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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

#221

Post by titanomachy »

professoretc wrote: post #173
leetrout wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As a software engineer, I generally agree.

My partner is a corporate lawyer, though, and deadlines are a _big deal_ for them.

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

#222

Post by sdenton4 »

The example about the ever-increasing list of assignment requirements appears in many other domains than teaching. Think of the AirBNB with a fifty-page guide whose 'rules' are all thinly-disguised anecdotes about something that went horribly wrong. And I'm sure we've all seen business processes like this...

This ends up (somewhat) preventing asshole behavior at the expense of making life worse for all of the non-assholes. But in reality, assholes will find new and imaginative ways to be assholes, no matter how many specific rules are in place.

One hopes that better solutions are possible. In the teaching example, we could imagine keeping the rules broad and simple, and including a reward for any student who doesn't require 'special treatment' through regrade requests, etc. (I have seen systems where regrades include a grade reduction if no errors are found.)

In AirBNB, deposits and waive-able cleaning fees serve a similar purpose.

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

#223

Post by staticassertion »

foldr wrote: post #205
staticassertion wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Students compare grades and talk to each other. That works for multiple choice. Given the ".5" I'm assuming partial credit is discretionary. So you can just discretionarily choose to give +.5. > For example, suppose that the class you took was graded on a curve. It wasn't. Also I'm pretty sure I still failed the test because cheating is hard, I couldn't really read much of what the person in front of me wrote. > Yo…

>That works for multiple choice. Given the ".5" I'm assuming partial credit is discretionary. So you can just discretionarily choose to give +.5. Yep, and then you'll deal with the students who want to know why their friends got the discretionary +.5 and they didn't! And you'll be in a difficult position, because arbitrarily adding points to some answers and not others does seem pretty unfair on the face of it. (Reme…

> think that cheating is bad

I don't think that cheating is bad.

> recognize that it happens frequently,

Naturally. If you give people stupid chores they will almost universally try to find a way to avoid them.

> don't think that cheaters should be punished.

Even if I bought into everything else ie: that testing is good and cheating is bad, I would still not punish cheaters. As I said, I cheated that one time because I had other issues that made school difficult. Punishing would have done nothing except add additional stress, making me retreat further from my education. But of course, as I just said, I don't buy into all of that other stuff, so it's not only an ineffective and cruel way to approach education, but it serves no purpose.

> It's not clear to me what your point is regarding cheating.

My point is that most tests are stupid, and a lot of what "cheating" is is just making them less stupid. For example, I remember students would hide their notes during a test so that they could reference them. That's just good sense - in what real world situation do you need to have instant recall for arbitrary information? It teaches kids to memorize shit, which is damaging.

Two students checking each others answers? Sounds a lot like any normal adult problem solving.

So you can try to "tweak" the system until cheating is impossible or so scary that people will rarely try, or you can "give up" and let people cheat... or you can take a step back and realize that you've made up a problem with no solution.

As I said, school should focus on the three things I mentioned. Nonsensical testing strategies and finding ways to trick kids for doing what is, frankly, the sane thing to do, is purely damaging.

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

#224

Post by camgunz »

sdenton4 wrote: post #222

The example about the ever-increasing list of assignment requirements appears in many other domains than teaching. Think of the AirBNB with a fifty-page guide whose 'rules' are all thinly-disguised anecdotes about something that went horribly wrong. And I'm sure we've all seen business processes like this... This ends up (somewhat) preventing asshole behavior at the expense of making life worse for all of the non-ass…

It's regulations in general. Whenever someone complains about regs and red tape stifling innovation, it's generally that someone tried to game the system. "This is why we can't have nice things", etc

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

#225

Post by [deleted] »

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

[deleted]

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

#228

Post by withinboredom »

lupire wrote: post #74
ZYinMD wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember reading Harry Potter on Kindle, and Dumbledore had a line "Youth cannot know how age thinks and feels. But old men are guilty if they forget what it was to be young", and Kindle has this feature to show how many other readers have highlighted a sentence, and this sentence were highlighted by thousands. I guess they're all teenagers.

Harry Potter on Kindle readers are probably young adults.

I’m reading it out loud to my family (every character has a different voice). It’s a very mixed group with lots of discussions.

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

#229

Post by titanomachy »

jvvw wrote: post #190
derbOac wrote: post #130

So I've taught a lot at the university level, and reading this and the original blog post they were responding to I realized that I gradually shifted in how I saw exams. The traditional model, the one implicitly adopted in the posts, is one where the instructor presents material, maybe with some discussion or engagement with the material in the form of activities or assignments, and then evaluates understanding on an…

At Oxford, my degree depended entirely on 8 three-hour exams at the end of the final year, which were mostly set by different people from the people teaching you. There are issues with this (not least that if you are slightly ill say during the two weeks of exams, it affects your whole degree) but one thing that was really nice compared with the other universities where I have taught is that the relationship with the…

The tutorial system seems way better than what most schools do. Interesting that one of the oldest schools seems to have one of the most sensible systems, possibly because they've resisted the pressure to make everything more scalable.

The average American private university costs $45k per year (about the same as Oxford's international tuition) so you'd think they'd have the resources to do this as well. As far as I know only a couple actually do it (e.g. MIT) and their student-tutor ratio isn't as good.

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

#230

Post by bsder »

legobmw99 wrote: post #26
gonehome wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As an CS instructor, my solution for that was to have a skeleton level of unit tests but to switch in a full suite once the deadline passed. Your grade was based on passing the full tests.

Practically everyone who "played fair" got the same grade for both. Occasionally, I would add a test that tripped everybody up and I'd have to go see what happened. Anybody who overfitted, however, got crushed.

My favorite assignment was always the next to last project (before end of semester deadlines start getting crushing). I created only a single unit test to verify the test suite runner was functional, and the students had to submit the rest of the pre-deadline unit tests. And I would switch in my full suite at the deadline. I told people that anybody who passed that suite would get bonus points that everybody was always bugging me for.

It was always absolute chaos. I only ever had one student pass the switched in suite (he got some nice bonus points out of that--didn't need them, of course). I would then reopen the project for a week (I planned for it) to let everybody else clean up their work and resubmit.

You could see and feel the difference in the students after that assignment. The fact that testing was an integral part of programming and that testing was, in and of itself, a difficult problem was a revelation--and not a particularly welcome one.

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