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Doing well in your courses: Andrej's advice for success (2013)

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Re: Doing well in your courses: Andrej's advice for success (2013)

#201
post #182
post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading from slides is the absolute worst way of delivery anywhere, whether it’s a lecture or an internal presentation to your work team, doesn’t matter. The best power point slides have zero overlapping words with what the presenter is saying except perhaps some slide or section titles. Chalk and board though is not necessarily the best. Power point supports magic hotkeys - B and W - and allows drawing on slides. Wh…

I slightly disagree. Specifically, in the case of academic lectures, on: > The best power point slides have zero overlapping words with what the presenter is saying except perhaps some slide or section titles. Especially when not taking notes, having the slides effectively be lecture notes is great to allow you to go back to the content of the lecture days or weeks later. That does not mean that I want a lecturer to…

> having the slides effectively be lecture notes is great...

This is usually considered a great sin by presentation gurus, even for lectures. For academic material, there would hopefully be a textbook as a reference material.

Re: Doing well in your courses: Andrej's advice for success (2013)

#202

Even if you're not allowed to bring it to the exam. Writing things down helps. What you want is to cram the entire course on 1 or more pages that you can in the end tile in front of you and say with high degree of confidence "This is exactly everything I must know" Reminds me of this comedy bit in an American sitcom from about 35 years ago where the dumb kid when asked how his history test said it went okay but admit…

I went to a concert recently and naturally they don’t let you bring alcohol in to the venue. So I very smartly decided to store the alcohol in my belly before I got there. Security had no idea how hard I bamboozled them.

Re: Doing well in your courses: Andrej's advice for success (2013)

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The foundational purpose of universities is truth-seeking, not job training. There's universities like Bologna, al-Qarawiyyin, Oxford or Cambridge that are more than 1000 years old. The ultimate goal is knowledge cultivation. You're more adapt to intellectual work only if you actually cultivate knowledge. If all this college circus is, farming grades, then universities are ultimately failing at their job.

I don't disagree with you at all. But we both probably know that that isn't the reality as of the last half a century or so.I'd love to properly separate acedemia and create a bolstering apprenticeship/trades programs for several sectors to properly train a workforce, but there's basically zero momentum for that among white collar work. Also note that GPA isn't just for jobs. Applying for school post bachelor's cares…

Further reason to remove grades in university, if anything.

If job prospects are the focus then we should invest in proper trade schools detached from universities that focus on teaching marketable skills.

This is a thing in countries like Germany. My uncle works in maintenance of nuclear reactors there and he went through a trade school that focused on learning the relevant parts of the job.

Re: Doing well in your courses: Andrej's advice for success (2013)

#204
Article says:

> TESTS: ON DAY OF

> Study very intensely RIGHT before the test.

> DURING THE TEST

I have one other hack, really helpful and fully legal: As soon as the test starts, do a braindump onto scrap paper, especially the items just crammed beforehand. That effectively produces a cheat sheet, which is easiest to do when the information is freshest.

Also, as fatigue sets in, it is harder to recall lots of facts, so doing a braindump as the very first task was a big win for me.

Re: Doing well in your courses: Andrej's advice for success (2013)

#205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problems were more obvious to me when I was older and trying to mentor college students. Some of them just got it, absorbed good advice like a sponge, rejected bad advice, and did their best. They were unsurprisingly successful in life (for their own definitions of success, which wasn't always monetary) The most frustrating cases were the students who got baited by angry internet advice. Reddit was a frequent sou…

The problem with cynicism and seeing everything as bullshit and unfair is that it's self-reinforcing. I used to wallow in that too because it was the only way to make sense of the world, because I just was not very happy and couldn't see what I would be able to do to change that. Once I graduated from college and started working that completely changed for me, because I finally for the first time had some semblance o…

> Once I graduated from college and started working that completely changed for me, because I finally for the first time had some semblance of agency and real stakes in my life, and wasn't forced to spend all my time with other people my age who were just as lacking in real perspective and experience. Someone gave me real responsibility over something actually pretty important, I could speak up and do and change things in ways that weren't explicitly decided for me ahead of time, it wasn't all just a game anymore.

This is a very helpful way to look at it. Thanks for writing it out.

One of the biggest potential benefits of mentoring programs is that it can expose students to the real world outside of their academic bubble. The hard part for me is trying to break into their bubble and explain that there's more to the world than the mental model they pieced together from snarky Reddit posts. It can be difficult.

Re: Doing well in your courses: Andrej's advice for success (2013)

#206
post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is why I hate the PowerPoint presentation-based lectures. Speaker typically goes too fast, and their brain does not actually break down the arguments into logical steps. They just read the slides. Chalk and board is the way.

Reading from slides is the absolute worst way of delivery anywhere, whether it’s a lecture or an internal presentation to your work team, doesn’t matter. The best power point slides have zero overlapping words with what the presenter is saying except perhaps some slide or section titles. Chalk and board though is not necessarily the best. Power point supports magic hotkeys - B and W - and allows drawing on slides. Wh…

Although I would prefer the slides having no overlapping words, but doing it this way is very punishing for whoever that skip the class for whatever reason.

Looking at the slides no longer build enough context for you to learn and catchup on what you have missed, so in the end every lecture is unskippable.

Re: Doing well in your courses: Andrej's advice for success (2013)

#207
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The viewpoint of a lecture as an inefficient note delivery system is a pretty common and reductive view. Your "Let's Play" analogy was pretty apt though. I think their (potential) value seems pretty clear when you look at language courses -- you can't possibly hope to develop fluency in a language by studying it in isolation from books -- forming your own sentences and hearing how other human beings do the same in re…

I rarely skipped math lectures in university (only when the prof was really bad; but then I watched video lectures taught by a different prof from a previous term). The lectures in the hardest math classes I took did not feature any “working through problems.” They were 50 minute pedal-to-the-metal proof speedrun sessions that took me 2-3 hours of review and practice work to fully understand. I don’t know how anyone…

I meant "problems" in a broad sense -- I loved disorganized professors who would pause and stare at their lecture notes in silence for a minute, realize their proof or example contained some flaw, and then have to correct it on the fly.

I found those moments really valuable if course-correcting was non-trivial -- the typical Definition-Theorem-Proof-Example format certainly is essential for organizing one's thinking and communicating new math in a way that's digestible to other mathematicians, but it is not how mathematicians actually think about math or solve novel problems

In the grad analysis sequence this "course correcting" mechanic was built into the course, since we were required to regularly solve a challenging problem and then present its proof to the class and withstand intense questioning from both the professor and peers. If you caught an error in someone's proof and could help the presenter arrive at a correct proof, you'd both earn points.

The thrill of surviving an incredulous "Wait a second..." from that particular professor (who later became my research advisor) was hard to beat

Anyway my intent was to analogize math lectures (whatever they might look like) with language courses or immersion in the sense that they are an opportunity to practice speaking and listening, and to immerse yourself in cultural norms. I think it goes a bit deeper than this, in that language is inextricably connected to most thought and vice versa -- we experience this in a very explicit way whenever we find our thinking clarified in the process of formulating a question, but it's always there

That said, pure immersion for language learning is actually easy to beat -- lots of research shows that immersion together with explicit grammar instruction has far better learning outcomes than immersion alone. Immersion alone misses lots of nuance -- and it relies on the speaker being acutely aware of the difference between their output and target forms.

With your verb conjugation example, lots of time can be saved by knowing that there's a thing called the subjunctive and that it is distinct from tense and it shows up in a myriad of places tending to concern hypotheticals

Similarly, I gain a lot from talking to mathematicians and attending conferences. But I also need to spend time alone consulting relevant theory, reading papers, and playing with examples. Both are important, but in math it seems you one get away with less immersion

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