Teaching

Courses I have taught

I've taught a variety of courses as an instructor of record or teaching assistant. Below are two of my favorite courses to teach: The Science of Singing and Speech Technology.

The Science of Singing

"The Science of Singing" is the original course I designed for the Provost's Mentored Teaching Fellowship. At its core, it is a course on articulatory and acoustic phonetics; the "twist" is that the examples and course content are mostly about vocal and signed music.

The course draws from the anthropophonic perspective—the position that studying all vocal behaviors, including vocal art like singing and beatboxing, can help us improve our understanding of phonetics and phonology (Catford, 1977; Lindblom, 1989). Different musical styles push the limits of human ability in various ways; for pedagogical purposes, the juxtaposition of different musical behaviors can bring sharp clarity to concepts like resonance and the creation of harmonics.

As part of the course, students learn about topics like:

• The different breathing strategies used in operatic singing.
• The fundamental principles of resonance that underlie the production overtones in overtone singing.
• The anatomical features of the vocal folds that are responsible for growls in throat singing and heavy metal.
• The vocal tract articulators and their possible configurations, especially as used by beatboxers.

A theme of the course is that both scientists and artists have valuable expertise over their shared domain, so scientific thinking should be informed by respectful collaboration with artists and incorporation of artists' knowledge. There was only one section of the course when I first offered it as an upper-division course for Linguistics majors, so I recruited local artists into the classroom to demonstrate and answer questions about a variety of vocal music (opera, throat/overtone singing, heavy metal, and beatboxing). Everybody had a great time.

The course has since been revamped into a freshman-level general education course with multiple sections each semester. It's no longer feasible to bring guest artists into the class (they would have to give up their whole day); instead, I now try to bring expert artist insight into the course through an interview assignment and pre-recorded presentations—and I welcome new ideas!

The current syllabus can be found at the link below.

• syllabus

Speech Technology

I've taught Speech Technology (or "Speech for Humans & Machines" or "Human Language & Technology") both as instructor of record at UCSB and as a teaching assistant (leading my own lab sections) at USC. As general education course, Speech Technology combines the basics of a general phonetics course with an introduction to computer programming and fundamental concepts in math and physics (e.g., mass-spring systems). For more advanced Linguistics students, less time can be spent on phonetics and more time spent on algorithms.

As part of the course, students learn about topics like:

• Speech synthesis (parametric, concatenative, and generative)
• Speech recognition (Fourier transform, neural networks)
• The tendency for technology to be racist and sexist
• Computations dynamical systems, mass-spring systems, dynamic programming, and the inner product
• How to code in MATLAB

When I taught Speech Technology for a quarter "at" UCSB (it was remote in Spring 2020) as an upper-division course for Linguistics majors, I emphasized the coding aspect through ten weeks of heavily scaffolded assignments that taught students how to use mass-spring systems to create and decompose vowel sounds. To learn more, have a look at this proceedings paper.

Below you can find links to a sample syllabus and a reading I created that introduces dynamical systems (which would also be appropriate for an introductory Articulatory Phonology class). Contact me if you'd like to learn more about this class, the accompanying MATLAB assignments, or other resources I created.

• Syllabus
• Dynamical systems

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University Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award

The University Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award is the highest honor USC bestows on teaching assistants, and it was my great pleasure to accept it in Spring 2018. Below is the text by which I was introduced when receiving the award. (Source: USC Center for Education and Teaching Universtiy Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award Winners.)

Reed Blaylock is an enthusiastic and inspiring teacher in Dornsife College. His students extol his virtues because he has the ability to “make learning fun,” to quote one of their comments. He has developed a “student-centered” style of teaching that involves first leading students to individually discover problems and questions that interest and excite them, and then learning the tools that let them go about answering the questions in ways that are tailored to their own learning styles. He is able to connect up these individual discoveries to the content of the classes using a variety of innovative methods. Students come away from his classes excited about science, excited about learning more and confident in their own abilities to pursue their questions.

In recognition of his devotion to his students and his ability to inspire students to wonder, inquire, and learn in diverse ways, the University of Southern California is proud to honor Reed Blaylock with a University Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award.

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Selected comments from students

Every term, I explain to my students that student evaluations affect my chances of getting a job and tenure. So, they should leave positive evaluations if they want me to teach more in the future, negative evaluations if they want to discourage schools from hiring me, and constructive feedback to help me improve either way.

Overall, my students are very supportive.