Teaching at the University of Sharjah

The First Lecture

The first lecture I gave at the University of Sharjah, I prepared for two weeks. The slides were meticulous, the examples were polished, and the pacing was calibrated to the minute. I walked into the lecture hall, faced thirty students who had grown up with smartphones in their pockets and code in their curricula from secondary school, and delivered what I had prepared. The silence at the end was not comprehension; it was patience. The students were waiting for me to finish so they could ask the questions the lecture had not anticipated.

That first lecture taught me something that every subsequent lecture has reinforced: teaching is not the transmission of prepared content. It is the art of responding to what the students actually need in the moment, which is almost never what you prepared. The preparation matters — you cannot improvise what you do not deeply understand — but the delivery must be a conversation, not a recitation.

The Responsibility of the Podium

Standing in front of students carries a responsibility that I did not fully appreciate until I had been teaching for several years. The students in the room are making decisions — about their careers, about their relationship to technology, about whether they belong in this field — that will shape the next forty years of their lives. The lecturer who influences those decisions, even peripherally, is participating in that shaping. The influence is not optional; the only question is whether it will be intentional.

The student does not remember the lecture. They remember the moment the professor treated their question as if it mattered. That moment, which costs the professor nothing, is sometimes the moment the student decides they are an engineer.

What I Learned About Learning

Teaching has taught me more about learning than any course I ever took. The student who cannot understand recursion despite three explanations is not failing to learn; they are revealing that the explanations assume a foundation they do not have. The student who solves the problem instantly is not demonstrating mastery; they are demonstrating that the problem was too easy. Calibrating instruction to the actual level of the room, rather than the assumed level, is a skill that takes years and never stops developing.

• The best exam questions are the ones that make you uncertain whether you taught the material well enough — because they test understanding, not recall.
• The best office hours are the ones where you learn as much as the student, because the question they ask reveals an assumption you did not know you were making.
• The best assignments are the ones that some students love and some students hate, because they require a kind of thinking that not everyone is ready for, and that is honest.
• The best feedback is specific and kind and honest, in that order, because specificity without kindness is cruelty and kindness without specificity is useless.

The Particular Gift of Sharjah

Teaching at the University of Sharjah has a texture that teaching elsewhere would not have, because the student body represents a convergence of backgrounds that I have not encountered in any other classroom. Emirati students educated in a system that is rapidly modernizing. International students from across the Arab world and South Asia, carrying different educational traditions and different relationships to authority. Transfer students from vocational programs who bring practical skills and theoretical gaps. The diversity is not a challenge to be managed; it is a resource to be drawn upon.

The students teach me about the region, about the aspirations of a generation that is building the technology future of the Gulf, and about the assumptions I carry from my own education that are not universal. Every semester, I leave the classroom a better engineer and a more humble person than I entered it. The teaching is not a side activity to my research; it is a collaboration with the next generation, and the collaboration enriches both. The joy of watching a student who struggled all semester deliver a final project that exceeds what they believed possible — that joy is the reason I teach, and it has never diminished.