Earlier quoted context omitted.
Literally nothing is wrong with a controlled spanking
You are egregiously wrong. https://www.gse.harvard.edu/news/uk/21/04/effect-spanking-br...
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Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate
401–410 of 502 posts
Re: Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate
#402Earlier 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…
You don’t ‘have’ to do it. You are choosing to do it despite them stealing from you. At some point you bear responsibility for how you are treated. Cut him off. Let him die alone. Not your problem. I had to do the same with my alcoholic mother. It was very hard it the moment her antics started affecting the quality of life of my family she had to go.
I think you're confusing "my parents make shitty decisions" with "i hate my parents."
Re: Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate
#403> The problem is that student performance is continuous. When you are forced to discretize into a small number of bins, injustice is inevitable.
Yeah, so why insist on doing that? Because that's what's easy for the schools and the teachers of this rather inhumane mass education system. How else are they to evaluate the performance of hundreds of students? They can't know each student individually. They must create artificial tests which they can apply at scale. They must create a grade economy. They must reduce humans to statistics.
Why even have grade boundaries? The difference between 89.95% and 90% is no doubt statistically insignificant. Why cause pain by creating rigid A-F boundaries?
> But some teachers are principled and are determined to police cheating anyway.
The problem is much of what is considered "cheating" by these people is actually perfectly normal real world behavior. Research and team work are absolutely normal and expected in the real world but in the artificially difficult dream world of academia they are frowned upon.
Why? Because allowing these things would force them to use less efficient evaluation methods. Much easier to ask a ton of questions in timed high pressure exams that will single-handledly decide the student's future.
Re: Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate
#404I'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…
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…
> we are forced to sell the house and both my brother and I have to forgo our share of the money so that he can survive
The money from the house? Since your dad didn't save for retirement, there was never any money to share. If you meant that you're forgoing some of your current income so he can survive, that's a different issue.
Re: Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate
#405Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
You seem to have a very distorted view. Have you considered the possibility that those people aren't gaslighting you, and that they might be correct?
Re: Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate
#406A lot of the issues here seem to be a product of the US education system that defers excessively to the students (probably because they’re paying big bucks). But it could be worse. I did my grad studies in a European University where there was only one examination at the end of the year with no option to contest or even get feedback. The year before mine a Nobel prize winning professor made a mistake on one of his test questions, causing the half of the class that chose that question to fail. Even though it was his fault, there was no recourse. One half of the class had to repeat the entire year-long course!
Re: Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate
#407I'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…
I am definitely in the same boat.
For 30 years, I had a very specific vision of how I'm going to be different. Whether in serious relationships or single, I was not really buying into my parents' generation OR my own generation ideas.
Then:
1. I met "The One"
2. We had kids
And now I'm living a fairly stereotypical North American lifestyle. And not... begrudgingly or resentfully or bitterly so! It's just that nothing could prepare me or give me true empathetic understanding of how my priorities, goals, and lifestyle would change.
An extremely superficial example is vehicle; I always had sport small hatchbacks. I used to have endless debates with my SUV-loving friends about how unsafe and overly large they are.
I now have a minivan. I love it. It's not a necessity, it's a luxury, but it's a luxury I WANT as a married parent of kids in North American suburb who loves to travel with extended family.
Myriad other things about raising kids too; e.g. I will never ever again judge another human being when their kid misbehaves in public, or how they're handling it. I'm humbled with deeper understanding of how little of a clue I have as to their relationship, parenting style, or what long long LOOONG chain of events precipitated the outburst and what may be the right way to handle it given the background... or, what the parent's energy levels and day are like.
Re: Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate
#408Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Any visionary attempting to restructure traditional learning should read this, and I say that with no ounce of malice or sarcasm... On the contrary. Part of TFA’s point is that, like many other fields, outsiders usually have a much poorer idea than they think of the hows and whys of teaching. Until you’re actually in front of a classroom it’s not obvious why seemingly sensible ideas are often ineffective or unworka…
> On the contrary. Part of TFA’s point is that, like many other fields, outsiders usually have a much poorer idea than they think of the hows and whys of teaching. So you're saying those attempting to restructure the classroom should not take into account this blog post? You seemed to fail to recognize the value of this blog post, or sharing knowledge in general: you give others an express pass to knowledge that you…
> So you're saying those attempting to restructure the classroom should not take into account this blog post? You seemed to fail to recognize the value of this blog post, or sharing knowledge in general...
Oh come on, this isn’t Pedagogy of the Oppressed, it’s a blog post of “things I didn’t understand until my first year on the job”.
TFA is a great post! It’s particularly interesting to laymen, and maybe rookie post-secondary faculty who have been taught a lot about their subject and very little (if anything) about how to teach. But none of it’s novel for anyone who’s been on the other side of the desk.
Talking about education practice in public forums is hard because everyone has a stake, and everyone thinks their experience as a student or parent plus a little common sense makes them an expert. Again, see literally any HN thread about education. TFA does a great job of reminding laymen that often those Chesterton fences are there for a reason. But sorry, I don’t think it’s a rejection of the idea of “sharing knowledge in general” to say that “visionaries attempting to restructure education” probably shouldn’t be laymen.
So, okay, “on the contrary” in my OP was a little strong. Not that anyone shouldn’t read it. But just because something is new to you doesn’t actually make it new.
Re: Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate
#409I'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…
These two observations can be synthesised into recognising that most people are poor at empathy and haven't seriously thought through the question of why other people do what they do (fun fact, a skill that can actually be practised by arguing about politics).
Most parents are probably bad at parenting, based on the observation that most people are bad at most things and there isn't much in the way of training available compared to the size of the task. But most youths are even worse parents and have wildly misunderstood the constraints, goals and threats involved.
Re: Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate
#410I'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…
There's a great quote about being a parent that's often attributed to Mark Twain:
> When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.
It's unlikely he personally said it, because his father died when he was about 11. But it sounds like something that he would have said in one of his books. [0]