

Anyone who has attended a lecture in university has met professors who do not want or like to teach. If they did, they would do a better job of it. Scott Aaronson's teaching statement declares explicitly what his Quantum Computing lectures show: that he is an an amazing researcher and first-rate thinker while still being able to teach at undergraduate levels. Maybe you can't be such an amazing researcher, or maybe you already are, but you could do worse than to try and be as good a teacher as he is:

My basic proposal is to sing the ideas of theoretical computer science from the rooftops—by creating new undergraduate courses, training graduate students, helping talented undergraduates reach the research frontier, blogging, and writing popular books and articles.

Read the rest of the proposal, where Scott puts forward such heresies as teaching theoretical computer science as a liberal arts course, raising the undergraduate teaching ceiling to the level where it reaches "the research frontier", modernising the curriculum towards that frontier ("instead of showing twenty NP-completeness reductions, why not show two reductions, and then spend the rest of the time talking about pseudorandom generators, Primes in P, natural proofs, or quantum computing?"), having his students prove non-obvious theorems instead of just the obvious ones, and rewarding intellectual honesty (and, conversely, punishing dishonesty) in a way that I wish were done more often, even to me, when I was studying.

Now go read it, it's only four pages long, and it will make you feel better about the world.