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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

#391

Post by lumost »

kelnos wrote: post #326
lumost wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was a physics undergrad who hopped into a few grad classes, and to be honest I was terrible at homework and great at exams (mostly due to some youthful obstinance on putting the time in on homework). At the time I believed that the exams showed who really knew the material and who applied time to solve the problem. With some time past I see that the larger/tougher problem sets were where the real challenge was. I r…

> The work for the first question easily totals > 20 hours of pen and paper time. I guess grad students generally take less coursework than undergrads, but how could a professor expect students to have 20+ hours on hand to solve a single question, given other demands on a student's time?

Grad students usually take 1-2 classes at a time, and the problem sets are spread out over 2 weeks.

A problem like the above would be given as a single problem for students to solve over 2 weeks.

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

#392

Post by nradov »

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…

Why would you think that parenting skills would improve in successive generations? Historically that doesn't seem to be the case.

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

#393

Post by detaro »

nojs wrote: post #366

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 co…

> the student is clearly failing to answer simple questions, it’s quite hard for them to argue they were treated unfairly.

I know you didn't quite say that, but to be clear: Fairness isn't defined by someone being able to argue that they were treated unfairly. You still have room for bias in how you treat weaknesses in student answers, and few students are going to give perfect answers for everything. And even without any specific-to-the-student bias I'm going to be more consistent in grading the same question if I go through a stack of written answers en-bloc than if I grade replies with hours or days inbetween.

Randomized questions also has potential for bias that feels like it could be stronger than question selection for a written exam.

That's not to say there isn't value in doing oral exams, but they are not the solution for everything either.

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

#394

Post by Trasmatta »

oblio wrote: post #314
swat535 wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You clearly haven't had incompetent parents. I'll give you a personal example: both my parents _completely_ failed to manage their finances, they kept on borrowing money, refinancing the house 3-4 times. Since the age of 17, as a young software engineer, I was constantly asked to help with the payments. Now that my mom has passed away, my dad has 0 income, he didn't bother to plan anything for his retirement and thus…

I'm always amazed how these kinds of folks survive. Do they luck out into well paying jobs? What do they even spend the money on? Don't they noticed the bad patterns after a while? Soooo many questions :-)

> how these kinds of folks survive

By getting into massive amounts of debt

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

#395

Post by dorkwood »

jcims wrote: post #344
yojo wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A similar thing happened to me. Except my parents decided, somehow, that moving one of us to live with my mom and the other to live with my dad five hours away was a good idea. I've tried to forgive them for doing this, but I'm not making much headway.

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

#396

Post by kajaktum »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #245
s1artibartfast wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But stupidity is relative and stupid children are more common. The heuristic can be reworded as adult parents are more knowledgeable and capable than children. Put the average child in the position of the average parent and you will see the difference.

"Children" aren't a homogenous group. Neither are "parents." And "stupid" is not a single metric. Pre-teens don't have practical adult skills and have poor or non-existent emotional regulation. Teens have some adult skills, are learning or experimenting with others, and have patchy self-regulation. So it makes perfect sense not to allow kids to do things that are dangerous to others, and to limit what teens can do wi…

>They may not know what to do with their insight, but they're not wrong - just inexperienced.

taking insights from teenagers...really? Do you know what kind of "insights" I had in my teenage years? They are downright cringe.

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

#397

Post by lazide »

netizen-936824 wrote: post #362
sosborn wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Also, there is no ‘right’, rather a series of attempts that fit on an ever shifting curve. There is no ‘ideal’ parenting except by sheer luck.

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

#398

Post by ryan93 »

staticassertion wrote: post #359
ryan93 wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

LOL at the idea that grades are just based on who you sit next to in a test.

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

#399

Post by pgcj_poster »

EntropyIsAHoax wrote: post #271

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…

So if you hand in the first assignment a day late, you fail the class?

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

#400

Post by blindmute »

KerrAvon wrote: post #380
blindmute wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Literally nothing is wrong with a controlled spanking

Even better, a controlled whipping. Flick that switch hard. Draw blood. Nothing teaches ‘em like the old methods.

Not necessary; a child's pain tolerance is very low. The goal is not to hurt them, but to dissuade them through unpleasant stimulus. The spank doesn't even need to be very hard. But you knew this already
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