Teaching

Course Links

Awards

  • 2022: Steven H. Weiss Provost’s Teaching Fellowship Award, Cornell University. This is the highest annual teaching award at Cornell for teaching-track faculty. The award citation read, “The selection committee was highly enthusiastic in recommending you for this honor. Colleagues admire your extraordinary success with teaching extremely large courses, your wide range of expertise, your excellence in course development, and your commitment to diversifying STEM. Your students attest to your caring nature, your passion for and knowledge of your field, and the clarity of your course design.”
  • 2023 and 2021: Professor of the Year Award, Cornell University, Tau Beta Pi National Engineering Honor Society. In 2021 the award citation read, “This award is given each year to recognize exemplary teaching and commitment to our students. Tau Beta Pi oversees the selection process and Engineering students nominate their favorite professor.” An accompanying letter from the Tau Beta Pi President read, “Professor Clarkson has consistently displayed both passion and empathy to bring out the best in his students.”
  • 2020 and 2015: Excellence in Teaching Award, Cornell Engineering. Both times the award citation read, “This is highest award for teaching in the college.”

What Students Say

  • From an alum: “CS 3110 remains a transformative life experience for me. Every week at work I use my 3110 knowledge of higher order functions, partial application, and monads. 3110 made picking up Scala at work a breeze. And 3110 gave me the ability to have the thought ‘hmm… this is unfamiliar syntax. I wonder what its semantics is’ instead of guessing at the semantics without even really knowing that I’m guessing.”
  • From an asynchronous student during pandemic: “These lectures were some of the best that I had experienced, not only during a virtual semester, but throughout my entire time at Cornell. Every lecture was extremely well produced, interesting, and beneficial to my understanding of the content and of my future as an engineer in the computer science industry. Other professors should consider Michael Clarkson and CS 3110 as a prime example of how to successfully teach a course.”
  • From a TA: “Over the past two years as a TA, I have come to admire even more the work you do as a professor. I continue to be inspired by your style of lecturing and the commitment you show to your students. […] Every lecture was like a well-polished gem that, at a minimum was clear and insightful, and at best, evoked a measure of joy (and now let me make the embarrassing confession that I even cried a bit during the [lecture on the beauty of the Curry-Howard isomorphism]).”

Ratings for me as an instructor and for my courses are above average in the CS department and the Engineering college.

Course Evaluation Graph

Instructor Evaluations Graph

My teaching load started at about .4 kilostudents and recently has exceeded 1.0 kilostudents.

Teaching Load Graph