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PROFESSOR: So typically in the course we start off talking about the structure of these cellular materials. We do some modeling of honeycomb and foam type materials, and that takes not quite half the term, but most of the first part of the term anyway. And I give them more problem sets at the beginning of the term, and they don't really start on the projects at the beginning. So I give them some background information to get them going. And I assign the project at the beginning of the course, and I think there's three kind of deadlines. One is they have to give me a proposal. I think that's typically about a month into the course, and that can be fairly brief, but I want to at least know they've got a team. They've got an idea. They've got some idea of how they're going to carry out their project. Then in about another month they have to send me a sort of update on the project, and by that point, I would have expected them, if they're doing...

GIL STRANG: Typically, the first few days of class, these guys ask what's the class average going to be? How are we going to be graded? I don't have any answers for that stuff. So I say what is totally true, that I don't feel my main job is to grade them. My job is to teach them or learn with them. That's what I continue to do, and gradually, they begin to believe. SARAH HANSEN: Today in the podcast, we're talking with teaching legend Professor Gil Strang. GIL STRANG: Maybe the key point is that make it human. You're a person like the student is a person. The book isn't quite a person, but it was written by a person. SARAH HANSEN: Welcome to Chalk Radio, a podcast about inspired teaching at MIT. I'm your host, Sarah Hansen, from MIT OpenCourseWare. One of OCW's most popular courses is Professor Strang's 18.06 Linear Algebra, a key foundation for his new course on machine learning, in which he's teaching students to teach compute...