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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

#491

Post by cycomanic »

I think one of the major problems with university teaching at the moment is the strong emphasis on student evaluations.

I don't believe students are necessarily the best judges of learning outcomes. In face I have learned that students tend to be the most conservative entities at university. Try to make any change in a course and they will hammer you on the evaluations. The detailed instruction example is a perfect example of this. In my experience it is not so much that students find creative ways to misinterpret loose instructions, instead I had students literally complain they had to think for labs or homework. I find this attitude very weird, as if when they start working they will always be given the detailed step by step instructions.

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

#492

Post by imtringued »

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?

Maybe generation 3? One of my grandmothers worked on a farm in a developing country.

Times change. Subsistence farming doesn't cut it anymore. The lessons learned from that generation are something we have to grow out of.

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

#493

Post by EntropyIsAHoax »

pgcj_poster wrote: post #399
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?

Yes, but the first assignment was something silly so everyone could do it. I could also see giving everyone 3 cookies to start with as an initial buffer

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

#494

Post by IshKebab »

hajile wrote: post #490
IshKebab wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other benefits of a degree beside learning are: * Makes it way easier to get a job * Great social experience

You can gain social experience lots of other places while making money rather than spending tons of money. Degree inflation means that getting a job with one is about as hard as getting a job without one a couple decades ago. In any case, who you know is usually more important than what you know when starting out. If you wind up self-employed, then I started out my professional programming career before I had a degre…

> Degree inflation means that getting a job with one is about as hard as getting a job without one a couple decades ago.

Agreed. Still both easier than getting a job without a degree now!

> In any case, who you know is usually more important than what you know when starting out.

Erm not really - when you're starting out you don't know anyone, so you can't use networking to get a job and qualifications are relatively more important. It's only when you've had a bit of a career that you start to have a network and can e.g. bypass HR because you know someone.

> I've never asked a programmer about their college education in an interview and I don't see a reason to start asking that question.

Me neither but programming is a bit of an exception. I think because so many people learn it on their own, and because it's relatively easy to directly test in an interview. It wouldn't be the same for accountancy or management or lawyers or doctors or ...

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

#495

Post by light_hue_1 »

agentdrtran wrote: post #370
light_hue_1 wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You would lose your bet. Let's just say that I know what I'm talking about first hand and I'm not making a conjecture.

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

#496

Post by agentdrtran »

light_hue_1 wrote: post #495
agentdrtran wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You would lose your bet. Let's just say that I know what I'm talking about first hand and I'm not making a conjecture.

just out of curiosity, did they cheat more than the average cheater? I knew a few of people who cheated in college but it was infrequent and varied by class, friend group, etc.

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

#497

Post by diarrhea »

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…

> 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.

What did you expect? To me, it would be painfully obvious that the already given example is void and no longer up for grabs. I would never construct such an exam question. Dangerous slope, but in this case obvious.

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

#498

Post by dorkwood »

moviewise wrote: post #474
dorkwood wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A helpful way to deal with childhood trauma, I've found, is to take a wide perspective. The speech that Tom Hanks as Walt Disney, who was abused by his father, gives in the 2013 movie "Saving Mr. Banks" beautifully encapsulates this idea and eloquently delivers this advice: overcome your past. Here is the full speech: https://moviewise.wordpress.com/2015/05/27/saving-mr-banks/

Thank you for responding, but I don't find this advice particularly helpful. Yes, I am tired. Yes, I would love to overcome my past. How does one go about doing that?

This quote also leaves out the second part of their conversation -- the speech's emotional climax -- where Disney tells Travers she needs to forgive herself. This doesn't apply to me. I have nothing to forgive myself for.

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

#499

Post by mattwilsonn888 »

adminprof wrote: post #445
mattwilsonn888 wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 level…

Students are users of a class, as much as a dentist is a user of a dental software application. Neither were involved in the making of the class or software. Both were delivered the experience as designed by the course staff (instructor and/or TAs), or software team. Both only see the final product after months or years of development, done by specialists trained for many years even before that. The error you're maki…

The only way you can refute is by being obtuse. QA testers and dentists using software are not the same, not at all - that was the premise for my whole point and you refuted it by pretending I didn't say it.

I assume you are a teacher, so what's truly laughable is that I must explain this to you: teaching students is at least a factor more intimate than delivering a finished piece of software or other commodity to a user - its also a factor less complicated to deliver a MVP. If we are talking textbooks, then you're objections apply - I would hope teaching in your mind occupies a distinct space from textbooks.

Surely many students displeased with instruction will be ignorant with some nuances and limitations of structuring a class, but the gap between good prescription and naive wishes is not a half career's worth of experience when it comes to teaching. I'm sorry to burst your bubble: Teaching is not rocket science, it is not software engineering - the prestige a teacher earns comes from either their qualifications in an advanced field or their effectiveness in imparting knowledge (or perhaps their proclivity to allow cheating depending on how you measure).

There are surely many teachers instructing arithmetic that understand teaching better than doctorate professors. Are you going to tell me that a piece of writing outlining common pitfalls, an earnest reader, and a creative mind really get you no further than a fresh, apathetic track-following graduate when it comes to innovation? Get real.

If teaching is the only thing that makes you good at teaching then I guess we should ignore all sharing of information about it, even from those who are good at it. Well, or we could just ignore your sentiments about who should be allowed to innovate in public.

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

#500

Post by LaserToy »

dominotw wrote: post #209
LaserToy wrote: post #29

Ha, the same happens to managers. Unless you have a power to remove cheaters, you will have to throw rules at them. At expense of everyone else. I still hold the line, but do suffer sometimes.

what makes you happy being a manager. i mean how does it provide you satisfaction. I've been trying to see if its a good idea to go into managmement but dealing with people isn't my strong suite.

Honestly, ability to build more. Can’t say I’m a big fan of people issues.
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