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

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

#361

Post by Ntrails » Sat, Mar 12, 2022, 11:40 PM UTC

beebeepka wrote: post #297

Ntrails wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am talking about adults judging other adults decision with hindsight and out of real time with time to reflect. You are welcome to throw stones if it makes you feel better, but try not to get hit when one flies back through your window in a few years.

Quoted post unavailable.

> Bad parenting is a thing.

No shit sherlock. Here are some more hot takes for you:

    - too much screen time is bad
    - hitting children is generally counter productive
    - feeding a toddler highly processed foods full of sugar is not a good idea

Armed with this incredible wisdom you can go off and spend more time thinking how stupid and bad other people are at parenting. Have fun!

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

#362

Post by netizen-936824 » Sat, Mar 12, 2022, 11:45 PM UTC

sosborn wrote: post #357

eloeffler wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Well think of how bad things used to be, the progress is very incremental. Our short term perspectives as humans isn't good for seeing these patterns.

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

#363

Post by jdougan » Sat, Mar 12, 2022, 11:46 PM UTC

Another fine example of "Our systems are the scar tissue of past mistakes."

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

#364

Post by jacobsenscott » Sat, Mar 12, 2022, 11:53 PM UTC

You can replace "teacher" with "engineering manager" and it continues to be spot on. None of this changes after engineers graduate, and even after they have years of experience.

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

#365

Post by notriddle » Sat, Mar 12, 2022, 11:54 PM UTC

andrepd wrote: post #311

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…

You are making very sweeping claims with next to no evidence (ironically, a very un-wise thing to do!). The more I observe the more I understand good parents are exceedingly rare. The vast majority of parents fuck up one way or another. Which shouldn't necessarily be surprising, parenting is very hard!

Of course, if you're an adult of average intelligence, then 50% of parents will be dumber than you. Parents who are dumber than you are would not be rare at all.

But I'm not comparing adults with other adults. I'm comparing adults with children. I would be surprised to find a child that was smarter than their parents; it happens, but it's rare.

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

#366

Post by nojs » Sat, Mar 12, 2022, 11:56 PM UTC

One of the most effective exam techniques I have seen, which is uncommon in my country but maybe common elsewhere, is oral exams. I TA’d for a German professor who did them for his stat/ML course, and so got to sit in on all of them (I also took the course myself in an earlier year so had the experience as a student as well). The process was:

1. Give students a list of about 100 questions in advance, more than you could memorise. Some were simple like “write down the formula for X”, some were more complex like “derive the backprop update algorithm”.

2. Pick the first question difficulty based on the student’s assignment grades

3. If they go to it right, pick a harder question, otherwise an easier one. If you aren’t sure whether they really understand, interrogate them about the answer, ask follow up questions etc.

4. Choose a grade based on which questions they got right.

Firstly this was highly effective at making students actually learn the material because most were worried enough about embarrassing themselves in front of the professor that they prepared well. But also, it was extremely fair because it’s essentially impossible to cheat and fake what you know.

I suspect many professors would avoid this because it’s harder to justify the grades at the end to a third party. But if you record the exams, and the student is clearly failing to answer simple questions, it’s quite hard for them to argue they were treated unfairly.

Of all the written exams I’ve seen and taken, I’ve never seen a process as fair or effective as these oral exams.

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

#367

Post by rootusrootus » Sat, Mar 12, 2022, 11:58 PM UTC

Maybe there's room for a top tier education and/or certification environment. Some place where the assignment instructions are the simple version and the people who try to play the unreasonable "but what about this?" game just get failed out. It would be a feature of the credential in question.

And right along with that, small enough class environments that the grade for the course is pass or fail, and the exam is oral. You either know the material or you don't.

Maybe we could do this in software and try to cut back on the need for leetcode interviews. Ha!

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

#368

Post by Jensson » Sat, Mar 12, 2022, 11:58 PM UTC

Ntrails wrote: post #361

beebeepka wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

> Bad parenting is a thing. No shit sherlock. Here are some more hot takes for you: - too much screen time is bad - hitting children is generally counter productive - feeding a toddler highly processed foods full of sugar is not a good idea Armed with this incredible wisdom you can go off and spend more time thinking how stupid and bad other people are at parenting. Have fun!

This isn't about "other peopke" though, recognising that your own parents are bad parents is very important, not sure why you try to dismiss that. People telling you that you are wrong, your parents actually did good, is just gaslighting and damaging.

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

#369

Post by opportune » Sat, Mar 12, 2022, 11:59 PM UTC

beebmam wrote: post #9

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…

When I was a TA, I convinced my professor to stop giving graded assignments. it was obvious on tests who had done the assignments and who hadn't.

When I was a college student, I wasn't diligent enough to always do ungraded assignments. I'd do reading, but for actual questions I'd only do them maybe 50% of the time when preparing for a test on the material. And out of my peers I felt like even doing assigned reading and trying to do ungraded homework put me well ahead of the pack.

I think it's a maturity thing. Probably until I was ~24 I just didn't have the executive function to be able to do things like that. It seems beneficial to have graded assignments as a forcing function especially given some college students are literally teenagers.

Also, I took an accelerated math curriculum as a freshman where I went from never having written a proof/knowing how to prove something rigorously, to pretty good at it. The feedback from the assigned homework was absolutely crucial in helping me learn these skills. It's easy to follow a proof from the answer section, but since there are usually several ways to prove something, it doesn't always help just to see an answer, plus you don't know what kind of divergences/hand waves are acceptable or not without feedback.

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

#370

Post by agentdrtran » Sun, Mar 13, 2022, 12:02 AM UTC

light_hue_1 wrote: post #247

jedberg wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both questions were answered in the article. The reason for precise directions is because otherwise people will complain, and if you ignore their complaints, they will complain to your boss. At the end you'll win, but you'll waste a bunch of time defending yourself. The reason for not allowing cheating is repetitional. If you get a reputation for allowing cheaters, then all the cheaters will want to take your class,…

There's a deeper reason for not allowing cheating: you are building cheaters. People who cheat in courses will cheat in industry, why wouldn't they? They normalize this behavior. So you end up with major corporations that steal, politicians that lie, etc. If for example, Harvard and Yale's law schools stopped rampant cheating. Maybe so many of their graduates wouldn't go on to routinely lie to the public? I don't tea…

I would be willing to bet that most of the politicians/ceos/etc that currently lie to everyone's face and went to harvard/yale didn't need to cheat their way through and didn't bother more often than not.