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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

#141

Post by chias »

wuyishan wrote: post #105
finexplained wrote: post #6

This 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…

Did someone ask the students why they were cheating or creatively interpreted instructions? And then tried to address the underlying problem?

You can't address the underlying problem that a difference in an A and a A- could very well have lasting effects on a person's life.

You can't address the underlying problem of someone making it to their late teens and being a little shit.

You can't address the underlying problem that some people don't even really want to be in your class but "have" to take it because they want a degree.

You can't address the underlying problem that some students have spent the last 19 years rules-lawyering their parents and always getting their way.

You can't address the underlying problem that any concessions you make for the 20 year old mother of two struggling with two full-time jobs on top of college will also be vehemently claimed by the stoner 20 year old with a parent on the Board and who thinks college is awesome except for the classes.

You can't address the underlying problem that the university gave you a class size three times what it would need to be for you to be able to provide each student with the requisite attention to really address anything other than "did they meet the criteria".

Re: Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate

#142

Post by musingsole »

sanderjd wrote: post #81
finexplained wrote: post #6

This 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…

I thought the article was fairly strong except for in the two points you highlighted here. In the first case, I still don't understand why you don't just mark their answer from creatively misinterpreted instructions wrong and move on with life. And in the second case it seems like just not worrying about cheaters and letting it be their own funeral (or not) is optimal. I remember who the cheaters were in my classes a…

> I still don't understand why you don't just mark their answer from creatively misinterpreted instructions wrong and move on with life

Because the actual incidents are often in fuzzy areas where it seems possible the teacher's instructions were confusing. You're stuck making a character judgment of your student instead of evaluating knowledge. Over a career, it becomes easier to cordon off fuzzy areas than it is to risk a moral challenge.

Re: Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate

#143

Post by buo »

kazinator wrote: post #102

> But some are an assault on reason, with every word of the assignment creatively misinterpreted. It was never stated which temperature circuit to build or how to prove it works or what level of explanation was necessary. And who’s to say what “build” means? You have to think like a software engineer. Test first: write the requirements fro the perspective of a test which fails if the requirements are not met. Rather…

Absolutely. In my experience teaching in college, this is the correct approach.

A very useful thing to have, both for teachers and students, is a "rubric": a succinct description of how the work will be evaluated, and the importance (weight) of each feature.

Re: Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate

#144

Post by caddemon »

vwoolf wrote: post #77
leetrout wrote: post #2

This 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…

This is also how teaching went for me. I found out why teachers have attendance policies, quizzes, and all the other things that, as a student, seemed inane, if not counterproductive, to me. While those things sometimes are, and can be overly punitive or poorly applied (like anything, much of the apparatus around teaching can be done better or done worse), I now get why instructors do those things.

I also think there's always going to be a question of which students you are optimizing for. I had a professor that didn't have an attendance policy, but at the start of every year he would show a scatter plot of class attendance versus final grade with a fit line showing decent correlation. Of course if you looked closer, the effect was mostly that very good attendance led to A's. Low attendance was a crapshoot on the plot, with every letter grade represented including many of the A+'s.

The students that attended didn't need an attendance policy because they were inclined to attend anyway. The question is how much forced attendance would have improved the scores of the bad performance/low attendance group versus how much it would have hurt the good performance/low attendance group (including missed opportunities at the same time slot). I don't see a policy that realistically helps all of the struggling students without hurting any of the top students, so a tradeoff has to be made.

Perhaps offering attendance as extra credit without making it a penalty could be a good middle ground, but I don't think it would help all of the low attendance/poor performance students. By the time they realize they need extra credit they would already be behind, and they may not care about an extra credit offer at the start of the semester.

Re: Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate

#145

Post by jessriedel »

endisneigh wrote: post #58
jessriedel wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This problem isn't a teaching problem. Evaluating someone's skills in any respect or context is basically an intractable problem. You're not engaging with author's argument. The author explicitly assumes for the sake of argument that perfect evaluation is possible. He's saying that even under this unrealistic assumption, teacher policies that naively look draconian are in fact hard to avoid given reasonable teacher…

That wasn’t my read. Ultimately the issues described are political. The author says as much when describing the “structural forces” and that systems with humans behave is funny ways.

That two things both involve politics does not, by itself, imply they cannot be usefully discussed separately. You need to actually argue that the issues the author discusses go away or become moot given the imperfection of real-world evaluation. It is not enough to argue that the world would look different were perfect evaluation possible.

Re: Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate

#146

Post by giantg2 »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #94
dionidium wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just had my first child at age 40 and of course my experience is similar to yours. I can't help but wonder if delaying (or eschewing) having children is contributing to what seems to be a broadening generational gap. I'm learning lessons in early middle-age that previous generations learned in their early twenties. I could have used some of this new empathy I'm feeling for my parents and their generation 15-20 year…

Same boat, same feeling. But I also think there are mistakes we aren’t making, a maturity that will lead to perhaps enhanced outcomes for our kids even if not for us.

Even kids have less responsibility and more oversight today than generations ago. I wonder if that contributes to speed of maturation.

Re: Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate

#147

Post by warner25 »

jhanschoo wrote: post #127
warner25 wrote: post #10

I'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…

On the other hand, this observation must be qualified as not necessarily generalizable to all teenagers and parents. Sometimes a person may grow up and realize that their parents were indeed quite lacking, and be right in that assessment. I think this other circumstance is important to at least mention because children of objectively lacking parents can have doubts in their mind about their own judgment. In part beca…

True, and I wouldn't limit this to only be about my own parents, but more broadly about all kinds of people like teachers, coaches, aunts and uncles, older co-workers, people in the news... even slightly older siblings who had kids a few years before I did.

Re: Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate

#148

Post by adverbly »

sturgill wrote: post #24
warner25 wrote: post #10

I'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 frequently say that 16 y/o Chris would be very disappointed in 40 y/o Chris. But 16 y/o Chris was an idiot. As you touched on, the fun twist is when you abstract the learning so it’s not just “I was wrong about X” but “I should be much more accepting of contrarian views.”

> the fun twist is when you abstract the learning so it’s not just “I was wrong about X” but “I should be much more accepting of contrarian views.”

Yup. Until people abstract over their previous experiences they will continue to find themselves in situations where they have had and discarded 5 different previous viewpoints only to think to themselves: "I've got it right this time, and anyone that disagrees is stupid".

Some would call this "Wisdom". Also interesting that learning this lesson does not make your current understanding any more accurate - it just reduces your confidence in it. Wisdom != Ability to understand.

Re: Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate

#149

Post by hajile »

Unfortunately, even graduating students usually still have the life experience of a child and can't see the real purpose in education.

Most are better off without a degree.

Most who get a degree would be better off with an apprenticeship tailored to their field.

Most of the rest would benefit from getting a few years of real life experience first.

The reduction in attendance would lower costs and reduce degree inflation in the job market. More productive years would be available and people could replace their college debt with a mortgage and have something of tangible value when they were done.

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