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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

#351

Post by oblak »

jimbokun wrote: post #342
beebeepka wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If the assumption of a caring parent has to die, then what's the point in any of this?

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

#352

Post by quijoteuniv »

derangedHorse wrote: post #334
quijoteuniv wrote: post #293

If you have lived all your life in a basement you tend to think the flourecent light is the sun. Could not make sense of the article… my take on teaching is… you teach because you are the most capable on the subject in the community, is a responsability and you do your best. As with most professions when you do it for the money, you become cinic.

Teaching should definitely not be done by the "most capable on the subject", it should be done by those who are the best educators (with "best" being based on some metrics relating to student outcomes). Both roles are not the same. Just because someone is knowledgable about a subject doesn't mean they know how to convey that subject for consumption. Conversely I think that those who don't know as much about an entire…

Tomeitos, move to a smaller isolated community and see how you become the right person for the job.

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

#353

Post by oblio »

sneak wrote: post #339
portpecos wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s pretty sad. As a CS Professor, he should understand the distinction between a conjunction and disjunction.

As an educated human, he should understand that when you provide written instructions it is implicitly a "do what I say" and not "do what [you infer] I mean". It is obviously unfair and unprofessional to penalize the student for the professor's error.

Tell that to all the math professors that go: "this part is obvious"...

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

#354

Post by cehrlich »

pkdpic wrote: post #349

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…

I had the same experience. In addition to many jobs being less than full-time, it's also not a very secure job, in the sense that depending on your specialty there might only be a handful of universities that could ever potentially hire you in any given country. I'm currently transitioning from teaching to dev, and this insecurity is what caused me by far the biggest anxiety, much worse than not having a lot of money.

Regarding the article: I agree entirely. I also came into teaching with the goal of being different than the teachers I'd had, but every good intent got beaten out of me by someone who used it as an opportunity to skirt the rules. Combine this with strict admin stuff (you know you're BSing and I know you're BSing, but I can't give you a bad grade because you technically didn't break any explicit rules) and you end up with the current situation of having to preemptively mention every loophole and edge case.

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

#356

Post by jcims »

eloeffler wrote: post #347
jcims wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Doesn’t this assume a static target of ideal parenting?

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

#357

Post by sosborn »

eloeffler wrote: post #347
jcims wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Take any family line. What generation are they at? Shouldn’t all bad parenting be weeded out by now?

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

#359

Post by staticassertion »

ryan93 wrote: post #345
staticassertion wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 to…

> If you were smarter you would recognize that in many cases there are substantial financial rewards for good grades.

Yes, well, I'm managing to scrape by somehow despite that.

> Of course you are obviously right its good to work together on problems, but what does that have to do with exams?

Yes, that's... the point. Exams are idiotic.

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

#360

Post by warner25 »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #260
warner25 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The root of it, for me, is that most of my choices as I grow older are compromises for the sake of ease, or from of a sense of obligation to my wife and kids. Like I recognize that different, harder choices could make me richer, or leaner, or more accomplished, or whatever, but I'm often exhausted and such choices would often be harder on everyone else in the family too. So rather than ice cream and Lamborghinis and…

> and everybody watches too much streaming video, and sleep and exercise are things I do only after everything else is done I don't know, this kind of feels like the adult version of ice cream for breakfast. Maybe what you're describing is the difference between dreaming something and actually doing it. There's nothing forcing any of us to watch a ton of streaming video other than our own choices, although it's hard…

Upon further reflection: What you wrote is actually central to the idea that I'm trying to express. When I was younger, I thought that I'd always make different choices and live my life "better" than older people I knew (e.g. going to the gym everyday for a serious workout), but once I grew up I understood why most people do what they do (e.g. working out irregularly, because having so many other demands on their time and energy makes it hard, or due to injury), and now I'm living much the same way in many areas of life for the same reasons. That's the sad part.
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