Live data from Hacker News

Need help with students who've turned my class into a dating service

academia.stackexchange.com

231–240 of 659 posts

Re: Need help with students who've turned my class into a dating service

#231

I still have clear recollection of the 50:1 men-to-women ratio in my CS2xx classes and higher. Your odds weren't good if you were hoping to meet Mrs. Right. I imagine things have gotten better since. Still, seems like a fairly high effort low outcome place to meet someone who is likely not even receptive to advances in that context. Do colleges not offer many other opportunities for people to meet outside of class in…

i was going to say.. there weren't many women in my CS classes either and I'm not an outgoing person, but i still had no problem meeting women. just go to whatever events anyone puts on. whether it's a dorm party or a school dance. just go out. that's how you meet people.

Re: Need help with students who've turned my class into a dating service

#232

A lot of you are okay with this?

She clarified "there are no unwanted advances". Just because someone is uncomfortable does not mean there's something untoward going on. E.g. if I'm uncomfortable with two men kissing each other in public, it doesn't follow that those two men are creepy. If you grow up with conservative parents, you may be socialized to believe that men kissing each other is creepy, when it is actually normal and healthy. Similarly,…

Agreed about the strawmanning. (Ahem, “strawpersoning”?)

Seems to be a common rhetorical tactic to substitute untoward “downstream” effect with a system itself.

(“Because System X can be exploited for unwanted behavior Y, we need to condemn System X as much as we do behavior Y.”)

Re: Need help with students who've turned my class into a dating service

#233
post #146
post #43

> This might be hard, as no unwanted advances are taking place. We simply have students excelling at the course, and drawing-in a crowd. I should've been more clear with my "leching" comment. Still, it seems harassing in nature. It seems increasingly that society demands a world where dating only happens during designated and approved dating times and venues, and outside those strictly delimited places, men are to be…

That will not lead to a drop in fertility. Infact, that's exactly how high fertility societies operate. At least the Islamic ones, like Afghanistan for example, where the population doubled since 2001. Fertility has been dropping since the 80s, long before anything to do with wokeism or meetoo or whatever.

Fertility has been dropping since the 80s, long before anything to do with wokeism or meetoo or whatever.

So nobody was woke in the 80s? Feminism and homosexuality just sprang up out of nowhere in 2010?

Re: Need help with students who've turned my class into a dating service

#234
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Women signal interest or a lack thereof in a thousand ways. Picking up on that is a basic social skill and like all skills some persons are more capable than others.

Keeping track of a thousand subtle signals is a "basic" social skill?

Yes, “basic” means fundamental, not simple. And for a sexually reproducing species reading the social cues of the opposite sex is indeed of fundamental importance, modulo outright barbarism.

Re: Need help with students who've turned my class into a dating service

#235
I find the behavior predatory but not to a point that I can complain about without any more detail. If I swap out senior students with complete strangers, then it kind of sounds worse, but that may be an unfair comparison.

One thing that I will complain about is the preferential treatment that these seniors are showing. In my opinion, you are in a course to learn and teach (or because you're forced to), and these seniors definitely fall in the latter, yet, as teachers, they only help select juniors. This somewhat reveals their intentions and also makes the other juniors uncomfortable.

I don't see what point the app and diversity data play aside from optimizing for the courses you join and being backstory as to why seniors are joining. You're free to stick your head into courses and figure out if there are potential partners there.

Re: Need help with students who've turned my class into a dating service

#237
post #149
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that taking a class to get to know single women of your own age is disrespectful. Do we know they are objectifying? The post said this was about finding a future wife.

It’s disrespectful because it ignores the fact that the women are not there to date, but to learn. The men are getting in their way by showing off and offering disingenuous tutoring.

Why do you assume the women aren’t as interested in dating as the men?

Seems pretty sexist frankly.

Re: Need help with students who've turned my class into a dating service

#238
post #184

I still have clear recollection of the 50:1 men-to-women ratio in my CS2xx classes and higher. Your odds weren't good if you were hoping to meet Mrs. Right. I imagine things have gotten better since. Still, seems like a fairly high effort low outcome place to meet someone who is likely not even receptive to advances in that context. Do colleges not offer many other opportunities for people to meet outside of class in…

[flagged]

if this post is reflective of how you and fellow male computer science students acted with them then maybe we have a reason why they don't like computer science that much

Re: Need help with students who've turned my class into a dating service

#239
there is a non zero chance this post is a LARP or if it's real then greatly exaggerated. Parts of it don't sound right to me. I doubt anyone would keep this gag up throughout the whole semester if it wasn't going anywhere the first few days.

But the teacher also said there are no unwanted advances happening but referred to it as leching. Then later she described the problem as:

We simply have students excelling at the course, and drawing-in a crowd.

The same poster also made some other strange comments.

Re: Need help with students who've turned my class into a dating service

#240
post #128
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do people see this as even remotely unethical? It seems to me that it's great that plenty of younger people are getting essentially free tutoring sessions and fun friendships/relationships out of it. Unless there's sexual assault/battery being alleged here, this is both ethical and good for all the students involved!

There is an assumption in a class that you are there to learn the curriculum in some way. The seniors in this case are interested only in the other students. The class/coursework is only a prop for them to force interactions with other students. I don't think it's violence, but it's certainly unethical, and makes the class a "joke" for senior students to interfere with others learning. Imagine taking your first CS co…

> There is an assumption in a class that you are there to learn the curriculum in some way.

No there isn’t. We’re talking about a university, not someplace whose sole or primary purpose is learning. The assumption in a university classroom is that students are there to earn a grade and a credential.

Post reply on HN