Reflections on Teaching Logic

Date

April 23, 2025

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Colleagues and friends of mine know I can often be found (usually after a pint or two!) bemoaning the fact that for a discipline that is so interested in asking and answering questions and understanding fundamental truths about the world, philosophers are remarkably poor at reflecting on our own practices, especially our teaching and assessment practices. (I say this including myself in the lot, even as someone who thinks she thinks about these things quite a bit!) Quite a lot of us teach the way we ourselves were taught, because—let’s face it—we’re not pedagogy specialists, nor are we likely to become such; reading up on good pedagogy takes a lot of time, time that we could be spending reading philosophy instead. One advantage of blog posts is that they are short, and hence quick to read, and provide space for pedagogical reflection of a more practical, rather than theoretical, kind.

I’ve been teaching logic for almost two and a half decades. My experiences run from my first time in front of a classroom as a 20 year old PhD student, conscious of the fact that many of the juniors and seniors in the room were older than me; to teaching a mid-level class at a new institution which I thought was on philosophical logic but the students thought it was going to be mostly philosophy of language, resulting in a terrible mismatch between my expectations and theirs that resulted in 2/3 of the students signing a petition to get the final exam canceled; to seeing my newly introduced final-year advanced logic seminar grow from a small seminar of 10-12 students, to 12-15, then 15-18 students, and finally up to 32 this year. I’ve been a teaching assistant to some brilliant pedagogues; I’ve also assisted some not-so-stellar teachers of logic. So here are some (not quite bullet point, although I swear I tried) reflections on things that I’ve learned about teaching logic.

Joy:

There is very little I would rather be doing (and I include “spending time with my partner and kid” in this list!) than standing up in front of a crowd of students, teaching them introductory logic. It is so much fun and it brings me such joy. Students see this, and they want it: They want to be a part of something that clearly generates so much happiness and satisfaction. Since they want it, they’re willing to work for it, even those who might otherwise not want to be there. I have had students tell me (back when this class was a mandatory rather than elective class), “I didn’t really enjoy logic, but I enjoyed your classes.” A far cry from a student who once told me that attending their logic lectures (not given by me!) was like “being fed spoonfuls of sand.”

Explicit expectations:

The disastrous class I mentioned above was definitely a cause for pedagogical reflection: How had I gotten things so badly wrong? One very obvious thing was that neither I, nor my students, articulated our expectations of each other until it was far too late in the year; we both assumed that the other knew what we were doing here, and that we could just begin. I’ll never make that assumption again! But there’s more to this than just making explicit my expectations concerning class content and method; it’s about making explicit what kind of classroom I want to lead. This was most recently important in my advanced logic seminar, which with more than three score students in it was no longer really a seminar. My usual method had been that at the end of each class, we’d agree on how much of the textbook to try to read before the next week and who amongst the cohort would be in charge of “presenting” the material. (I use scarequotes because I didn’t want presentations, I simply wanted someone who would be in charge of reading the group through a close reading of whatever text we were reading, who had gone through the proofs in detail and was prepared to go through them on the board if need me; my role, then, in the class was to provide support, help people when they got stuck, and give extra context that might have been missing from whatever we were read.) This method was no longer going to work.

But I didn’t want to give up on that close-knit, small-group seminar feeling, so I told my students this on the first day: That that was the atmosphere I wanted to nurture, and I would do my best to do so, but that the only way this would work was if they were willing to step up and do their part: To be willing to talk, to be willing to engage, to be willing to ask questions, to be willing to not just turn up and expect me to feed them content. So not only did I make clear my expectations of them, but also the benefits they’d get by meeting them, and this came in tandem with explicit information about what I would be doing to support them in getting there. This included quite practical considerations: It was a two-hour seminar, starting at 9am. Two hours of logic that early in the morning is a lot to ask of anyone, even with a short break partway through, and I wanted students to know that I knew that. So I set a baseline expectation from day one that even with a scheduled break partway through, I didn’t expect them to remain glued to their seats for the entirety of the rest of the class. Anyone, at any point, who needed to get up and move around, or stand rather than sit, or sit someplace other than one of the uncomfortable chairs, was welcome to. Anyone who needed to leave the room, at any point for any reason (whether to get something to drink, to use the toilet, or just to let their head empty out a bit), was welcome to. One side perk of this which I totally did not expect is that as the year wound on, and 9ams got harder and harder for people, I still didn’t see a significant drop in attendance by the end of each class period—students knew that if they came in late, there would be no censure, and that I’d rather have them there for part of the time rather than none of the time!

Dancing on the edge of ignorance:

The other thing I did in that class was talk a lot about what it was that we were doing there (beyond, of course, learning cool modal logic stuff)—what is the purpose of being in a classroom? What is the purpose in me being there, when they have the textbook and my logic videos on YouTube? What is the purpose in being there with other students? What does it mean to learn? And how can they recognize, in themselves, when it is happening? We talked about this quite a bit because advanced logic is one of those classes where it’s pretty much guaranteed that every student will flounder at least once—they’ll come up on a concept that they just can’t wrap their head around, or a technique that they just cannot apply no matter how they try. But in fact, what I told them was: I actually want them to be dancing on the edge of falling into that abyss every week, to constantly be at a point where they felt like they were just about to lose all the pieces, because that is where learning happens. If everyone is always confident and comfortable with what we are doing in class, then I’m not doing my job: I’m not teaching them things that they don’t already know. The tricky part is finding where that edge of ignorance is, and staying on it, but not letting students fall off the cliff edge. This is where I emphasized how important it was that they let me know if they thought they were falling, because I couldn’t take a step back if necessary if I didn’t know they needed me too. And admitting that kind of ignorance in front of 30+ of your peers is hard: But it was a lot easier for them to do knowing that it wasn’t just them, that everyone else was also dancing on that cliff edge, and that I was asking them to tell me when they were about to fall not so that they would be shamed or ridiculed or made to feel ignorant, but so that I could ensure that they didn’t.