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Comment by paulitex | Hacker News Reader

"features interactive instruction, online laboratories and student-to-student and student-to-professor communication"

Gerald Sussman is one of the professors (coauthor of SICP and father of Scheme). If the first statement is true, this is quite an opportunity.

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I don't think that he's quite as inspiring to learn EE from as to learn CS from, though he's certainly an excellent teacher in any case.

I'm kind of sad, however, that they cancelled the graduate-level sequel to SICP that he was going to teach this semester and that I was going to take. I had even paid my tuition of $7696 for the class (MIT ain't cheap!). I'm one of the first victims of MITx! I still think it's a great thing anyway.

He and Agarwal seem like odd choices to teach this lower-level undergrad class. Maybe because it's so high-profile?

I'm not sure I get you. At MIT it is encouraged for the most prestigious professors to teach even freshman level classes. In fact, Sussman and Ableson themselves taught 6.001 (SICP) when I took it as a first semester freshman. I was taught by all sorts of famous people all throughout my undergrad MIT education. The big names especially chose to do so when they were developing a new approach to teaching the material.

Ahh, ok. I'm not sure you get the more average university experience then. I spent 5 years at a fairly large research state university without ever having a class from the department head, despite the fact that his main focus was also AI. I've even had a few lower-level undergrad classes taught by under-qualified first year PhD students.

Ah. I'll never again whine about how much my MIT education cost me! (Even though I never got to take a linguistics class with Chomsky.)

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