In the light of remote teaching, remote work, gamification, AI etc, we should rethink teaching as a whole
It feels there is very little experimentation in the space, mostly trying to mimic a classroom in digital
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
#12Reminds me of a quote I read long ago - I think it was from Sartre - that I'll try paraphrase:
"Teaching in public schools suffers from the same problems as cooking in public cafeterias - and generally produces similarly mediocre results."
I don't buy into the sentiment that public education is a mistake, or even that it's outputs are generally mediocre. I do, however, think that the insight that public education is more akin to an industrial process than an interpersonal relationship holds some water.
Re: Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate
#13This 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…
Good! Students should be failing out of they're unwilling to work hard
Re: Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate
#14This 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 fr…
We could call it the Paperclip Maximizer.
Re: Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate
#15This 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…
I really liked homework suggestions that (critically) included the answer key and walkthrough of solution!
Doing problem sets in university without this made it way less valuable because you need the immediate feedback loop to learn and waiting until office hours or recitation takes too long and you forget.
Good classes (from grade clarity perspective) were ones where it was clear what would be tested and how to prepare. Then you could leverage the optional homework to focus on areas you didn’t understand yet.
There were classes I enjoyed that did this poorly by either forcing homework grading without answer keys (feedback loop too slow, often can’t focus on what you don’t know) - or made it very hard to know what the test format would be like to prepare for.
I like learning and enjoyed my CS classes - I also kept a high gpa at a university known to be hard (was also preparing for medschool where gpa is critical in the US), but the stress around grades was miserable.
Getting good grades is a skill that’s related to learning, but also its own thing. Sometimes to optimize grades you have to do things that hurt learning (rather than focus on how a compiler works and digging into interesting details here, you must focus your attention on the specific types of puzzles that will be tested).
I get why this is done, but I still wish there was a better way to handle this. I think ISAs and job market validation of skills is an improvement (like lambda school) but those students still blame everyone else for their own failures even in that case so it’s a hard problem.
Re: Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate
#16For the most part I actually had wonderful teachers during my school career. What I bitterly disagreed with was a lot of the curriculum, and I knew they didn’t have a say in that.
So my question to educators here would be: Do you ever feel like you’re forced to teach topics you know won’t benefit students?
Re: Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate
#17I'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 may not make the same problems I judge my parents for, but I will certainly make new mistakes my children will judge me for. Just trying to be better.
Re: Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate
#18This 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.
Graded assignments are useful to give feedback to students. And more importantly they force students to work regularly and not wait for the last minute to study.
Re: Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate
#19This 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.
After just starting a grad program after 12 years in industry. I'd have to disagree. While a large fraction of homework is busy work designed to give the illusion of challenge and rigor - tests simply estimate whether someone has memorized the material sufficiently for a short 1 hour exam.
In CS, a ~4-20 hour project is vastly more representative of how well someone understands the material and could apply it in a real world setting than a 40 minute multiple choice exam. At the advanced levels this is true for fields such as Physics, English, History or any others.
Maybe we should ask ourselves how to give better assignments in a class that aren't simply busy work?
Re: Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Graded assignments are useful to give feedback to students. And more importantly they force students to work regularly and not wait for the last minute to study.
Personally I always preferred quizzes for that. I've always been a very strong autodidact though, there are probably people who prefer getting dragged through things by homework.