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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

#411

Post by adminprof »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #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 ar…

Simply, because using absolute points would lead to debate over every single decimal of a point. A student with 89.95% would be determined to fight to get 90.05% and then continue to fight to get 90.15% so it only makes the problem worse.

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

#412

Post by beebeepka »

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!

Ah, there it is. You somehow feel personally offended that someone might not like the important choices made for them.

Sorry this conversation frustrates you. Guess you're still dealing with toddlers which is not something I had considered until now. I thought we were talking about much, much older children. Teens even.

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

#413

Post by hahajk »

SuoDuanDao wrote: post #322
fungiblecog wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm weird. I've brought up my kids without applying the dumb rules i hated as a kid and they're both happy and well adjusted. And i'm happier too because i've avoided all the usual stupid family arguments that would otherwise result. I see other parents repeatedly inflicting on their kids rules and behaviours that are completely unnecessary but they think it's "the right thing" i see this as truly stupid and a…

Now this is a feel-good comment. Do you mind sharing one of the dumb rules that you might have been tempted to apply but decided against?

Saying “because I said so.”

Or “stop it,” out of frustration.

Family members have babysat my kids, and this is a mistake I see all the time. If you tell kids not to do something, always tell them why. And be honest about it. It’s kids’ job to learn about the world, and it’s your job as a parent to teach them about it.

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

#414

Post by adminprof »

smogcutter wrote: post #408
mattwilsonn888 wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 pos…

I'd like to see in a forum for dentists a thread where they offer clever suggestions for how to change software development. Clearly, all these dentists have used plenty of software before.

They would have seemingly great ideas like "programmers should get 10% of their pay docked each time I encounter a bug in a program" or "the real solution is to hire someone to test the program from start to finish before releasing it".

I bet programmers on Hacker News would be livid upon hearing these suggestions, but seem to have no problem announcing their clever solutions about other disciplines (not excluding myself).

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

#415

Post by nojs »

l_s wrote: post #390
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…

To back this up - I went through the oral exam experience on both sides (student and TA) with two different German professors and it worked incredibly well. We offered oral exams as a remedy for a few situations: - suspected/known cheaters - students who missed exams due to illness - times in the course where we needed to get a good grip on whether our students understood the coursework the way we'd taught it It was…

Haha small world! It was at the ANU, intro to statistical machine learning several years ago.

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

#416

Post by matheusmoreira »

adminprof wrote: post #411
matheusmoreira wrote: post #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 ar…

Simply, because using absolute points would lead to debate over every single decimal of a point. A student with 89.95% would be determined to fight to get 90.05% and then continue to fight to get 90.15% so it only makes the problem worse.

That's not my experience. There were no A-F grade boundaries in any of the schools I've ever attended. Students only ever cared about the one boundary that still remained: minimum passing grade. I saw exactly one student trying to get a teacher to round up a 99% grade to 100% just so he could say he had a perfect grade, nobody else cared about decimals unless they were in danger of failing a class.

Boundaries are the problem. Standardized testing for post-graduate positions in my country would give students bonus points based on their overall academic performance. Full bonus points for grades > 90%, half points for grades > 80%... Of course students wanted to optimize that number as much as possible and I don't really blame them.

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

#417

Post by freddie_mercury »

hahajk wrote: post #413
SuoDuanDao wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now this is a feel-good comment. Do you mind sharing one of the dumb rules that you might have been tempted to apply but decided against?

Saying “because I said so.” Or “stop it,” out of frustration. Family members have babysat my kids, and this is a mistake I see all the time. If you tell kids not to do something, always tell them why. And be honest about it. It’s kids’ job to learn about the world, and it’s your job as a parent to teach them about it.

That's not a dumb rule, that's a bad explanation of a rule that may in fact be good.

"You can't stay up until midnight because I said so."

Few parents would argue that not letting them stay up until midnight is a dumb rule. But the example certainly has a bad explanation.

The problem with this entire thread is that without concrete examples everyone is imagining their own which, not coincidentally, happen to match their already existing world view.

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

#418

Post by viceroyalbean »

icegreentea2 wrote: post #46
viceroyalbean wrote: post #41

>In a recent post, Parrhesia suggested that course grades should be 100% determined by performance on a final exam—an exam that could be taken repeatedly, with the last attempt being the course grade >[...]I suspect this proposal hasn’t seen much contact with people who’ve actually taught classes This is how a fair number of classes at my university are graded. Particularly math classes are structured so that you cou…

They let you retake the exam? Like... the same exam? Or re-do at a later term?

Re-do the exam when it is next offered. The most common math exams (e.g calculus, linear algebra) run 4 times a year so there are quite a lot of opportunities.

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

#419

Post by avs733 »

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,…

> every word of the assignment creatively misinterpreted

I hear you, communication is hard, but trust me your statement and the authors are an AND not an OR :) the difference is scale. the students are about 1v30 when it comes to opportunities for badly written assignments. In a typical semester, I am 1v120+ hostile attacks on my communication skills

The number of students I have that actively presume I am trying to trick them is truly astonishing. It's a learned behavior, sure, but it is the behavior.

I've put parts of answers in the question text, underlined them, and then had students tell me they thought it was a trick. I'm at the point when I write tests I leave pretty blatant hints because I have found they are a useful way to punish students who have opted out of thinking and try and brute force answers. I've had students actively invent parts of assignments in their head. In the last one, I asked for three examples in a short answer problem...and gave one of them as a 'for example'. less than 10% of people used that. More than 10% told me they thought it was a trick.

I'm not mad, I'm worried. I get why IT is moving towards zero trust, but it is fundamentally at odds with actual learning. The saving grace is that I can actually use the term 'headcannon' with this generation and they know what I mean.

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

#420

Post by avs733 »

zwkrt wrote: post #48
leetrout wrote: post #2

This is TERRIFYINGLY accurate. """ Here’s what will happen: Like most other humans, your students will be lazy and fallible. So many of them will procrastinate and not do the homework. So they won’t learn anything. So they will get a terrible grade on the final. And then they will blame you for not forcing them to do the homework """ This is almost exactly how adjunct teaching went for me. It was not the experience I…

There is a breed of very narcissistic person in our culture that will always find a way to blame their inadequacies and their mistakes on those around them. In high school, if you are a teacher you have quite a lot of authority in the classroom and so even if your student is oriented in this way, they will just 'not like that teacher'. Helicopter and apologist parents are increasingly an issue but they aren't directl…

> There is a breed of very narcissistic person in our culture that will always find a way to blame their inadequacies and their mistakes on those around them.

There is a flip side...a lot of students are reaching college now without the experience of the decision or blame being on them. College is viewed as so important that it cannot be left to these children who will screw it up. Grades are inflated, kids are told to do more activities but with less depth...everyone is trying to game every metric. It is a functionally nihilistic world view that becomes embedded in students minds in a way that totally lacks agency.

They feel that if they fail its because the teacher failed them...because in their priors the teacher fixed it, because failing and the consequences were not an option - especially for the 'gifted' students. It isn't a personality, it's a lived experience. Its confusing to the students just as much as to me because they don't understand what has happened or how their parents/teachers/leaders/society have failed them.

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