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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

#341

Post by sneak »

r_hoods_ghost wrote: post #65
jjj123 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could call it unwilling to work hard. Or it could be difficulty prioritizing work, or ADHD, or disorganization. Are those traits what we’re testing for, or are we testing for knowledge of the subject?

I know this is harsh but if you have ADHD, difficulty prioritizing work or are disorganised to the extent that you can't perform academically at the required level to complete a degree then you shouldn't be wasting your money and time going to university and should instead look for something that better suits your talents.

It's their money and time to decide if an allocation of same is wasted or not; your opinion of what is or is not a waste of someone else's time is not relevant.

Source: extreme ADD sufferer who has "wasted" tons of time swimming upstream to learn to do things easy for some others but insanely difficult for me, simply because I wanted to.

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

#342

Post by jimbokun »

beebeepka wrote: post #250
Ntrails wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think people find it very easy to judge parenting from the outside and/or with hindsight, whether their own or other peoples. I know that my children will wish I did things differently. Whether that is location, discipline, activities, internet access etc etc. I know they will wish I made more reasoned choices in the moment. That I was never tired, distracted, frustrated. That I let them spend their time as they wi…

I am glad you had a nice childhood. Now, would you try to be as understanding to children as to you to fellow parents. Being well intentioned and caring is the bare expected minimum. Why do we need to repeat this?

The “bare minimum” trope has to die.

It never adds anything meaningful to a discussion. Most often, it’s used by someone with little or no experience with a role or responsibility judging someone who is trying to carry out that role, however imperfectly.

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

#343

Post by pmyteh »

bricemo wrote: post #310

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…

This is interesting. Do you have a link to further reading?

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

#344

Post by jcims »

yojo wrote: post #301
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…

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 amazin…

Totally agree. My mom might get roasted for the few times she swatted me on the ass, but nobody would say a word about her moving my brother and i to a place five hours away from our dad and huge extended family. I would take the former every day if it would have prevented the latter.

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

#345

Post by ryan93 »

staticassertion wrote: post #223
foldr wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

If you were smarter you would recognize that in many cases there are substantial financial rewards for good grades. And many classes are curved. It's not just wrong its evil to screw other pre meds for example by cheating. Of course you are obviously right its good to work together on problems, but what does that have to do with exams? Obviously in hard classes everyone could in fact would "work together" with the top students.

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

#346

Post by nearbuy »

ihunter2839 wrote: post #285
commandlinefan wrote: post #233

> every word of the assignment creatively misinterpreted OTOH when I took operating systems I got an assignment that said “implement a job scheduler, using FIFO, LIFO or round-robin job scheduling”. So I picked FIFO, got it working and I had time left over so I thought, “what the hell? I’ll do LIFO too”. So I did, and I still had time so I took a crack at round-robin, but I didn’t have time so I turned it what I had,…

I have to say I think it's quite possible and comical that the professor interpreted your work on two of the three questions as additional evidence that you did know it should be an "and", since I would guess relatively few students would attempt any more than _one_ permutation if the assignment only asked for one. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

But what did the other students the class do? If almost everyone in the class did only one, the professor would have to give almost the entire class 33% for a mistake he made.

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

#347

Post by eloeffler »

jcims wrote: post #330
turkishmonky wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Fortunately your children will almost certainly find new ways to critique and disparage your decisions as a parent and their respect for you also diminish as they grow older and calcify their opinions of what makes a good parent.

You're missing the point here. Ideally the 3rd gen kids will grow up to realize their 2nd gen parents made reasonable decisions even though they disagreed as kids, just as the cliché says (and like so many testimonials out there).

e.g. If gen 1 only used witty condescending remarks to teach their children that they're dumb, then 2nd gen can realize that this severely damages their kids' self-esteem. If gen 2 recobers from that abuse they may choose the path of taking their kids serioisly even with their shortcomings. The 3rd gen might take some kind of offense in that but there is less of a reason to grow in resentment towards gen 2 while they raise gen 3.

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

#348

Post by Consultant32452 »

jcims wrote: post #330
turkishmonky wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Fortunately your children will almost certainly find new ways to critique and disparage your decisions as a parent and their respect for you also diminish as they grow older and calcify their opinions of what makes a good parent.

And they learned a valuable lesson that it's okay/normal to terminate relationships with you.

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

#349

Post by pkdpic »

Kind of agree but thats why I stopped teaching and went to a dev bootcamp.

Even though I taught for about 7 years my theory was that 3 years was a good amount of time to put in to teaching before starting to burn out. Sort of treating it like the public service it feels like.

Not that everyone has the option of leaving. But financially speaking I observed that even fewer people had the option / privilege of teaching indefinitely without the financial support of a spouse or roommate living situations into middle-age. Thinking mainly about the growing percentage of non-fulltime teaching roles.

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

#350

Post by kovvy »

professoretc wrote: post #165
musingsole wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I still don't understand why you don't just mark their answer from creatively misinterpreted instructions wrong and move on with life Because the actual incidents are often in fuzzy areas where it seems possible the teacher's instructions were confusing . You're stuck making a character judgment of your student instead of evaluating knowledge. Over a career, it becomes easier to cordon off fuzzy areas than it is to…

> it seems possible the teacher's instructions were confusing. Yes; I've been on both sides. I've written assignments that I thought were clear and unambiguous, only to find that a significant number of students misunderstood what I meant. They weren't intentionally trying to make the problems easier, they just weren't sure what I wanted. (And, of course, who is going to interpret an ambiguous problem so as to make m…

I find that students talk to each other and spread interpretations of the assignment. They might be correct, they might not - either way the interpretation spreads (never through anything like 'official' course forums set up for students to ask about interpretations, of course). They've also gone through shared experiences in other courses beforehand and will often simply come up with the same incorrect interpretation. For 5 years the basic assignment was clear and easily understood, then the next year it's almost universally misinterpreted. Those shared misunderstandings have easily outnumbered creative interpretations to help grades in my experience.
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