741–750 of 1001 posts
It certainly made for good learning material.
Threads like these are always frustrating, because as usual people (programmers in this case) freely air their opinions on how schools are broken with phrases like “we need to fix the system”. As someone who studied pedagogy for years and quit due to an immense frustration with exactly this — how broken the system is — I would encourage you to entertain the thought that maybe, you as a person who is almost in all cas…
If people within the education system are getting upset that the people who are supposed to benefit from the education and who are paying an enormous sum of money in order to obtain the education dare to have an opinion about the education, I'd say that's a pretty good indication of the problems with the system. I can't think of any other area where there's anger at customers voicing their opinion. Institutions with that kind of attitude probably wouldn't last long if the education system was opened up and students were actually given some choice (say, by separating education and credentialing).
Threads like these are always frustrating, because as usual people (programmers in this case) freely air their opinions on how schools are broken with phrases like “we need to fix the system”. As someone who studied pedagogy for years and quit due to an immense frustration with exactly this — how broken the system is — I would encourage you to entertain the thought that maybe, you as a person who is almost in all cas…
Threads like these are always frustrating, because as usual people (programmers in this case) freely air their opinions on how schools are broken with phrases like “we need to fix the system”. As someone who studied pedagogy for years and quit due to an immense frustration with exactly this — how broken the system is — I would encourage you to entertain the thought that maybe, you as a person who is almost in all cas…
i’m not so sure we _can_ fix it or even _should_ fix it. in my opinion, fixing implies a standard of perfection. it’s an imperfect system, formulated by imperfect people - the types we’re going to meet and interact with for the rest of our lives. there are always going to be imperfect ways of measuring the “goal”, be it content domain knowledge, or project completion kpi, or something else.
the positives of an imperfect system that i can think of off the top of my head are that they give teachers the ability and motivation to find creative ways to impart information and knowledge, and it can implicitly educate pupils in how to navigate complex, broken systems.
teachers who come up with novel educational methods are generally heralded for their innovations, but there’s not much else to incentivize them to remain or continue to innovate. not to mention the fact that those innovations may be expressions of their personalities and not an actual template for how every teacher should teach.
the same seems true for students. they find adaptations for navigating those broken systems. some will fall into the stream of the system, play the game, and get high marks. what have they learned? i’d say they have learned a fair amount. some will discover a need to collaborate survive and they have learned about themselves. some will complain and resist, but pass based on raw willpower or charm or something else. some will fail but will see gaping holes in the system to explore, exploit, or fill. they’ve also learned.
these are just a few of the dimensions i can think of off the top of my head. i believe that the primary way that we should seek to reform or improve educational systems is through how we treat the educational infrastructure (teachers, staff, materials, services) and the students who are failing to engage the experience due to factors beyond their control (mental health, SES, etc.)
Threads like these are always frustrating, because as usual people (programmers in this case) freely air their opinions on how schools are broken with phrases like “we need to fix the system”. As someone who studied pedagogy for years and quit due to an immense frustration with exactly this — how broken the system is — I would encourage you to entertain the thought that maybe, you as a person who is almost in all cas…
> HOW do you measure knowledge? And when you decide how, how do you scale it? I have experienced good tests and bad tests. I studied in France, tests were open book with no multiple choice questions, only problems to solve. This approach scales badly and is a lot of work for the professor grading but it measures knowledge. The problems were long, had few questions besides describing the problem and maybe a few questi…
The institution was far from elite; they used to send staff on recruitment drivs in faraway places, because (a) overseas students get to come th this country when otherwise they wouldn't get a visa; and (b) they pay more. The result was that many of the students were rich, and assumed they didn't have to work. Many didn't have basic qualifications for doing the work. So they cheated extensively (there was no web and no WhatsApp; they just copied one-another's coursework submissions).
I asked my experienced colleagues what to do. They said that I could report the cheating to the school; but I would then be tied up in exam boards all summer, for which I wouldn't be paid. Also I could expect to have to fight charges of racism. Alternatively I could explain to them the difference between helping one-another out (good) and plagiarism (bad). Guess which choice I took!
Basically, the institution didn't care about plagiarism; they didn't care about the unfairness to honest students; and I don't think they cared whether the students learned anything. By the next year, I didn't care either. I just delivered the material, and went home.
He created a testing system that encourages cheating. He made it too easy to cheat, so if one student cheated other students (who are all in competition together) would need to cheat as well less they receive a relatively lower grade.
Then when he detected the cheating he didn’t attempt to minimize the damage. Instead he focused all his time and effort building a solution that nobody needed, and let the main problem escalate to the point where nearly all his students were cheating.
The lecturer should be fired.
In my degree (Comp Eng) we overlapped with the Comp Sci program a fair amount. Comp Sci was part of the college of mathematics and Comp Eng was part of the college of engineering, which were on opposite sides of campus and organizationally were very separate. The cultures could not have been any more different. The engineering labs were loud, full of collaboration and discussion. The professors would sometimes find o…
Education mostly doesn't work like that for most people in most places.
Teachers are not allies of students. They are the enemy, they are the problem. Students are rarely interested in learning. They are interested for this whole thing to be over and with a decent result.
This adversity pushes students to cooperate against the faculty. That's a strong motivator to connect and support each other in the face of common enemy. And they are learning a lot from each other, both in terms of knowledge and cooperation. There are also freeloaders in that cooperation that come just for the answers. But when the answer is not as easy as picking a letter, for example the answer is a way of solving a class of problems even those cheaters learn from this coopeartion. And they learn more than they could learn from their teachers.
By exploiting adversarial dynamics, having good materials available and technically ensuring it's hard to cheat trachers can basically have half of their teaching work done by the students as they teach each other. This benefits everybody.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I never gave a fuck about grades. For some courses I had below average marks, for others I was the best. I studied because I wanted to genuinely understand how things work and how I can solve problems and how, beginning with one ideea I can extend it or come up with an entirely different idea. And I know I will get downvoted for saying this, but for me, programming without having a solid understanding of CS backgroun…
> I studied because I wanted to genuinely understand how things work and how I can solve problems and how, beginning with one idea I can extend it or come up with an entirely different idea. > programming without having a solid understanding of CS background and how computers work it would make me just a code monkey, able just to do what I saw in tutorials and copy pasting SO answers without understanding them Other…
Yes, except ...
University courses are always going to have a mixture of people with different motives. One of those motives is going to be a desire to go into research, while another is going to be earning credentials to prove they have an understanding of their field before they embark upon their career. Then there are the people who take the courses with a pure desire to learn how things either in a structured environment or to learn along with like-minded people, without pursuing it as a career path. That runs the gamut from needing university credentials, to the credentials being nice to have, to not needing the credentials at all. Yet, in each case, the desire to learn is genuine.
Then there are the people who are cheating the system by treating the university as a credential mill, the means to an end, where the end has little to do with furthering their understanding. Some of them are upfront about this. I remember one of my high school peers saying they chose their discipline based upon how much money they would earn and how well they would perform. Some choose to deceive themselves about this, largely by griping about how poor instruction is or how irrelevant the course material is while putting little effort into the courses. Whichever way you look at it, these people are problematic when they step over the line by cheating. They go from being passive leeches on the system to actively destructive forces.
There are genuine advantages to learning in a university environment. For some it is structure. For some it is being able to work with their peers. For some, it is having access to professionals in their chosen field. All of these can contribute to understanding, if the learner chooses to do so. I have known very few professors who would turn away someone who was genuinely interested in learning. For the most part, they were more inclined to side with the students who would benefit from learning in a university environment, but were struggling to keep up with the demands of those who would not!
Threads like these are always frustrating, because as usual people (programmers in this case) freely air their opinions on how schools are broken with phrases like “we need to fix the system”. As someone who studied pedagogy for years and quit due to an immense frustration with exactly this — how broken the system is — I would encourage you to entertain the thought that maybe, you as a person who is almost in all cas…
When you live your life in a rigorously controlled institution, you only consider what the institution echos. Outside the box thinking is possible, but it's the exception. You need outsider ideas and collaboration.
Politics will never solve these problems. It has to be grassroots and volunteer driven.