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My Students Can't Read

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Re: My Students Can't Read

#221

Post by Balgair »

throwaway2016a wrote: post #218
Balgair wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In today's day and age reading anything long is asking a lot. No offense here, but I mean, they are in college. They are there to be asked a lot of. That's kinda the point.

Is it? I thought the point was to learn. Most reading is just busy work that doesn't actually advance the learning objectives.

What kind of college are you going to? I wasn't a humanities major, but had to take a lot of credit hours there. None of the readings were ever busy work. Now, I really didn't want to do them and I very much resented having to do credit work in the first place, granted. But in terms of the classes, none of the readings were ever pointless. If anything, we never had enough time to even do the readings that we really should have - the courses should have been longer. If you are seeing the readings as just busy assignments, you really need to talk with the professor and try to figure out if you're in the right class or not.

Re: My Students Can't Read

#222

Post by throwaway2016a »

Balgair wrote: post #221
throwaway2016a wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it? I thought the point was to learn. Most reading is just busy work that doesn't actually advance the learning objectives.

What kind of college are you going to? I wasn't a humanities major, but had to take a lot of credit hours there. None of the readings were ever busy work. Now, I really didn't want to do them and I very much resented having to do credit work in the first place, granted. But in terms of the classes, none of the readings were ever pointless. If anything, we never had enough time to even do the readings that we really s…

My undergrad was in computer science and my master's is a MBA. Both from good schools (think top 50 not top 5).

I was thinking more like text books. Text books authors are generally much more wordy than they need to be because the publishing industry and academia awards length. But with that said, I kind of disagree with you a bit on biz school work. I'd say a quarter of most HBR case studies are fluff. I don't mean throw 12 on the floor and 3 are fluff, I mean, take a 12 page case study and 3 of the pages are not adding value.

Articles are even worse because the pay is often by the word and there are min lengths to get into the print edition.

Speaking from experience. I actually wrote a book for a major publisher and the main metric that determined how much I got paid was page count. We had a page count decided before the first word outside of the proposal was written.

Re: My Students Can't Read

#223

Post by Balgair »

throwaway2016a wrote: post #222
Balgair wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of college are you going to? I wasn't a humanities major, but had to take a lot of credit hours there. None of the readings were ever busy work. Now, I really didn't want to do them and I very much resented having to do credit work in the first place, granted. But in terms of the classes, none of the readings were ever pointless. If anything, we never had enough time to even do the readings that we really s…

My undergrad was in computer science and my master's is a MBA. Both from good schools (think top 50 not top 5). I was thinking more like text books. Text books authors are generally much more wordy than they need to be because the publishing industry and academia awards length. But with that said, I kind of disagree with you a bit on biz school work. I'd say a quarter of most HBR case studies are fluff. I don't mean…

I think we're talking apples and oranges here.

I was speaking about the assignment itself, not the writing therein.

Sure, you can throw out about 80 pages of War and Peace where he just blabs about soviet farming practices.

I'm not an MBA guy, so I can't speak to the curriculum in Biz Schools, but I can say that what you say does come across with most MBAs I have met. In that they think similarly about their education being about the networking and not really about the material.

Which is a shame really for both of our sides of this all.

I think you are saying that the publishers are essentially paying for minimum words / word count. Which is the opposite of what any writing upperdivision teacher would tell you about writing. And I'm saying that you are getting busy work assigned from the professor in the first place (and then saying that i haven't experienced that).

The solution is to have the students take charge of their education and be less passive. If the assignments are bad (in selection or in writing) then the student should challenge the teacher on it.

Yeah, that's a harder way to do things, yes, but I think anyone out of school for anytime will agree that it would be a better way.

Thank you for sharing you experience with me all the same.

Re: My Students Can't Read

#224

Post by KPGv2 »

pclowes wrote: post #90
KPGv2 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 90%+ of all people in undergrad I'm not sure if you realize you're basically saying most people with an IQ two standard deviations above the mean should not be pursuing higher education. Currently 40% of young adults are in higher education in the US. (based on a quick google, percent could be wrong, i also saw 60% pursue it at some point ) As a heuristic, let's assume they're the 40% with the highest IQ. If 90% of…

In short yes. Top 10% is not genius level. You see the outcome of this all the time at the PhD level. Even top 2% often just does not cut it when trying to do novel research. So many PhD’s get stuck in the post-doc adjunct cycle with never a real shot at tenure. That is fine. Nothing to feel bad about. But also we don’t want our top 10% but not 2% to waste eight plus years and hundreds of thousands of dollars. Again,…

> we don’t want our top 10% but not 2% to waste eight plus years and hundreds of thousands of dollars

Is it really your assertion that university is a waste of time for the most intelligent decile? Do you think four bucks in late fees at the public library remotely resembles a quality university education? I find people who didn't go to university often say things like this, because they've drunk some kind of far-right kool aid.

Re: My Students Can't Read

#225

Post by pavel_lishin »

> When I assign analysis, I am not trying to extract a polished product; I am trying to put the student’s mind through resistance in order to make it stronger

This reminds me of a thing my spouse and I argue about sometimes. She'd get mad as a kid when she turned in homework, because she'd get points taken off for now showing her work. My view is that the teacher doesn't give a shit about the answers, the teacher doesn't need to know what the solution to an equation is, the teacher needs to know that the students are learning the correct techniques to solve a problem, and without showing work, there's no way to evaluate that.

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