Some of Michael Artin's teaching experiences

from Recountings: Conversations with MIT Mathematicians edited by Joel Segel:
"I taught calculus in small classes for years, starting when I was a graduate student in Harvard. But the first time I tried to lecture one of the freshman calculus classes, it didn't work very well. I was too formal, probably. You're in front of 250 people or so. It's a short of show game, and I had a hard time. The last time I did it, it was fine, but I'd learned a lot. Before trying it again, I attended Arthur Mattuck's lectures for an entire semester, and I leaned a lot from him.
Another thing that really helped me was being videotaped. The first time I was videotaped it wasn't in the calculus, though I've been taped teaching those courses. It was an upper-class course. I looked at it, and I saw that I was doing something terrible. I avoided looking at the class. Even when I turned around, my gaze was down. It just stared at you in the face when you watched me. I decided that the reason was that looking at the class would break my concentration on what I was saying, I'm pretty sure that's what it was. But it was extremely difficult to stop doing it. I probably still do it, but not as much. One of my brothers-in-law suggested just programming looking at the class into my preparation. It was a good idea....
There was another problem that also I can't do anything about. When Arthur sees my tapes, he is very critical, because I sometimes skip steps. The reason I can't do anything about it is because it's really a brain function-my brain has skipped the step. But that's one reason that I prepare very carefully. I've written down everything out exactly the way it's going to go on the board, for instance, so my board has gotten pretty good. I still have this skipping steps, but it's probably not as bad as not turning around often enough to look at the class. I get reasonably good ratings, so these aren't terrible. It's just that you want to be perfect".



Interestingly, his father Emil Artin is a Feynman like figure in mathematics. Here is the Wikipedia article on Emil Artin .

The book has also an interview with Arthur Mattuck and his experiences with Emil Artin's teaching and guidance.
I won't to say anything about my teaching except that one of the first students remarked that I was whispering endearments to the blackboard and I do not think that it improved much.
I briefly met Michael Artin 1966 when he was visiting Bombay for conference and I was a graduate student. It was partly because Emil Artin's 'Galois Theory' was one of the first non-prescribed math. books that I read and probably never got out of that thrall of beautiful theories without examples. Then I saw Michael again in a conference in Japan around 1973 and was very surprised that he remembered me and introduced me to his mother as the Swarup from India.