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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

#61

Post by oconnor663 »

mr_cyborg wrote: post #38
oconnor663 wrote: post #22

My teaching experience is limited, but for teaching compsci I've had good results with programmatically graded assignments, where the students get unlimited submissions but also machine-enforced deadlines. (I liked this when I was a student, and I've liked structuring my own class this way too.) One of the big benefits is that you can be maximally clear about what the problem set is asking the students to do, because…

As a student I’ve taken computer science classes with and without some kind of autograder. I’ll say that depending on how it’s set up it can be complete nightmare fuel. In one class I recall that 3/4 of my time was formatting comments correctly to not trip the chest detection that came from not “properly attributing” the code I wrote. Also the assignments were written to the autograder. So instead of saying “write a…

Ugh automating the cheat detector sounds awful. The tool we used had a nice similarity detection feature for me to look at, and I used it by hand a few times, but of course it had false positives.

> write a method named NAME that takes in XYZ parameters and outputs exactly in QRS format

Yeah I hate that too. Personally I went with "your program should read JSON from stdin and write JSON to stdout". For students who had never seen JSON before, that was definitely some extra friction. But the upside is that it's something they're going to see a lot of in the real world.

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

#62

Post by ZYinMD »

sturgill wrote: post #24
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…

I frequently say that 16 y/o Chris would be very disappointed in 40 y/o Chris. But 16 y/o Chris was an idiot. As you touched on, the fun twist is when you abstract the learning so it’s not just “I was wrong about X” but “I should be much more accepting of contrarian views.”

I remember reading Harry Potter on Kindle, and Dumbledore had a line "Youth cannot know how age thinks and feels. But old men are guilty if they forget what it was to be young", and Kindle has this feature to show how many other readers have highlighted a sentence, and this sentence were highlighted by thousands. I guess they're all teenagers.

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

#63

Post by civilized »

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…

I'm sure it's theoretically possible to do poorly in a class because the teacher didn't like you, but statistically, it's got to be one of the most powerful red flags on a human. Steer clear.

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

#64

Post by bernulli »

Yep, this is it. Ever wondered why syllabi and problem statements are so long, convoluted, and oddly specific? It all boils down to "Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, it's going in the syllabus." [0]

Edit: I did not come up with [0], but I also don't remember where I saw it.

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

#65

Post by r_hoods_ghost »

jjj123 wrote: post #25
beebmam wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good! Students should be failing out of they're unwilling to work hard

You could call it unwilling to work hard. Or it could be difficulty prioritizing work, or ADHD, or disorganization. Are those traits what we’re testing for, or are we testing for knowledge of the subject?

I know this is harsh but if you have ADHD, difficulty prioritizing work or are disorganised to the extent that you can't perform academically at the required level to complete a degree then you shouldn't be wasting your money and time going to university and should instead look for something that better suits your talents.

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

#66

Post by whatever1 »

lumost wrote: post #19
beebmam wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was a TA, I convinced my professor to stop giving graded assignments. it was obvious on tests who had done the assignments and who hadn't.

After just starting a grad program after 12 years in industry. I'd have to disagree. While a large fraction of homework is busy work designed to give the illusion of challenge and rigor - tests simply estimate whether someone has memorized the material sufficiently for a short 1 hour exam. In CS, a ~4-20 hour project is vastly more representative of how well someone understands the material and could apply it in a re…

Many engineering programs have their most challenging courses set up as semester long projects.

In chemical engineering the final boss is the process design class, a project where you are asked to produce a chemical substance with desired properties at scale without losing money. Almost everything you learned during the program has to be used to pull it off. Programming, numerical methods, CAD, Transport phenomena, kinetics, physical chemistry, thermodynamics. It really is the best all around test for a chemical engineer.

While this is feasible for the senior year, I am not sure if you can convert for example calculus 1 into a semester long project.

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

#67

Post by ElFitz »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #43
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…

What’s wrong with doing the things that your more mature, logical self actually wants instead of what your younger, uninformed self thought you’d want? There’s nothing stopping you from eating ice cream for breakfast, spending all of your money on Lamborghinis, and playing video games all day. As an adult you realize that those things won’t actually bring you true happiness and those decisions will cause significant…

It’s still nice to finally have that ice cream for breakfast every now and then.

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

#68

Post by dwater »

Daneel_ wrote: post #16

For the most part I actually had wonderful teachers during my school career. What I bitterly disagreed with was a lot of the curriculum, and I knew they didn’t have a say in that. So my question to educators here would be: Do you ever feel like you’re forced to teach topics you know won’t benefit students?

I was a high school math teacher for 9 years and taught classes with high stakes state administered tests at the end, and the content of the curriculum was the least of my complaints.

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

#69

Post by zabzonk »

asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #54
zabzonk wrote: post #3

The whole thrust behind this article is that grading and testing is a bunch of crap. And that's entirely correct, IMHO. We should restructure our whole Western (and Eastern, for all I know) education system on the lines of Ivan Illich's book Deschooling Society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deschooling_Society which (simplified) suggests that everyone gets an educational grant that they can spend about which and who…

That is not at all what I got out of the article. The main thrust is that policies that are apparently dumb to non-teachers are not actually dumb. They are well-justified responses to the ways students will attempt to defeat the purpose of the system.

> students will attempt to defeat the purpose of the system.

Given any system, why would people not attempt to defeat it? And if they can defeat it, perhaps the system is wrong?

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

#70

Post by busyant »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #43
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…

What’s wrong with doing the things that your more mature, logical self actually wants instead of what your younger, uninformed self thought you’d want? There’s nothing stopping you from eating ice cream for breakfast, spending all of your money on Lamborghinis, and playing video games all day. As an adult you realize that those things won’t actually bring you true happiness and those decisions will cause significant…

> I don’t see what’s sad about that, other than maybe the disappointment of losing naiveté.

From my own experience, some sadness is due to treating a few people with disdain in my youth. At times, I was an arrogant, pissy teen. I wish I could make amends, but some of those people are gone.

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