Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate
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Re: Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate
#2This is TERRIFYINGLY accurate.
""" Here’s what will happen:
Like most other humans, your students will be lazy and fallible. So many of them will procrastinate and not do the homework. So they won’t learn anything. So they will get a terrible grade on the final. And then they will blame you for not forcing them to do the homework """
This is almost exactly how adjunct teaching went for me. It was not the experience I had hoped it would be in almost any way.
Re: Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate
#3The whole thrust behind this article is that grading and testing is a bunch of crap. And that's entirely correct, IMHO.
We should restructure our whole Western (and Eastern, for all I know) education system on the lines of Ivan Illich's book Deschooling Society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deschooling_Society which (simplified) suggests that everyone gets an educational grant that they can spend about which and who they study with they can freely choose. But it is not going to happen, and we will stay with the whole grading and testing bullshit.
Re: Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate
#4Yup. If i taught as if a younger version of myself would have liked, it would be a terrible course for most students.
Re: Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate
#5Evaluation has always been the biggest challenge for teachers in the tech industry, because education is largely driven by assessment (I've been teaching IT for 23 years now).
But things are changing, and the pandemic is speeding that process. A decade ago James Paul Gee outlined where we want to go, and I think it will largely come to fruition before the end of this decade: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNfPdaKYOPI
Re: Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate
#6This perfectly describes my experience as a TA in graduate school. At first I didn't understand why my advisor insisted on being so precise in assignment instructions. Then when TAing with him I saw how students could creatively misinterpret instructions, even when I could not imagine how to make them more precise. An exception for the new case would be added to the next iteration of the assignments. I only understood why we went to such lengths to prevent cheating because in my first year I watched my advisor spend two weeks of his time sitting down individually with each student and present evidence that they had cheated. Only about 10% of the students had cheated, but in a class of 1400, that's 140 students! I can't even imagine how much work that must of been on the head TA.
Re: Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate
#7This problem isn't a teaching problem. Evaluating someone's skills in any respect or context is basically an intractable problem. Interviewing, school, job performance, etc. etc.
If there were an organization that could "perfectly" evaluate people's skills in a fixed period of time it would quickly become the top, and eventually only company. It would use its own skills in order to remove low performers, perfectly from its own organization. It would find all of the top performers outside of the organization, perfecting arbitrating wage vs. value benefits. Profits from this would be divested back into the organization forming an infinite virtuous cycle.
Later it would supersede whatever nation it's in, conquering it by finding the best military leaders and soldiers using the same "perfect evaluation" ability. It would get the best diplomats and business leaders. Later it would turn an eye to other nations, then the world. Eventually the galaxy and the entire universe.
Re: Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate
#8The whole thrust behind this article is that grading and testing is a bunch of crap. And that's entirely correct, IMHO. We should restructure our whole Western (and Eastern, for all I know) education system on the lines of Ivan Illich's book Deschooling Society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deschooling_Society which (simplified) suggests that everyone gets an educational grant that they can spend about which and who…
That's putting the cart before the horse, people need teaching to learn how to spend, trial and error is the slowest learning strategy and should only be used when there are no alternatives
Re: Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate
#9This perfectly describes my experience as a TA in graduate school. At first I didn't understand why my advisor insisted on being so precise in assignment instructions. Then when TAing with him I saw how students could creatively misinterpret instructions, even when I could not imagine how to make them more precise. An exception for the new case would be added to the next iteration of the assignments. I only understoo…
When I was a TA, I convinced my professor to stop giving graded assignments. it was obvious on tests who had done the assignments and who hadn't.
Re: Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate
#10I've often thought the same thing about becoming an adult, especially a parent, in general. There are so many choices that I harshly judged older people for making (how to allocate their time and money, where to live, what to allow or not allow the kids to do, how to behave at work, etc.) that I now find myself making as a married guy in my mid-30s with four kids. It makes me sad, but on each point I'm like, "Oh, now I get it." I fear that this pattern could continue until I become my father in my 50s and 60s. I try not to judge people so much anymore.
Anyway, I appreciate the article as someone who will soon try my hand at teaching. I will have a lot to learn.