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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

#21

Post by germinalphrase »

Daneel_ wrote: post #16

For 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?

I teach high school English, so I have a greater degree of freedom in my curriculum development (there is no textbook. I create everything). That is actually not my issue.

My problems are mostly reality/logistical constraints. There is always more I could do, more I could give, more I could help every single student, but I would have to learn to freeze time or never sleep.

It’s unhealthy and irrational, but I feel shame for not giving more when I know what a kid needs but I circumstantially lack the capacity to give it to them.

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

#22

Post by oconnor663 »

My 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 you give them an example input and an example correct output, and for each submission you tell them what their output should have been. But each grading run uses a randomized input, so they can't just hardcode the answers.

Compsci is perfect for this, because students can fix their bug quickly and resubmit their whole assignment. For math, I guess you'd want to avoid having them repeat problems they already got correct. But for other subjects that don't really have a place for "random input", I guess this doesn't work?

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

#23

Post by cpach »

TBH reading this article really didn’t give much, IMHO.

I guess the context here is mainly a university? Or is it senior high?

Anyway, I spent around three years in college and the value-add for me wasn’t the grades I got. The value I got out of it was the foundation that I laid and the inspiration I got. I got in touch with materials/domains that I might never have encountered otherwise. And to me that’s truly a gift that keeps on giving.

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

#24

Post by sturgill »

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.”

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

#25

Post by jjj123 »

beebmam wrote: post #13
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…

Good! Students should be failing out of they're unwilling to work hard

You could call it unwilling to work hard. Or it could be difficulty prioritizing work, or ADHD, or disorganization.

Are those traits what we’re testing for, or are we testing for knowledge of the subject?

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

#26

Post by legobmw99 »

gonehome wrote: post #15
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…

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 prep…

In CS courses, I always appreciated when we were given access to the grading scripts/unit tests used by course staff. It made that feedback loop immediate, and unless you were intentionally doing something weird you usually knew exactly what grade you were getting for your submission.

As a TA, it was funny to see the ways a few students would overfit those tests. In one extreme case I literally saw a student replace a complicated function definition with a if-else chain that just determined which of the 4 test cases it was being run on…

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

#27

Post by neap24 »

As 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 class. At first, principled teachers may stick to tough grading, but as the years go by and they watch their friends easily make 3x more in industry, the incentive to just put a check mark on every paper is about the best you can do to close that benefit gap.

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

#30

Post by jokethrowaway »

Grading is not dissimilar to setting up arbitrary metrics on a business or an engineering team.

People will find ways to optimise for the metric.

If you give bonuses based on number of commits created or number of tickets closed you'll end up with a lot of useless commits and tickets.

If the only thing that matters in order to pass a course is to do an exam, people will optimise for that. If someone doesn't like the subject or doesn't like the teacher or doesn't like being taught (especially disagreeable boys), they will happily skip the subject and just try to get a passing score.

In university I was already working as a professional developer and I attended only a few classes I cared about and hacked my way out of exams with a mix of cheating and cramming the night before.

I enjoyed all the project work instead and I excelled at that. But that was worth just 1-2 points out of 30. Why was I forced to memorise bullshit I didn't need and that I would have not remembered 3 seconds after the exams in order to get a piece of paper saying I graduated? Isn't being able to do the projects more important than that?

When I hired people with degrees from "good schools" I was always surprised to realise how little were they able to get done on their own. I quickly stopped even checking their qualifications as they're completely worthless for anything related to work.

If I had to reform education I would make it totally based on projects. There would be no grades or titles when you get a job, just an increasingly longer list of projects you worked on.

When I was in school I had to take a Latin class. I didn't want to take it but I picked the best course according to my interest - and unfortunately it had Latin.

I spent those lessons secretly working on my own projects, then I downloaded a bunch of famous texts with their translation and I just wrote a J2ME application to look things up and used it for 5 years (Mobile internet was very expensive back then and searching on the internet would have been way harder).

After I finished my written finals in all the subjects, luckily my score was already high enough not too pass, even if I got zero at the oral exam and I kind of bullshitted my way through that last exam.

Was there any point in trying to force me to learn something? Why do we put people in this situation?

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