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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

#81

Post by sanderjd »

finexplained wrote: post #6

This perfectly describes my experience as a TA in graduate school. At first I didn't understand why my advisor insisted on being so precise in assignment instructions. Then when TAing with him I saw how students could creatively misinterpret instructions, even when I could not imagine how to make them more precise. An exception for the new case would be added to the next iteration of the assignments. I only understoo…

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 and a couple decades later it's clear that to a one, I would much rather be in the shoes of the diligent hard workers than the cheaters.

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

#82

Post by lupire »

yodsanklai wrote: post #18
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.

Graded assignments are useful to give feedback to students. And more importantly they force students to work regularly and not wait for the last minute to study.

Thus we see the problem that universities are admitting students who aren't ready for tertiary education.

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

#83

Post by brabel »

akvadrako wrote: post #39
endisneigh wrote: post #7

This problem isn't a teaching problem. Evaluating someone's skills in any respect or context is basically an intractable problem. Interviewing, school, job performance, etc. etc. If there were an organization that could "perfectly" evaluate people's skills in a fixed period of time it would quickly become the top, and eventually only company. It would use its own skills in order to remove low performers, perfectly fr…

There is such a system in the long run, it's called the free market. If you can consistently outperform your peers while both parties have complete information, it's a sign of having some advantage. Free markets are never perfect locally, but on a galactic scale they are pretty close, so the superior groups and will dominate.

> so the superior groups and will dominate.

That may be true by definition, if your definition is that superior groups eventually dominate, but that's of course just tautology.

However, depending on how you define "superior", for example "more intelligent and honest", or "more compassionate and fairer", could be what most people have in mind, then that may not be true at all. In human societies, throughout history, it's likely that who dominates is actually the most brutal and reckless, up to a point where people actually become accountable for their actions.

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

#84

Post by chaosite »

akvadrako wrote: post #39
endisneigh wrote: post #7

This problem isn't a teaching problem. Evaluating someone's skills in any respect or context is basically an intractable problem. Interviewing, school, job performance, etc. etc. If there were an organization that could "perfectly" evaluate people's skills in a fixed period of time it would quickly become the top, and eventually only company. It would use its own skills in order to remove low performers, perfectly fr…

There is such a system in the long run, it's called the free market. If you can consistently outperform your peers while both parties have complete information, it's a sign of having some advantage. Free markets are never perfect locally, but on a galactic scale they are pretty close, so the superior groups and will dominate.

See, no, the second you put in "superior" then you left any idea of a free market. The idea of a free market doesn't claim to make any value judgement of what group is better, the free market is purely about selecting fair prices for commodities.

Your idea of superior groups and so on based on success on the free market is basically social darwinism.

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

#85

Post by [deleted] »

IgorPartola wrote: post #56

My college classes gave a 5% weight to homework, 45% to the midterm and 50% to the final. Since I was a good test taker I could skip almost all the homework and still get an A or an A- if I didn’t do as well on one of the exams. It also didn’t help that the professors gave extremely hard exams to small classes: I distinctly remember getting a B+ on an exam where I got 1 out of 6 questions right because everyone else…

[deleted]

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

#86

Post by dclowd9901 »

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?

Not to be insensitive, but ADHD is a learning disability. Are we saying that anyone can be taught anything? That seems unrealistic to me.

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

#87

Post by rrss »

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…

I do not understand how self directed learning like this is expected to work at all for children.

If you replace a high school with letting the students do whatever interests them, a small fraction might study something, and the majority will spend the time watching tiktok, playing league or legends / fortnite, listening to music, etc. maybe you think that letting kids do whatever they want for “education” like this is better, but IMO this proposal is much worse than the current system of directing students to spend time on things that are moderately useful to society and determined to be valuable to intellectual development

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

#88

Post by dionidium »

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 just had my first child at age 40 and of course my experience is similar to yours. I can't help but wonder if delaying (or eschewing) having children is contributing to what seems to be a broadening generational gap. I'm learning lessons in early middle-age that previous generations learned in their early twenties. I could have used some of this new empathy I'm feeling for my parents and their generation 15-20 years ago.

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

#89

Post by asdfasgasdgasdg »

zabzonk wrote: post #69
asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes, people will attempt to defeat systems to their own benefit. That is why these policies discussed in the article exist -- to harden the system to such attempts.

"Wrong" in your comment is underspecified. It depends what you mean by the word.

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

#90

Post by skybrian »

temp8964 wrote: post #79
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…

There's an author I read a lot who repeatedly makes a point in this writing: there are things in my writing you won't be able to understand before you get older, there is just no way. I have to say, it is so true. There are layers of layers I can only see when I get older. Remember when you are a teenage in high school and teachers explain subtle messages in the reading? You and all your classmates are like: this is…

Which author?
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