Much of the article and comments here can be explained the death of
good faith. People no longer believe in competent, benevolent power,
and a process of maturation that challenges power in acceptable ways.
Instead we build "systems". We pretend these systems are equitable.
They merely hide power and force it to become malevolent, incompetent
and terrified of challenge. We call this stagnation "progress"
Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate
171–180 of 502 posts
Re: Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate
#172Theres much to talk about here. A lot of this is sensitive to context. Students in high school, college, and grad school have different levels of maturity. There are also different incentives for each setting. I would say that high school and college students are more similar than grad students though. Perhaps more important is the fact that the power the teachers have in each setting is different as well: high schoo…
I feel like a lot of development happens between 14 and 18, so I don't understand why freshmen and senior years of high school are so similar from an academic philosophy perspective. Even in a private school where the teachers have a bit more freedom. I think a lot of kids get thrown into college with no idea how to manage themselves because they never had to before. There ought to be a better way to ease into that.
I agree it is very context dependent though. Not just academic year but also class content. Some courses need to lay a strong foundation, others would be most useful as a survey, still others are about synthesizing knowledge from across prior courses. Some classes contain students mostly forced to be there and others contain mostly students that are excited about that particular material. Different fields lend themselves to different assignment styles. And so on.
Re: Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate
#173As a professor, this completely resonates with me. For example, I take attendance and make it 5% of the grade. Then I give 5 free days and am generous with absences due to whatever. Why? Because it's a nudge for many students to get them to come to class, which makes them stay engaged, and ultimately get a better grade. (The other reason I take attendance is so that I can recognize at least most of them by mid-semest…
I ran my class like a job (senior level interactive media). We had assignments with deadlines and I did PR reviews. Deadlines are deadlines. Cut scope, features, etc but absolutely no late work. You can guess how it went.
> I ran my class like a job... Deadlines are deadlines.
We were having a conversation at my college about deadlines at some training thing and someone pointed out that almost no job is like that. That movie scenario where the guy has a big presentation, but it's also his daughter's dressage recital or whatever, and if he misses the presentation he'll lose his job? That doesn't happen. In the real world, you just say "I can't do it that day, let's reschedule for next week." and that's fine. Most real world deadlines are soft.
Re: Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate
#174As a teacher (CS and Math) for over a decade, I agree with much of this. I will only add that, as far as grading is concerned, I think the long-term incentive for the teacher is actually to put almost no effort in at all. There is no pay or status increase for teachers who are tough, consistent graders. In fact, some of the most revered teachers I’ve known essentially hand hold their students to a guaranteed A in the…
When I was an adjunct (EE and Math), it was widely known amongst all of the teachers, that the student evaluation scores were primarily a measure of what grades the students expected. And I had to ask myself: If I were a student again, why would I adopt any other strategy?
I don't remember if it was a formal study but somebody has asked students at the beginning of the course what grade they _think_ they'll get and at the end it fit very well. Basically all students try to make a particular grade with the least effort, since that's what they are incentivized to do.
Re: Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate
#175This phenomena has plenty of analogues in the corporate & government worlds as well. A formal performance review system is instituted to keep people from spending all their time sucking up to their boss, and then is progressively refined to deter all the ways that it has been gamed, until it is very well adapted to preventing the historical forms of gaming the system but bears no relation at all to incentivizing good business results. A codebase gets a series of bugfixes, until it ends up slow and impossible to maintain, and then is thrown away when a competitor adapts to market conditions faster. A new government bureaucracy is formed to identify and prevent all the ways that terrorists could bring down airliners, and only serves to violate flyers' privacy and add millions of hours to accumulated travel time.
The root cause, I think, is that humans are really bad at considering both the specific and the general in their decision-making. A new procedure might perfectly solve the problem you're having right now, but the cumulative effect of all these new procedures is to make the overall system useless.
Long-lasting systems provide for ways to throw away whole parts of the system and replace them with something simpler, without throwing away the system itself. Whole industries get outcompeted by a nimble startup. Codebases get refactored, and gnarly subsystems deprecated and replaced with clean interfaces. Elected officials get thrown out of office.
Perhaps the right way to look at this is to embrace change, and position yourself as the destroyer and replacer of systems that have become overcomplicated and bloated. That's why the tech and finance industries have been so highly compensated over the last 20 years: together, they're throwing away whole parts of the 1980/90s institutions that had become bloated through 40-50 years of progressive micro-optimization.
Re: Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate
#176I spent my 20ss trying to become a professor and teaching undergrads. The article resonates loudly with me. One of the best thing about nope-ing out of that lifestyle has been this: I still teach people. I teach people almost every day and this is incredibly validating. I teach people almost every day and this is incredibly validating and they find this useful. I teach new things to musicians I play with. I mentor my…
It’s totally a systemic problem, that’s it. Same thing with me. I love teaching, I just can’t stand the faculty anymore.
Re: Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate
#177Tangential: The article mentions Chesterton's Fence. I clicked the link to learn what that means and didn't find it (it's just a link to the guy's Wikipedia page). But check out the beautiful signature of this Chesterton fellow! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#/media/File...
Chesterton's fence refers to a principle that before changing something, you should first understand why it is the way it is.
> Chesterton’s Fence is a heuristic inspired by a quote from the writer and polymath G. K. Chesterton’s 1929 book, The Thing. It’s best known as being one of John F. Kennedy’s favored sayings, as well as a principle Wikipedia encourages its editors to follow. In the book, Chesterton describes the classic case of the reformer who notices something, such as a fence, and fails to see the reason for its existence. However, before they decide to remove it, they must figure out why it exists in the first place. If they do not do this, they are likely to do more harm than good with its removal. In its most concise version, Chesterton’s Fence states the following: Do not remove a fence until you know why it was put up in the first place.
Re: Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Older people knowing better than younger people is one of those heuristics that's almost always right [1]. It's hard to tell the difference between a stupid kid and a stupid parent, because stupid parents are rare. Yet people keep searching for stupid parents, because it's really important to find them when they exist. There's a constant rate of kids pulling false alarms on their parents, but you don't want to ignore…
> Older people knowing better than younger people is one of those heuristics that's almost always right
Up to mid 20's, yes.
> stupid parents are rare
Not even uncommon.
Re: Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate
#179> 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.
Yes! And then the rubric should actually define the pieces of the assignment you care about them getting right. I have this debate a lot when we’re designing assignments for an intro to Python class (which, sadly, we have to do very regularly because of sites like Chegg…). Figure out what it is you want the student to get out of the assignment (e.g., manipulating dictionaries or sorting values) and evaluate their results based on whether they did that thing. If they did the thing but missed some nitinoid details they don’t get a perfect grade, but they should get a solid, passing grade for it.
Re: Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate
#180My teaching experience is limited, but for teaching compsci I've had good results with programmatically graded assignments, where the students get unlimited submissions but also machine-enforced deadlines. (I liked this when I was a student, and I've liked structuring my own class this way too.) One of the big benefits is that you can be maximally clear about what the problem set is asking the students to do, because…
As a student I’ve taken computer science classes with and without some kind of autograder. I’ll say that depending on how it’s set up it can be complete nightmare fuel. In one class I recall that 3/4 of my time was formatting comments correctly to not trip the chest detection that came from not “properly attributing” the code I wrote. Also the assignments were written to the autograder. So instead of saying “write a…
> “write a method named NAME that takes in XYZ parameters and outputs exactly in QRS format”.
That's a pretty realistic requirement, though, isn't it? If you're writing a class that's supposed to interoperate with other systems, it's not like you can just name things whatever you feel like. They have to fit the expected interface.