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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

#431

Post by mattwilsonn888 »

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…

Get real, man. The whole post is premised with "these are the first things you learn on the job when you try and innovate the classroom." I'll repeat myself again saying that any educator who actually is going to try and change parts of the protocols, procedures and practices for the better (rather than just say it can't be done every-time an idea crosses their path) are either going to learn the hard way and waste time, or take into account posts and experiences like this blog post lays out and not waste time trying what's been proven to fail.

Your argument, if it has any relevance to what I wrote, is that these teachers shouldn't innovate because they don't have experience teaching. Okay, well you can spend twenty years running a classroom in all the old ways you like, and you still won't have gained much valuable experience when it comes to new procedures, considering you haven't tried any. When it comes to innovating or experimenting, the most valuable experiences are those related to attempts at innovation and experimentation, so its quite obvious the opening moves and results to those attempts are invaluable to anyone trying to change things.

And yes, like it or not, people sharing their wisdom like in this blog post will make new teachers in general much wiser than the generation of teachers the author was in when they first started - that's the point of sharing knowledge graciously. Teachers, new or old, who have first hand experience or who take writing like this to heart absolutely are better equipped to innovate the classroom than those who have not. The experience only mantra is ironically enough antithetical to pedagogy in general.

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

#432

Post by bo1024 »

nobody9999 wrote: post #318

"If the colleges were better, if they really had it, you would need to get the police at the gates to keep order in the inrushing multitude. See in college how we thwart the natural love of learning by leaving the natural method of teaching what each wishes to learn, and insisting that you shall learn what you have no taste or capacity for. The college, which should be a place of delightful labor, is made odious and…

I believe college used to be much more about being close to the cutting edge of knowledge and research (thus why instructors have historically been research professors), whereas now it is more like an extension of high school.

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

#433

Post by mattwilsonn888 »

adminprof wrote: post #414
smogcutter wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 releasin…

Terrible analogy. What authority might a team of QA testers have on restructuring the methods for software development? Perhaps not as much as a software developer, but certainly enough to grope at and possibly conceive of new and useful ideas. A student is a QA tester for a classroom, they are not a dentist using a program, they were involved in the entire process and saw basically every mechanism with varying levels of ignorance on motivations.

Comparing a student to an end product consumer of software development is an embarrassingly long stretch - teaching is an art, but its not that complicated nor disconnected from its patrons.

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

#434

Post by avs733 »

tempestn wrote: post #421

This passage is terrible and beautiful: Here’s a story from my father. He was teaching a course for working professionals that had a large project component. He—being naive and idealistic—decided that as long as the students eventually finished the project, they had learned the material, so they should get full credit. Thus, his policy was that students could submit the project, get it graded, and then repeat this pr…

>Particularly those who care about their grades and are actually trying to abide by the spirit of the thing and not game the system.

A grading system that is more work for students focused on the grade over learning is something I would see as a feature not a bug.

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

#435

Post by matheusmoreira »

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…

Oral exams are awesome. The problem is they don't scale up to a high number of students. A teacher with hundreds of students literally cannot afford the time and effort to properly examine the knowledge of the students. So they make these multiple choice tests they can just apply to every student in parallel.

All of these problems with academia are rooted in the fact it's a mass education system designed to teach hundreds if not thousands of people all at once.

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

#436

Post by kirso »

warner25 wrote: post #10

I'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…

This is a bit paradoxical because it also works the other way around.

I definitely have the same resonance in terms of understanding, but I am also feeling like "Gosh, they had no clue what they were doing when they [game me this advice], [prevented me to do this], [scolded me for doing that] etc. etc.

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

#437

Post by sanderjd »

jedberg wrote: post #163
sanderjd wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought the article was fairly strong except for in the two points you highlighted here. In the first case, I still don't understand why you don't just mark their answer from creatively misinterpreted instructions wrong and move on with life. And in the second case it seems like just not worrying about cheaters and letting it be their own funeral (or not) is optimal. I remember who the cheaters were in my classes a…

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,…

Sorry I wasn't clear, I saw and understood the explanations in the article, I just find them weak.

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

#438

Post by sanderjd »

finexplained wrote: post #97
sanderjd wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought the article was fairly strong except for in the two points you highlighted here. In the first case, I still don't understand why you don't just mark their answer from creatively misinterpreted instructions wrong and move on with life. And in the second case it seems like just not worrying about cheaters and letting it be their own funeral (or not) is optimal. I remember who the cheaters were in my classes a…

In the first case, they complain, and there's ~750 of them (in the course I TAed) so even a small number can take up a lot of time. The right way to think about it is for a small additional bit of time spent clarifying instructions you save yourself a larger amount of time later. In the second case, it does depend upon how much the instructor feels it's their duty to uphold the integrity of the grades in their class.…

I was a TA too, though not for a course that large. I guess my feeling is that complainers should just be noted and ignored.

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

#439

Post by sanderjd »

kikimora wrote: post #302
sanderjd wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought the article was fairly strong except for in the two points you highlighted here. In the first case, I still don't understand why you don't just mark their answer from creatively misinterpreted instructions wrong and move on with life. And in the second case it seems like just not worrying about cheaters and letting it be their own funeral (or not) is optimal. I remember who the cheaters were in my classes a…

> In the first case, I still don't understand why you don't just mark their answer from creatively misinterpreted instructions wrong and move on with life. Because your job is to educate them. They also complain about the task which in effect waste your time or give you trouble.

It seems like a good learning experience to get an answer wrong because you didn't succeed in interpreting the question. Nobody takes pains to describe things in minute detail in real life.

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

#440

Post by matheusmoreira »

avs733 wrote: post #419
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…

> The number of students I have that actively presume I am trying to trick them is truly astonishing.

> I've put parts of answers in the question text, underlined them, and then had students tell me they thought it was a trick.

Why wouldn't they assume that?

Tests are nothing but games where students figure out what answers you want. They can do that by learning the material, but there's a metagame. What were you thinking when you wrote down this question on the exam?

For example, once I took a english test which asked me the correct pronoun for ships. Choices: he, she, it, they. I know that "she" is almost always used to refer to ships, but I also know that "it" is also grammatically correct. So which is it? Is the teacher trying to test my understanding of this historical tradition? Does the teacher think "she" is antiquated? Will I lose if I pick "she"? There's enough uncertainty here for me to pause even though it's an absurdly simple question. I know the answer but I'm not 100% sure what will happen if I choose it.

There are serious consequences to getting these answers wrong and students simply can't afford to trust you.

Entire books could be written about this teacher-student metagame. Another example: choice order. Suppose the choices to the above english question were ordered so:

  Which pronoun is used to refer to ships?

  A. It
  B. He
  C. They
  D. She
Deliberately positioning an almost correct answer as the first choice was extremely common in the schools I attended. A student who's overly anxious or running low on time might read that, pick choice A without even reading the other options and move on. The second we noticed this, "letter A is never right" became a meme and to this day I feel uncomfortable choosing the first option presented to me in any context. Preparatory schools actually offered test taking classes where we were taught to read questions backwards because of this.

Teachers eventually noticed that we noticed and suddenly the right answers were the first choices. Do you have enough confidence in your knowledge to assert that letter A is correct? Now it's a deeper level metagame: does this teacher know that I know?

This is what you get when education determines your future job prospects. It is no longer about "actual learning". It is a game and our future hangs in the balance.

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