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

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

#301

Post by yojo » Sat, Mar 12, 2022, 8:55 PM UTC

jhanschoo wrote: post #127

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…

On the other hand, this observation must be qualified as not necessarily generalizable to all teenagers and parents. Sometimes a person may grow up and realize that their parents were indeed quite lacking, and be right in that assessment. I think this other circumstance is important to at least mention because children of objectively lacking parents can have doubts in their mind about their own judgment. In part beca…

My dad’s dad hit him with a belt when he misbehaved.

My dad spanked me with his hand when I was a toddler. Not overly hard, and not after age 4, but still.

Do I think my dad could have made better parenting choices? Yes. Am I happy that he made substantial advances from what he learned as a kid? Also yes.

A small number of parents are legitimately abusive and should have their kids taken away. Some parents are amazing and talented care givers. Most are just muddling through and fall somewhere in between.

As a parent I am doing my best to keep raising the bar - no corporal punishment over here! But I am sure my children will still find myriad ways in which I have failed them as a parent. Kids don’t come with a manual, and “professional advice” is astoundingly inconsistent/conflicting. I think most parents are doing their best, it is just a hard and poorly understood problem.

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

#302

Post by kikimora » Sat, Mar 12, 2022, 8:59 PM UTC

sanderjd wrote: post #81

finexplained wrote: post #6

This perfectly describes my experience as a TA in graduate school. At first I didn't understand why my advisor insisted on being so precise in assignment instructions. Then when TAing with him I saw how students could creatively misinterpret instructions, even when I could not imagine how to make them more precise. An exception for the new case would be added to the next iteration of the assignments. I only understoo…

I thought the article was fairly strong except for in the two points you highlighted here. In the first case, I still don't understand why you don't just mark their answer from creatively misinterpreted instructions wrong and move on with life. And in the second case it seems like just not worrying about cheaters and letting it be their own funeral (or not) is optimal. I remember who the cheaters were in my classes a…

> In the first case, I still don't understand why you don't just mark their answer from creatively misinterpreted instructions wrong and move on with life.

Because your job is to educate them. They also complain about the task which in effect waste your time or give you trouble.

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

#303

Post by ModernMech » Sat, Mar 12, 2022, 9:01 PM UTC

bee_rider wrote: post #241

ModernMech wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Then when TAing with him I saw how students could creatively misinterpret instructions, even when I could not imagine how to make them more precise. The best part is if you do make it more precise by specifying the problem in more detail, they will just not read it and ask questions that you answered explicitly in the assignment.

At least if it is in the assignment, you can passive-aggressively copy-paste the text of the document to them.

My favorite phrase is "As per the syllabus..."

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

#304

Post by omegaham » Sat, Mar 12, 2022, 9:04 PM UTC

anon946 wrote: post #152

As a professor, this completely resonates with me. For example, I take attendance and make it 5% of the grade. Then I give 5 free days and am generous with absences due to whatever. Why? Because it's a nudge for many students to get them to come to class, which makes them stay engaged, and ultimately get a better grade. (The other reason I take attendance is so that I can recognize at least most of them by mid-semest…

A nice compromise that I've appreciated in the classes that I've taken - have strict deadlines, but offer X days (say, 2) of a no-questions-asked extension. It creates the clear expectation that work be turned in on time, but offers a small relief valve for one-off problems.

The problem is that this adds extra bookkeeping for a professor who's already busy with everything else going on, which gets back to the original poster's point of becoming everything that they hated.

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

#305

Post by jrm4 » Sat, Mar 12, 2022, 9:11 PM UTC

Soooo..I teach IT for a living and am thankfully thankfully free of being on the research side of things. I am incredibly lucky to be able to generally do things how I like.

I let them know mostly early on: I do grades because I have to, not because I enjoy them. I've settled on the following: I try to make the biggest assignment an ongoing project-thing that they "turn in" more than once, and try to coach them into primarily learning and doing -- and turning in something that I can reasonably slap a good grade on.

I do one or two small quiz type deals on top of that. Very hard multiple choice, but take-home, and you're on your honor to not to consult live humans. Also, I do the nice type of "curve," so if your fellow students' grades are average low, that helps you. Honestly, this is much more to maintain classic ideas about grading, though I suppose it helps keep the younger ones on their toes. Also, I find the psychological effect of "QUIZ" to be sufficient to get people to prepare, even when they don't check the syllabus and see that these aren't all that much of their final grade.

This seems to be a pretty good way to do IT type classes.

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

#306

Post by MengerSponge » Sat, Mar 12, 2022, 9:14 PM UTC

To first order, you can solve the regrade and homework issue with policy: gate regrades on completion of homework assignments, and limit the number of regrades that may be submitted per week.

You need a rate limiter to prevent students from just spamming regrades until the evaluation returns "A", and you want to incentivize the desired behavior--homework is intended to help students develop skills.

If you want to learn more, some useful keywords and phrases to find cutting edge thought: "ungrading", "Standards Based Grading", "learning objectives-based assessment"

There is literature on this, but don't let that stop you! It's much more fun to speculate about pedagogical practices based solely on what you remember from high school and college.

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

#307

Post by jl6 » Sat, Mar 12, 2022, 9:17 PM UTC

fallingknife wrote: post #178

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…

> Older people knowing better than younger people is one of those heuristics that's almost always right Up to mid 20's, yes. > stupid parents are rare Not even uncommon.

> Up to mid 20's, yes.

Are you by any chance over 25 but under 40? :)

I think it’s inarguable that experience is valuable, and age correlates very well with experience up to that mid-20s point, but around that point people start to settle into a groove and the extra n years experience is actually just the same year’s experience repeated n times.

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

#308

Post by rayiner » Sat, Mar 12, 2022, 9:22 PM UTC

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…

Why should you feel bad about it? You’re learning from your life experience. I too cringe at stuff I believed before I was mid-30s and married with three kids. I’m also slowly becoming my dad. A lot of that’s due to having seen a lot of things that made me realize my worldview when I was young had been limited. (Freedom of choice and freedom from norms sounds great when you’re young and feel invincible and think you’re in control of your destiny, but less so when you live life and see tons of people making all sorts of bad decisions that you managed to avoid because you did what your square parents told you to do.) That’s life.

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

#309

Post by rayiner » Sat, Mar 12, 2022, 9:26 PM UTC

turkishmonky wrote: post #196

jhanschoo wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, this observation must be qualified as not necessarily generalizable to all teenagers and parents. Sometimes a person may grow up and realize that their parents were indeed quite lacking, and be right in that assessment. I think this other circumstance is important to at least mention because children of objectively lacking parents can have doubts in their mind about their own judgment. In part beca…

Those types of generalization have always been troublesome for me - While I admit I was an idiot as a kid, the respect I had for my parents has decreased even further the older I get. I understand more and more how harmful their behaviors were for me as a child, and have been intentional about not falling into the same behaviors with my kids. Some parents are just really really inadequate or abusive as parents.

But there’s a reason for the generalization. Some parents are inadequate and abusive, but virtually every kid is an impulsive and short-sighted creature whose brain isn’t fully developed until their mid 20s.

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

#310

Post by bricemo » Sat, Mar 12, 2022, 9:28 PM UTC

This opinion seems uninformed about a great body of research that has been done around standards-based grading. Stanford has led a lot of this and a family member of mine has collaborated with them on successful field studies in school districts. The result has been increased comprehension, better test scores, and especially improved performance for disadvantaged groups.

By removing grades on homework, and making it so that what is being evaluated is not collection of points, but rather ability to demonstrate the skill against a rubric while retesting, it allows learning closer to the actual target skill. It also more closely mirrors an actual career: if you are running a project at a company and do not hit your quarterly goal, then you don’t just say “Oh well, guess I got a F” and move on to phase 2 of the plan. You revise and try phase 1 again until you reach the objective.

It should be noted that switching from normal grading styles to standards-based grading is not trivial. In school districts there are in fact entire training programs and coaches like my family member that help teachers, administrators, and parents understand the concept and put it into practice. There are not only practical obstacles, but also paradigm shifts that have to slowly happen. But the results are worth it, it is overwhelmingly more effective.