Listening Tour

Five Years Later, What Should Students Retain?

After shifting to the instructor side of a college course, and after two semesters of TAing and co-teaching, I have kept asking a simple question:

Five years after a course, what should students still retain?

From my own experience, I took my first introduction to city planning course during my undergraduate years about five years ago.

I do not remember much about the exam or what I needed to finish the final project. I also do not remember much of the software, formulas, frameworks, or methods we were taught.

But I do remember Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City and the five elements of the mental map.

I do not think the class was a failure. It exposed me to planning, and I eventually decided to pursue it.

But moving to the instructor side, I started thinking of a different question:

What should actually stay?

Since TAing and co-teaching two civic tech classes, I have started thinking about this through my own experience learning coding.

Two of the most influential courses in my own learning were Qiusheng Wu’s GIS programming courses on YouTube. I do not remember every assignment or every package he introduced. But what I retained was how to break a problem apart, how to search, how to debug, how to find documentation, how a coding workflow fits together, and how to approach a new package I had never seen before.

Through teaching, I realized that my learning experience is not universal. Some people learn through exploration. Some need more structure. Some ask questions constantly. Some naturally transfer ideas across courses and projects.

In this sense, I want to start a listening tour.

I want to hear from students, alumni, instructors, TAs, and anyone who has thought seriously about learning and teaching.

Think about a course you took around five years ago.

What do you still remember?

What do you still use?

What changed how you think?

What disappeared almost completely?

And from the teaching side:

What did you hope students would retain, and is that what actually stayed?

I have some ideas of my own, especially about technical learning, exploration, struggle, and learning how to learn.

But I want to start by listening.

Five years later, what should a good course leave behind?