Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate • Hacker News Board

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

#271

Post by EntropyIsAHoax » Sat, Mar 12, 2022, 7:44 PM UTC

My "senior seminar" for my undergraduate degree had the most ingenious grading system I've ever encountered, called the "cookie system". While working on your paper throughout the semester you had to meet certain milestones. Each milestone was due at 6pm and there were the following grading rules:

- if you reach the milestone before 6pm you gain one "cookie" - if you reach it after 6pm but before midnight, no cookie - you lose 1 cookie for each day it's late, starting at midnight the day after it was due - if you at any point during the semester reach a negative amount of cookies, you instantly fail the class - the final paper is graded pass/fail

This has the advantage that it keeps students on track, but the final grade is just a result of their actual knowledge and the final paper. The first few milestones were trivial to meet so you get a little buffer if you're late for some reason. In my year not a single person failed due to lack of cookies either

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

#272

Post by arendtio » Sat, Mar 12, 2022, 7:45 PM UTC

matthewdgreen wrote: post #33

endisneigh wrote: post #7

This problem isn't a teaching problem. Evaluating someone's skills in any respect or context is basically an intractable problem. Interviewing, school, job performance, etc. etc. If there were an organization that could "perfectly" evaluate people's skills in a fixed period of time it would quickly become the top, and eventually only company. It would use its own skills in order to remove low performers, perfectly fr…

The first thing to understand is that the goal in teaching is not to evaluate anyone's skills . The goal in teaching is to make sure that students learn things. From a teacher's perspective, the evaluation part is entirely a hack to make sure that they do.

I think this is a crucial point missing in the above discussion.

However, tests should have a place in the teachers perspective, because they improve the learning effect (because they trigger the memory retrieval reliably).

So maybe the problem is simply, that tests are linked to grades ;-)

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

#273

Post by danjc » Sat, Mar 12, 2022, 7:54 PM UTC

Are people less reasonable than they used to be? I mean, was it necessary to use these kind of nudge/incentive techniques 30 years ago, 60 years ago?

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

#274

Post by Forgeties79 » Sat, Mar 12, 2022, 8:01 PM UTC

flycaliguy wrote: post #242

ryandrake wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the Boomer "Eat all the food on your plate" meme came from their parents, who lived through the Great Depression and food insecurity. Mindlessly passed down from a time of scarcity to a time of abundance. They just repeated it, but this time with gigantic, obesity-levels of food on their kids' plates. We usually just ask our kid how much she wants to eat. It seems to work a lot better than the way my parents…

Speaking of dinner time, the negative effects of all the boomer moms and their trendy diets on young girls at the time. Weight Watchers. Just the phrase “Weight Watchers” being in the house and in the air.

No kidding. My wife talks about this a lot actually - how basically every mom she was around constantly talked about diets, losing weight, I need to fit in x or y outfit, etc. Just constant (usually negative) body talk all the time by adult women.

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

#275

Post by hajile » Sat, Mar 12, 2022, 8:02 PM UTC

titanomachy wrote: post #210

hajile wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In ancient times, all final exams would be oral ones in front of a panel of teachers. I'd guess that this technique would be pretty successful today too.

This works great, and it is still how evaluation is done when the stakes are higher: PhD defenses, executive hiring... even getting hired as an entry-level engineer at Google requires about five hours of what is basically oral examination. But society is not willing to pay that kind of price for the earlier levels of evaluation. We want "scalable" systems. Unfortunately those same evaluations are often treated as mor…

You don't need oral arguments throughout the process. One at the end of the course is sufficient. It is then up to the students to learn the requisite knowledge in the given time period.

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

#276

Post by evilotto » Sat, Mar 12, 2022, 8:03 PM UTC

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…

Rocket launches, if you're a rideshare are not soft deadlines. You don't get your payload delivered on time, you lose. Even if you're the only payload, you have hard deadlines - there may be a few windows to launch in but if you miss those the next opportunity might not be for another 26 months. Someone will lose their job over that.

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

#277

Post by fma » Sat, Mar 12, 2022, 8:06 PM UTC

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…

Definitely depends on your deliverables. My recent deliverables were campaigns for CES and Superbowl. I can't say lets schedule for next week for those. On the other hand, I think if I screwed up I won't get fired, either...maybe someone up the management chain :)

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

#278

Post by hajile » Sat, Mar 12, 2022, 8:06 PM UTC

IshKebab wrote: post #249

hajile wrote: post #149

Unfortunately, even graduating students usually still have the life experience of a child and can't see the real purpose in education. Most are better off without a degree. Most who get a degree would be better off with an apprenticeship tailored to their field. Most of the rest would benefit from getting a few years of real life experience first. The reduction in attendance would lower costs and reduce degree inflat…

Sounds like you don't have the life experience to see that there is more point to getting a degree than learning. Maybe you don't like that, but it is true.

What things are supposed to be learned alongside said degree?

I graduated years ago and I still have yet to see what these other points are.

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

#279

Post by wutbrodo » Sat, Mar 12, 2022, 8:07 PM UTC

laserlight wrote: post #189

notriddle wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> stupid parents are rare How did you arrive at this conclusion?

I had the same reaction, but from context, I think what he meant was "cases where the conflict is due to the stupidity of the parent instead of the stupidity of the kid". The base case is that kids are stupid, because kids are supposed to be stupid.

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

#280

Post by plandis » Sat, Mar 12, 2022, 8:08 PM UTC

renewiltord wrote: post #108

Interesting. I grew up in an “exams count only” system that used a 2 decimal point score precision. So if you scored 89.75 at the end, you completed the course with 89.75. It wasn’t bucketed into grades. There were 4 exams: two quarterlies, a half, and the final. I don’t think it ever struck any of us that if we failed to study for an exam that it was anyone’s fault but our own. I actually really like articles like t…

> I don’t think it ever struck any of us that if we failed to study for an exam that it was anyone’s fault but our own.

This is interesting to me. If you’re noting working through problems how do you get the feedback to even know if you really understand the material? Generally assigned homework was nice because a professor will know the key ideas and can efficiently assign work covering those parts.

Right now I’m self studying real analysis and I wish I had someone to pick problems for me because otherwise I’m just trying to do them all to ensure that if I don’t know something critical it will come out when I can solve some particular problem.

On the other side of the same coin. How does a teacher know if their teaching is effective without frequency feedback until he form of students grades? I feel like waiting several weeks to determine if you need to change course is doing a great disservice to the students.