[HN Gopher] Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything yo...
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Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate
Author : dynm
Score : 531 points
Date : 2022-03-12 14:47 UTC (8 hours ago)
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| nobody9999 wrote:
| "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 unhealthy, and the young men are
| tempted to frivolous amusements to rally their jaded spirits.
|
| I would have the studies elective.
|
| Scholarship is to be created not by compulsion, but by awakening
| a pure interest in knowledge. The wise instructor accomplishes
| this by opening to his pupils precisely the attractions the study
| has for himself.
|
| The marking is a system for schools, not for the college; for
| boys, not for men; and it is an ungracious work to put on a
| professor."
|
| -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
|
| Source:
| http://www.anvari.org/fortune/Miscellaneous_Collections/1175...
| a-dub wrote:
| i always personally preferred project work. i was never great at
| exams (although i did get a whole hell of a lot better at them).
| project work always better suited my obsessive personality and
| desire to really polish things. projects feel creative, homeworks
| and exam prep... don't. (although learning how to take exams
| meant learning how to make good cheat sheets and memorizing them
| well, so in a way it became creative)
|
| that said for most lower division material projects are
| unsuitable, for that stuff the system i saw i liked the most i
| first saw online for an undergrad intro ai course at mit. it was
| pretty simple, the course had a handful of carefully designed
| uncurved but not tricky half exams units that were given
| throughout the term. the final was two half exam spaces for any
| units you wanted to try again, if you did well all semester, you
| didn't have to show up for the final, if you messed up, it's your
| chance to retake the specific units you wish to improve. goal:
| demonstrate you learned all the techniques in the course, that's
| it.
|
| sometimes it felt like putting more weight on homeworks was for
| student comfort and to reduce stress on exams for everyone, sadly
| sometimes i think it had the opposite effect of producing lazier
| exam design and more reliance on curves. i once took a course
| which had no official notes, fairly weak lectures and the claim
| "i teach at a level above the assigned textbook." no, he didn't,
| he wasted everyone's time.
|
| i once went to see a professor after the fact to go over the
| final, i told him explicitly i just wanted to understand the
| things i got wrong but he kept returning points even after
| multiple statements that i didn't care. this made me very sad to
| think that he probably sat for hours with people arguing over
| points rather than discussing material.
|
| overall it felt like some professors (or maybe their students)
| spent hundreds of hours designing amazing courses and some spent
| less than ten. those in the former camp were often prickly in
| terms of their specific asks, but obviously in those cases it
| didn't matter as the care and craftsmanship that went into the
| course design justified any particularity. it was the waste of
| time courses that were the worst (even if they did sometimes come
| with generous mea culpa grading).
| viceroyalbean wrote:
| >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 could
| literally ignore the class for 3 months and then just show up and
| take the exam and that decides 100% of the grade. Some homework
| is available for bonus points, but it only contributes to going
| from a failing grade to passing. While retaking the exam to get a
| higher grade isn't technically part of the system they will let
| you do it if there is space.
| icegreentea2 wrote:
| They let you retake the exam? Like... the same exam? Or re-do
| at a later term?
| scarecrowbob wrote:
| I spent my 20ss trying to become a professor and teaching
| undergrads. The article resonates loudly with me.
|
| One of the best thing about nope-ing out of that lifestyle has
| been this:
|
| I still teach people.
|
| I teach people almost every day and this is incredibly
| validating.
|
| I teach people almost every day and this is incredibly validating
| and they find this useful.
|
| I teach new things to musicians I play with. I mentor my
| coworkers when they are working with new things. I help my
| friends and partners learn new things. The best is that I know
| how to research ideas and commit to learning them myself.
|
| Much of formal education has systematic problems that make it
| struggle to achieve its stated goals.
|
| But "teaching" as a form of human interaction is a wonderful
| thing.
| sizeofchar wrote:
| It's totally a systemic problem, that's it. Same thing with me.
| I love teaching, I just can't stand the faculty anymore.
| leetrout wrote:
| 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 had hoped it would be in almost any way.
| zwkrt wrote:
| 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 directly in the
| classroom.
|
| In college however, students are grappling with their own
| burgeoning adulthood. They realize a TA is just another student
| with a few years on them. While the professor might be a bit
| out of reach, for a narcissistic person, it is easy to justify
| to themselves that they are actually _above_ the TA in status
| /rank/morality/righteousness/sociability. Subsequently they can
| beat down the TA in the way that you mentioned. "All my
| problems are the result of your failures to address them". "I
| would have done better but the TA didn't like me." "Oh I hated
| that class the TA was a total nerd." "No one ever told me I had
| to do the assignments, I didn't realize I would be tested on
| this."
|
| It doesn't help that people who choose to become a TA are often
| a 'helpful' kind of person, the exact kind of person that tends
| to be a little bit susceptible to these kinds of criticisms,
| even if they are untrue. The only way to move forward as a TA
| (and as a person) in this environment is to harden yourself in
| the ways that the article and many other commenters mention.
| That's my 2c anyhow.
| civilized wrote:
| 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.
| wisty wrote:
| There could be teachers who are fanatics about some
| political issue, and if you even hint you might disagree
| with them they'll try to lash out. I also recall some
| university level class (I didn't take it but a friend did)
| where religion was a topic and the professor intentionally
| set very loaded questions in online tutorials. While it's
| fair to ask people to question their own assumptions, it
| often seems the people most keen on this are ones who would
| become very irate if their own assumptions got questioned.
|
| Perhaps that why some groups of people tend to gravitate to
| STEM, where teacher bias is less likely to have an impact.
| analog31 wrote:
| Ah, the student didn't know one of the secret college
| hacks: Teachers with an ideological axe to grind are
| almost always the easiest graders, because they can be
| manipulated by dog whistles, and need to be liked. I got
| my best grades in the obligatory religion classes.
| webmobdev wrote:
| I didn't get you; steer clear of who - the teacher or the
| student?
| titanomachy wrote:
| probably steer clear of the student who claims they
| failed because the teacher didn't like them
| caddemon wrote:
| Many, many TAs are only doing it because it is required for
| their PhD program (either explicitly or in order to receive
| funding). Some of them still take the teaching duty
| seriously, but not all. Having a bad TA is not a good excuse
| for failing a class I agree, but in my experience most TAs
| are not looking at their feedback because they're really only
| in it for the research. And a decent portion of them would
| deserve the negative feedback.
| beebmam wrote:
| Good! Students should be failing out of they're unwilling to
| work hard
| jjj123 wrote:
| 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?
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| Not to be insensitive, but ADHD is a learning disability.
| Are we saying that anyone can be taught anything? That
| seems unrealistic to me.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| As an advisor of PhD students I've learned that both things
| are important in different amounts. Much of what our
| education system measures right now is "willingness to work
| really hard from a young age." When I meet students from
| top-tier institutions I see a lot of this: it's really
| impressive. I also see a good deal of of selection for what
| I'd consider raw problem-solving ability. I see a smaller
| degree of selection for raw creativity.
|
| The most creative students I've met have been the ones that
| didn't accumulate credentials, and often suffered because
| of (possibly undiagnosed) ADHD. They did well when they
| found their passion, either because they found it later in
| life or because they really, really cared about it. Our
| system doesn't do as well with these people, but they can
| usually make their way through.
|
| Unfortunately there's a downside to this: all the
| creativity in the world isn't going to help you if you
| can't execute. A brilliant idea only takes you so far. And
| gaining sufficient background to have brilliant ideas is
| often an even more demanding task, which passion alone
| doesn't suffice for. I don't exactly know what to do about
| all this. What I do know is that a system that bases future
| success on how well individuals do at age 16 is
| fundamentally, profoundly stupid... And I wish I had a
| better one.
| caddemon wrote:
| Ironically, measures like discussed in this article can
| actually make classes much harder for students with ADHD.
| Keeping on top of busy work, maintaining a tight schedule,
| etc. is not easy with executive functioning issues, and
| could lead to a student that actually did learn the
| material and performed well on exams receiving a bad final
| grade.
|
| This may be more relevant to "twice exceptional" students
| that can still pick up on the material without following
| the whole class. There is certainly heterogeneity and I
| don't mean to speak for all ADHD students in what they
| would prefer. I just think it is funny your comment could
| be read as supporting either side of the debate without the
| parent context. And given the parent context I have to say
| I disagree.
|
| Now whether the hand holding of attendance policies and
| weekly assignments and the like is better for the class on
| the whole I can't comment on. It's not an easy tradeoff and
| I don't think the decision should be made primarily based
| on how people with ADHD perform, unless you are teaching a
| class where it is disproportionately represented.
| r_hoods_ghost wrote:
| 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.
| sneak wrote:
| It's their money and time to decide if an allocation of
| same is wasted or not; your opinion of what is or is not
| a waste of someone else's time is not relevant.
|
| Source: extreme ADD sufferer who has "wasted" tons of
| time swimming upstream to learn to do things easy for
| some others but insanely difficult for me, simply because
| I wanted to.
| caddemon wrote:
| I see where you are coming from in that there is only so
| much burden on the teacher that would be reasonable
| accommodation. However I think it comes across as harsh
| because many of these students could successfully
| complete a degree if they received adequate treatment
| from a healthcare provider.
| isbvhodnvemrwvn wrote:
| People sometimes get diagnosed with ADHD in their 30s.
| It's not that they are incapable of doing things,
| depending on the kind of ADHD they have, they might just
| not feel any drive to do it, or have no sense for
| deadlines whatsoever. It can take years to get into the
| habits which help you overcome it.
| Lascaille wrote:
| The testing is for a combination of knowledge of the
| subject and ability to apply it in practice.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| savanaly wrote:
| >And you know what? When the students blame you, maybe they
| are right. The teacher is supposed to use their experience to
| help students learn. Shouldn't you help the actual imperfect
| humans in front of them, rather than imagining a bunch of
| perfectly rational Platonic objects?
| fossuser wrote:
| I really liked homework suggestions that (critically) included
| the answer key and walkthrough of solution!
|
| Doing problem sets in university without this made it way less
| valuable because you need the immediate feedback loop to learn
| and waiting until office hours or recitation takes too long and
| you forget.
|
| Good classes (from grade clarity perspective) were ones where
| it was clear what would be tested and how to prepare. Then you
| could leverage the optional homework to focus on areas you
| didn't understand yet.
|
| There were classes I enjoyed that did this poorly by either
| forcing homework grading without answer keys (feedback loop too
| slow, often can't focus on what you don't know) - or made it
| very hard to know what the test format would be like to prepare
| for.
|
| I like learning and enjoyed my CS classes - I also kept a high
| gpa at a university known to be hard (was also preparing for
| medschool where gpa is critical in the US), but the stress
| around grades was miserable.
|
| Getting good grades is a skill that's related to learning, but
| also its own thing. Sometimes to optimize grades you have to do
| things that hurt learning (rather than focus on how a compiler
| works and digging into interesting details here, you must focus
| your attention on the specific types of puzzles that will be
| tested).
|
| I get why this is done, but I still wish there was a better way
| to handle this. I think ISAs and job market validation of
| skills is an improvement (like lambda school) but those
| students still blame everyone else for their own failures even
| in that case so it's a hard problem.
| legobmw99 wrote:
| In CS courses, I always appreciated when we were given access
| to the grading scripts/unit tests used by course staff. It
| made that feedback loop immediate, and unless you were
| intentionally doing something weird you usually knew exactly
| what grade you were getting for your submission.
|
| As a TA, it was funny to see the ways a few students would
| overfit those tests. In one extreme case I literally saw a
| student replace a complicated function definition with a if-
| else chain that just determined which of the 4 test cases it
| was being run on...
| bsder wrote:
| As an CS instructor, my solution for that was to have a
| skeleton level of unit tests but to switch in a full suite
| once the deadline passed. Your grade was based on passing
| the full tests.
|
| Practically everyone who "played fair" got the same grade
| for both. Occasionally, I would add a test that tripped
| everybody up and I'd have to go see what happened. Anybody
| who overfitted, however, got crushed.
|
| My favorite assignment was always the next to last project
| (before end of semester deadlines start getting crushing).
| I created only a single unit test to verify the test suite
| runner was functional, and the students had to submit the
| rest of the pre-deadline unit tests. And I would switch in
| my full suite at the deadline. I told people that anybody
| who passed that suite would get bonus points that everybody
| was always bugging me for.
|
| It was always absolute chaos. I only ever had one student
| pass the switched in suite (he got some nice bonus points
| out of that--didn't need them, of course). I would then
| reopen the project for a week (I planned for it) to let
| everybody else clean up their work and resubmit.
|
| You could see and feel the difference in the students after
| that assignment. The fact that testing was an integral part
| of programming and that testing was, in and of itself, a
| difficult problem was a revelation--and not a particularly
| welcome one.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I'm currently dealing with a kind of similar situation, and
| honestly I find it a little odd -- I get questions from
| students which I'm pretty sure are honest and asked in good
| faith, but they seem to think they are very close to having
| solved the problem, despite having just over-fitted most of
| the tests.
|
| It is possible that the problem is poorly written (I'm just
| a TA, I didn't write it, and it looks pretty clear to me),
| or it is possible that I'm just really gullible and they
| aren't actually asking in good faith (I'm a trusting
| person, but I've been doing this kind of work for a while
| and so I've seen most of the dishonest questions, this
| doesn't look like one to me). I dunno, I think I'll just
| chalk it up to the long tail of weirdness that can occur
| when dealing with a bunch of students.
| fossuser wrote:
| My guess is CS1 is often the first time a student has
| been given a problem they have to actually reason about
| to solve (rather than follow a script).
|
| This is hard to understand and adapt to and stresses out
| students that have been trained (for years) to learn the
| expected script.
|
| You eventually get to this level in math, but only way
| later in post graduate work (unless you're exceptional).
|
| I think there's likely a benefit in explicitly tackling
| this directly for young/new students, it might help them
| see the bigger picture. At least the earnest ones
| struggling to do well anyway.
| leetrout wrote:
| I personally recorded hours of walkthroughs for my students
| (very basic react, svg drawing, etc).
|
| It is such an immense amount of labor. Now i know why people
| regurgitate the same content everywhere or dont bother
| vwoolf wrote:
| This is also how teaching went for me. I found out why teachers
| have attendance policies, quizzes, and all the other things
| that, as a student, seemed inane, if not counterproductive, to
| me. While those things sometimes are, and can be overly
| punitive or poorly applied (like anything, much of the
| apparatus around teaching can be done better or done worse), I
| now get why instructors do those things.
| caddemon wrote:
| I also think there's always going to be a question of which
| students you are optimizing for. I had a professor that
| didn't have an attendance policy, but at the start of every
| year he would show a scatter plot of class attendance versus
| final grade with a fit line showing decent correlation. Of
| course if you looked closer, the effect was mostly that very
| good attendance led to A's. Low attendance was a crapshoot on
| the plot, with every letter grade represented including many
| of the A+'s.
|
| The students that attended didn't need an attendance policy
| because they were inclined to attend anyway. The question is
| how much forced attendance would have improved the scores of
| the bad performance/low attendance group versus how much it
| would have hurt the good performance/low attendance group
| (including missed opportunities at the same time slot). I
| don't see a policy that realistically helps all of the
| struggling students without hurting any of the top students,
| so a tradeoff has to be made.
|
| Perhaps offering attendance as extra credit without making it
| a penalty could be a good middle ground, but I don't think it
| would help all of the low attendance/poor performance
| students. By the time they realize they need extra credit
| they would already be behind, and they may not care about an
| extra credit offer at the start of the semester.
| penteract wrote:
| The grading method this article argues is infeasible is widely
| used in the UK (although retakes aren't always unlimited or
| free). This does have downsides, but many of the other problems
| described in the article vanish. Very importantly, students
| aren't incentivized to hide the fact that they don't understand
| something in homework.
| avnigo wrote:
| > I had some teachers who tried to avoid the issue by setting the
| A boundary at 89.5%. I outwitted them by earning 89.483%
|
| 89.483% rounds to 89.5%, but not 89.50%; it's just a matter of
| significant figures. I see significant figures often being
| misunderstood. You can only ever compare values of the same
| number of significant figures, it's just that most of the time
| that's done implicitly, so it's not acknowledged.
| Zak wrote:
| One of my favorite teachers in high school had the following
| policies:
|
| * There will be a short quiz every week covering recent material.
|
| * Homework is optional for any student who got an A on the last
| quiz (due to the length of the quizzes, that essentially meant
| 100%).
|
| * Anyone with an A average in the class so far _and_ an A on the
| last quiz is permitted to sleep in class.
|
| It worked great. Nobody's time was being wasted on busy work, nor
| were people recklessly left behind.
| zabzonk wrote:
| 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 they study with they can
| freely choose. But it is not going to happen, and we will stay
| with the whole grading and testing bullshit.
| rrss wrote:
| 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
| jdrc wrote:
| That's putting the cart before the horse, people need teaching
| to learn how to spend, trial and error is the slowest learning
| strategy and should only be used when there are no alternatives
| zabzonk wrote:
| > trial and error is the slowest learning strategy
|
| But that's what they do now! I can't see any alternative to
| that, but people could be given an increased range of
| learning possibilities.
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| 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.
| zabzonk wrote:
| > 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?
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| 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.
| memming wrote:
| Yup. If i taught as if a younger version of myself would have
| liked, it would be a terrible course for most students.
| rrss wrote:
| removed
| cdjk wrote:
| I would be curious to know the name of that school.
| EntropyIsAHoax wrote:
| 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 - you
| lose 1 cookie for each day it's late, starting at midnight the
| day after it was due - if you at any point during the semester
| reach a negative amount of cookies, you instantly fail the class
| - the final paper is graded pass/fail
|
| This has the advantage that it keeps students on track, but the
| final grade is just a result of their actual knowledge and the
| final paper. The first few milestones were trivial to meet so you
| get a little buffer if you're late for some reason. In my year
| not a single person failed due to lack of cookies either
| jasoneckert wrote:
| Evaluation has always been the biggest challenge for teachers in
| the tech industry, because education is largely driven by
| assessment (I've been teaching IT for 23 years now).
|
| But things are changing, and the pandemic is speeding that
| process. A decade ago James Paul Gee outlined where we want to
| go, and I think it will largely come to fruition before the end
| of this decade: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNfPdaKYOPI
| finexplained wrote:
| 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 understood why we went to
| such lengths to prevent cheating because in my first year I
| watched my advisor spend two weeks of his time sitting down
| individually with each student and present evidence that they had
| cheated. Only about 10% of the students had cheated, but in a
| class of 1400, that's 140 students! I can't even imagine how much
| work that must of been on the head TA.
| vishnugupta wrote:
| > class of 1400
|
| Is it a normal thing in the west?
|
| The largest class I've been part of in India had 105 students
| and I thought that was nuts. 1400 is like crazy to me.
| gruez wrote:
| "class of 1400" just means a given course has an enrollment
| of 1400 in a given semester, not necessarily that they packed
| 1400 students into one lecture hall and taught them all at
| the same time.
| omegaham wrote:
| 1400 is huge. It's common at large state universities for the
| introductory classes to have somewhere between 200 and 300
| students. The professor lectures in a large auditorium, and
| grading (and questions!) are delegated to a staff of TAs.
|
| If you get a good TA and have some good classmates, it's
| totally fine. Unfortunately, it's common for your TA to be
| crap, at which point grading becomes a nightmare.
|
| I avoided all of this by taking introductory classes at the
| community college, where they teach the same material to
| classes of 25 students.
| beebmam wrote:
| 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.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Professors grade the assignments to make sure that students
| do them.
|
| There are many other options for evaluating the students, but
| not many to force them to learn something.
| ModernMech wrote:
| This is tough because it creates a strong incentive for them
| to make bad long-term decisions. Think of it from the
| perspective of a student: you're taking 6 other courses, all
| of them very demanding with graded assignments, except for
| this one class where the assignments are not graded. You have
| a limited budget of time over the week, and time is getting
| short. Do you: a) work really hard on your ungraded
| assignment and turn in your best effort for no impact on your
| grade or b) tell yourself that you'll make up the work at a
| later point in time, and then focus on your other graded
| assignments to make sure you optimize those grade. Then you
| will focus on the other course later on during spring break
| or something.
|
| Sure everyone says they'll do a but really, this sets a lot
| of students up for a trap. They _think_ they will have time
| to make all of this up later, but really what will happen is
| they will just fall behind in the class. The assignments from
| other courses keep piling up, so the free time never really
| materializes. In fact, the same scenario repeats: the student
| will forego a second assignment, having already done so once
| before. Then the deferred responsibilities pile up and you
| end up with a student who is failing your course (even though
| on paper the grade is undetermined (kind of like a wave
| function), in all actuality it 's just waiting to collapse to
| a grade of F at test time.
|
| Look at it this way: it's like a reinforcement learning
| problem. If your reward schedule is that you only give a
| reward to the agent when it achieves the end goal, sometimes
| training that agent takes a very long time; if the search
| space is too large, then the agent can go any which way and
| will take a long time to reach that goal. That's ungraded
| assignments.
|
| Instead, if you give the agent little rewards along the way
| when it makes some significant progress, then the agent can
| converge to the goal state much faster, in a way that avoid a
| lot of unpleasantness for everyone. I don't like giving Fs,
| and they don't like receiving Fs. I feel like if I give an F
| that's really more on me than them. Part of my job is not
| just to put course content into student brains, but to also
| shape their ability to manage their time and juggle a variety
| of projects. It's the kind of thing I spend many semesters
| (4) instilling in my students and grades are one of the
| effective tools I use to do so.
|
| You may say just do away with all grades and we can talk
| about that. There are different models we could use. But as
| long as others are using grades it's kind of a baked in
| assumption at this point. Very hard to change that kind of
| system.
| hnfong wrote:
| It does sound like a pointless arms race (between different
| courses)
|
| I majored in Law but took a couple CS courses on the side
| so I saw the contrast between traditions in different
| departments. CS courses had a constant stream of non-
| trivial graded homework. Even if I knew the materials it
| took me quite some time to complete them. Law courses
| usually one essay that counts for ~15-25% (or less
| frequently, a mid-term test), and the rest is the final
| exam.
|
| Obviously, both methods work (I guess). But if you're
| already in an environment where courses give out lots of
| graded assignments, your concerns definitely make sense.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| 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.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I think it is mostly the latter. At least -- I rarely got
| useful feedback other than a little x (best case it would
| be on the error, more likely on the questions).
|
| Personally, when grading I keep a file of all my feedback
| so I can easily copy-paste it into their feedback files
| (since everything is digital nowadays). For a given
| assignment, usually only a handful of mistakes are made
| (repeated by each student). If anything, having the file
| makes my grading more consistent -- same points for the
| same error.
|
| I'm under the impression that this is a not-unpopular
| system, but try as I might, I cannot get anyone else to
| adopt it.
| moltke wrote:
| Personally I always preferred quizzes for that. I've always
| been a very strong autodidact though, there are probably
| people who prefer getting dragged through things by
| homework.
| lupire wrote:
| Thus we see the problem that universities are admitting
| students who aren't ready for tertiary education.
| lumost wrote:
| 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 real world setting than a 40 minute multiple choice
| exam. At the advanced levels this is true for fields such as
| Physics, English, History or any others.
|
| Maybe we should ask ourselves how to give better assignments
| in a class that aren't simply busy work?
| nvarsj wrote:
| I get what you're saying but I also disagree with it as a
| generalization, and say it would depend on the subject. For
| theoretical subjects, an exam is about the only way to test
| your understanding. Memorization is not going to help you
| solve math problems.
| lolinder wrote:
| > Memorization is not going to help you solve math
| problems.
|
| On the contrary, memorization is the way most people I
| know got through most of their math classes, at least
| through calculus and linear algebra. You memorize the
| steps by rote repetition without really learning _why_
| they work, then the test is mostly an exercise in
| guessing which steps and formulas you should apply to the
| given problem.
| nvarsj wrote:
| Is that really memorization? Memorizing multiplication
| tables is one thing. Practicing the techniques over and
| over isn't memorization imo. In grad level maths, you are
| solving proofs pretty much, you can't just memorize facts
| in a textbook to do that.
| lolinder wrote:
| It's memorization insofar as you can do all of that
| practice and become proficient at solving math problems
| without really knowing what they mean or why the steps
| work. You're regurgitating what you were taught, not
| making connections and using your understanding.
|
| You used math as an example of a subject where tests are
| used to check understanding. I disagree, because most
| people that I know who did well in math did so by being
| good human computers, not by understanding anything.
|
| I expect that doesn't continue to be true at the grad
| level, but most people don't get that far.
| lumost wrote:
| I was a physics undergrad who hopped into a few grad
| classes, and to be honest I was terrible at homework and
| great at exams (mostly due to some youthful obstinance on
| putting the time in on homework). At the time I believed
| that the exams showed who really knew the material and
| who applied time to solve the problem. With some time
| past I see that the larger/tougher problem sets were
| where the real challenge was.
|
| I recall a few unique problem sets from Graduate QM such
| as
|
| - Derive from first principles the color of the sky.
|
| - Prove that charge must be Quantized if there is one
| magnetic mono-pole in the universe.
|
| The exam questions were far simpler than the theory
| questions asked in the problem sets. The work for the
| first question easily totals > 20 hours of pen and paper
| time.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _The work for the first question easily totals > 20
| hours of pen and paper time._
|
| I guess grad students generally take less coursework than
| undergrads, but how could a professor expect students to
| have 20+ hours on hand to solve a single question, given
| other demands on a student's time?
| vlovich123 wrote:
| I'm someone who crammed their way through 4 years of
| computer engineering exams at a challenging university.
| It's possible. It's hard and the worst few weeks of life
| before exams, but it's possible.
| chaosite wrote:
| Cramming is not memorization. It's not optimal studying,
| sure, but you've still learned something.
| treis wrote:
| In my experience there's little long term retention from
| cramming.
| beebmam wrote:
| >tests simply estimate whether someone has memorized the
| material sufficiently for a short 1 hour exam.
|
| I feel a deep sadness reading this. Is your computer
| science curriculum more accurately described as a software
| engineering curriculum?
|
| Memorization should be virtually irrelevant on most
| computer science exams. Proofs should be core to computer
| science exams; the ability to reason is the most
| fundamental skill to all scientists, especially for fields
| which are tightly coupled to mathematics.
| lolinder wrote:
| > Is your computer science curriculum more accurately
| described as a software engineering curriculum?
|
| Given that most CS students want to go into software
| engineering, it would surprise me if this isn't the case
| for most CS curriculums. In my experience CS students
| don't generally want to be scientists, so most CS classes
| are more application-oriented than proof-oriented.
|
| Schools are starting to provide separate software
| engineering programs, but we're not all the way there
| yet.
| whatever1 wrote:
| 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.
| lumost wrote:
| Calculus 1 is an interesting subject as there certainly
| is a degree of memorization required (you can't re-derive
| the derivative of x^n every time it comes up in your
| career). There is a similar to intro to Organic
| Chemistry, Algorithms and DataStructures, intro to
| programming etc. But the goal is to build detailed
| understanding of these methods more so than memorization.
|
| On the other hand we live in a world where access to
| derivative rules is trivial. I'd imagine in 1800
| mathematicians would assume that you would need to have
| multiplication tables to be productive and not reduced to
| pen and paper their entire career.
|
| I wonder if there is an opportunity to push more
| challenging material into the earlier classes and make
| them more project like.
| wisty wrote:
| I disagree, but at least you didn't use the word
| "regurgitate".
|
| I always find it funny when people say that tests are just
| about "regurgitating" information. It's such a cliche that
| just gets regurgitated in every argument over testing, as
| though it's visceral imagery actually gives it any real
| weight.
|
| Tests can assess whether the student learnt the material
| covered in class. They can also test problem solving
| abilities.
|
| Assignments test conscientiousness, and the ability to make
| good design trade-offs when working with a single customer
| who is buying 100 different custom products and doesn't
| really care about any of them.
| ModernMech wrote:
| > 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.
|
| The best part is if you do make it more precise by specifying
| the problem in more detail, they will just not read it and ask
| questions that you answered explicitly in the assignment.
| leetcrew wrote:
| sometimes "precise" in the mind of the instructor is
| "unintelligibly technical" to the student. I'm tutoring an
| (ESL) friend through an intro to programming course right
| now, and every time she gets an assignment she sends me the
| full text of it just to ask me what the instructions mean. to
| me, the instructions are almost describing line-by-line
| exactly what to write. but to someone who isn't already at
| the level where they can just read and understand random
| pages on cppreference, it's basically impenetrable. this is a
| course designed for people who not only have zero programming
| experience, but also don't even intend to pursue a CS
| major/minor.
| bee_rider wrote:
| At least if it is in the assignment, you can passive-
| aggressively copy-paste the text of the document to them.
| ModernMech wrote:
| My favorite phrase is "As per the syllabus..."
| bee_rider wrote:
| OTOH, I've definitely taken classes with years out-of-
| date syllabi. It is a funny thing, where some instructors
| consider it to be the fundamental contract between them
| and the student, and others consider it to be an annoying
| bit of extra busywork.
| wuyishan wrote:
| Did someone ask the students why they were cheating or
| creatively interpreted instructions? And then tried to address
| the underlying problem?
| ryan93 wrote:
| Seems like a trivial thing to say there is an underlying
| cause. Student should still be failed for cheating.
| Definitely not like a research physicists job to address a
| students personal issues
| chias wrote:
| You can't address the underlying problem that a difference in
| an A and a A- could very well have lasting effects on a
| person's life.
|
| You can't address the underlying problem of someone making it
| to their late teens and being a little shit.
|
| You can't address the underlying problem that some people
| don't even really want to be in your class but "have" to take
| it because they want a degree.
|
| You can't address the underlying problem that some students
| have spent the last 19 years rules-lawyering their parents
| and always getting their way.
|
| You can't address the underlying problem that any concessions
| you make for the 20 year old mother of two struggling with
| two full-time jobs on top of college will also be vehemently
| claimed by the stoner 20 year old with a parent on the Board
| and who thinks college is awesome except for the classes.
|
| You can't address the underlying problem that the university
| gave you a class size three times what it would need to be
| for you to be able to provide each student with the requisite
| attention to really address _anything_ other than "did they
| meet the criteria".
| raverbashing wrote:
| So, I don't know where I read this (might have been here on HN)
| something like:
|
| If you create the rules for the pathological cases, then you're
| "optimizing" for those. Not for the majority.
|
| Whereas the pathological cases should be dealt exactly like
| those.
|
| Though sure, sometimes explanations can be better, but you can
| only play the game up to a point
| ryandrake wrote:
| On the other hand, if you _don 't_ address the pathological
| cases in writing, 90% of your time will be taken up by the
| 10% of people who rules-lawyer their way through life:
| Pointing out the lack of written clarity, complaining about
| 'hidden rules', writing a letter to object, appealing to your
| boss, appealing to boss's boss, lodging a formal complaint
| with leadership implying discrimination, getting actual
| lawyers involved, and on and on and on.
|
| There are a small number of people who just live for the
| thrill of taking advantage of poorly documented rules or
| process. They act disingenuously under the guise of
| sincerity. "I'm just trying to clarify: Nowhere is it written
| that [$obvious_bad_behavior] is not allowed, therefore how am
| I supposed to know??" People who spend more time scrutinizing
| their university's Policies, Rules and Regulations, and Code
| Of Conduct, looking for exploitable flaws, than they would
| ever spend actually reading their assignments. Happens in the
| business world too. I've seen salesmen who couldn't multiply
| two three-digit numbers together turn into Albert Einstein
| when the year's bonus structure got published.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Yeah that's why you can have a catch-all rule like "TA is
| conferred final discretion on evaluations"
|
| Though as I said, some things are good to have in writing,
| if it's an exception that happens with some frequency or
| some corner case that's not as rare as thought
| kelnos wrote:
| > _I 've seen salesmen who couldn't multiply two three-
| digit numbers together turn into Albert Einstein when the
| year's bonus structure got published._
|
| I kinda think you are arguing against your point, here. IMO
| these sorts of sales people are a _result_ of over-
| specifying homework questions to this degree, because they
| haven 't been shut down or washed out at the stage where
| you find out they can't deal with a reasonable (or even
| too-low) level of detail.
|
| But the problems you talk about in your first paragraph are
| real problems, and the solution is that the entirety of the
| school's administration needs to take a zero-tolerance
| approach with this sort of behavior. Rules-lawyering should
| be shut down at every step of the way. Yes, that might
| result in some actual lawsuits, which will suck up time and
| money, but I think that's just the price of educating
| people. And might still end up being less trouble overall.
| sanderjd wrote:
| 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.
| finexplained wrote:
| 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'm not sure if I would have made
| the same choice in my advisor's shoes, but that is the
| decision he made.
| jedberg wrote:
| 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, and eventually you'll have so
| many that your testing will be worthless. And if word gets
| out that your institution allows cheating, then your students
| will not be respected when they leave, causing harm to the
| non-cheaters and your chance at keeping your job as fewer
| people want to attend a school known for allowing cheats.
| light_hue_1 wrote:
| 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 teach because it's some sort of penance that I need
| to pay. I teach because I like it and I want to help build
| smart humans. Not contribute to our society degenerating.
| kikimora wrote:
| > 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.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _Because your job is to educate them._
|
| "Creatively misinterpreting" instructions means to me that
| the students are intentionally doing this (to get away with
| doing less work, or whatever). I think marking them down
| and moving on _is_ educating them: it very quickly tells
| them that sticking to the letter of the law but ignoring
| the spirit is not ok, and will not be tolerated. It 's
| pretty good preparation for being in the real world, too.
|
| Regardless, giving ridiculously over-specified assignments
| will _not_ be good preparation for the real world, where
| many (most?) things are under-specified and ambiguous.
| Adults need to learn how to read between the lines,
| interpret things properly, be comfortable asking follow-up
| questions for things that are not clear, and just figure
| things out when such clarity doesn 't exist.
|
| > _They also complain about the task which in effect waste
| your time or give you trouble._
|
| That sounds annoying, but to me it feels like over-
| specifying tasks in this way is the opposite of education.
| And it feels like the time dealing with the misinterpreters
| wouldn't be wasted; it would be spent actively teaching
| students that the world is not black and white, there's
| often no instruction manual, and that getting out of doing
| work through "creative misinterpretation" will not get you
| far.
| musingsole wrote:
| > I still don't understand why you don't just mark their
| answer from creatively misinterpreted instructions wrong and
| move on with life
|
| Because the actual incidents are often in fuzzy areas where
| _it seems possible the teacher 's instructions were
| confusing_. You're stuck making a character judgment of your
| student instead of evaluating knowledge. Over a career, it
| becomes easier to cordon off fuzzy areas than it is to risk a
| moral challenge.
| professoretc wrote:
| > it seems possible the teacher's instructions were
| confusing.
|
| Yes; I've been on both sides. I've written assignments that
| _I thought_ were clear and unambiguous, only to find that a
| significant number of students misunderstood what I meant.
| They weren 't intentionally _trying_ to make the problems
| easier, they just weren 't sure what I wanted. (And, of
| course, who is going to interpret an ambiguous problem so
| as to make _more_ work for themselves? A few students will
| do it both ways -- the easier interpretation and the harder
| one -- but most won 't.)
|
| And on the other side, I've taken continuing education
| classes taught by other teachers where the instructions
| were confusing, ambiguous, or sometimes just plain
| impossible to follow ("You'll find the answers to this quiz
| in the article you just read." but the article was revised
| and now uses different terminology from the quiz.)
| gerbilly wrote:
| > who is going to interpret an ambiguous problem so as to
| make more work for themselves?
|
| I did.
|
| In fact I always tried to find a unique or novel solution
| to my problem sets, ambiguous or not. (If the problem set
| contained a hint I tried mightily to not use the hint,
| I'd always try to replace a proof by contradiction with a
| constructive proof etc...)
|
| My marks suffered for it. I even almost failed a first
| year exam cos I didn't want to perform a grody 4x4 matrix
| multiplication. Later the prof said: "Your exam was crap,
| but you came up with a better answer for problem four
| than I'd thought of."
|
| It's still one of my most cherished memories from
| undergrad.
|
| I always hated the: "Will this be on the test" type of
| attitude. Are you there to learn and break new ground or
| to just get marks? I had crappy marks but my work spoke
| for itself.
|
| Students should put more effort into creating their own
| body of work. If they spent half the energy they put into
| finding tricks and gaming the system, they'd be much
| better off for it.
| professoretc wrote:
| I usually can tell which students will do well by how
| they answer ambiguous questions: they'll answer _both_
| ways, both the easy way, and the hard way.
| [deleted]
| endisneigh wrote:
| 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 from its own
| organization. It would find all of the top performers outside of
| the organization, perfecting arbitrating wage vs. value benefits.
| Profits from this would be divested back into the organization
| forming an infinite virtuous cycle.
|
| Later it would supersede whatever nation it's in, conquering it
| by finding the best military leaders and soldiers using the same
| "perfect evaluation" ability. It would get the best diplomats and
| business leaders. Later it would turn an eye to other nations,
| then the world. Eventually the galaxy and the entire universe.
| hajile wrote:
| In ancient times, all final exams would be oral ones in front
| of a panel of teachers. I'd guess that this technique would be
| pretty successful today too.
| titanomachy wrote:
| This works great, and it is still how evaluation is done when
| the stakes are higher: PhD defenses, executive hiring... even
| getting hired as an entry-level engineer at Google requires
| about five hours of what is basically oral examination.
|
| But society is not willing to pay that kind of price for the
| earlier levels of evaluation. We want "scalable" systems.
| Unfortunately those same evaluations are often treated as
| more sensitive than they really are. For example, if you're
| comparing two students I'd argue that 3.0 vs 3.5 GPA gives
| you at least some signal, whereas 3.5 vs 3.6 GPA gives you
| basically no signal at all (maybe the 3.6 student took easier
| courses, maybe they were more lucky with cutoffs, etc.). And
| yet the distinction sometimes matters e.g. to graduate
| programs.
|
| In well-designed systems, the GPA cutoff is set relatively
| low and more sensitive methods are used to select the best
| students from the pool. Often this includes an interview with
| a professor, which is also a form of oral exam.
| hajile wrote:
| You don't need oral arguments throughout the process. One
| at the end of the course is sufficient. It is then up to
| the students to learn the requisite knowledge in the given
| time period.
| thrill wrote:
| We could call it the Paperclip Maximizer.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| The first thing to understand is that _the goal in teaching is
| not to evaluate anyone 's skills_. The goal in teaching is to
| make sure that students learn things. From a teacher's
| perspective, the evaluation part is entirely a hack to make
| sure that they do.
| jessriedel wrote:
| > The first thing to understand is that the goal in teaching
| is not to evaluate anyone's skills. The goal in teaching is
| to make sure that students learn things.
|
| No, both learning and certification of learning (in a way
| legible to 3rd parties) are real and proper goals of
| teaching.
| skybrian wrote:
| They're both important, but I think having exams given by a
| separate person or organization might be a win in some
| cases?
|
| It might mean more teaching to the test, though.
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| I don't think it's true that in all contexts the role of a
| teacher is exclusively to teach. "Teachers" are also part of
| a credentialing system used in our society to identify people
| who are skilled or talented. This is discussed in the article
| when the author talks about the diffuse harms inflicted by
| cheaters.
| endisneigh wrote:
| I disagree - without evaluation how do they "make sure that
| students learn things"?
| arendtio wrote:
| I think this is a crucial point missing in the above
| discussion.
|
| However, tests should have a place in the teachers
| perspective, because they improve the learning effect
| (because they trigger the memory retrieval reliably).
|
| So maybe the problem is simply, that tests are linked to
| grades ;-)
| jessriedel wrote:
| > This problem isn't a teaching problem. Evaluating someone's
| skills in any respect or context is basically an intractable
| problem.
|
| You're not engaging with author's argument. The author
| explicitly assumes for the sake of argument that perfect
| evaluation is possible. He's saying that even under this
| unrealistic assumption, teacher policies that naively look
| draconian are in fact hard to avoid given reasonable teacher
| effort.
| endisneigh wrote:
| That wasn't my read. Ultimately the issues described are
| political. The author says as much when describing the
| "structural forces" and that systems with humans behave is
| funny ways.
| jessriedel wrote:
| That two things both involve politics does not, by itself,
| imply they cannot be usefully discussed separately. You
| need to actually argue that the issues the author discusses
| go away or become moot given the imperfection of real-world
| evaluation. It is not enough to argue that the world would
| look different were perfect evaluation possible.
| akvadrako wrote:
| 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.
| brabel wrote:
| > 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.
| chaosite wrote:
| 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.
| DannyBee wrote:
| Actually, free markets are only efficient if p=np.
|
| (They are not strong form efficient, that was disproven long
| ago, and are only weak form efficient if p=np)
|
| Unfortunately, this hasn't stopped people from believing in
| them anyway, because they really really want them to work,
| and people "feel" like they should
| mlyle wrote:
| They still outperform other mechanisms we have of resource
| allocation. They're massively parallel systems with ample
| signaling of different agents' state.
|
| And the worst corner cases of externalities _can_ be mostly
| offset with proper regulation, even if we struggle to do
| it.
| ameister14 wrote:
| This writer seems more concerned with not being blamed than
| improving students' success rates.
|
| Why have homework grades? Well, if you don't, "they will blame
| you for not forcing them to do the homework."
|
| Why have deadlines? If you don't, they "blame you for not
| imposing deadlines on them."
|
| I get why someone would want to avoid blame or conflict, but it
| shouldn't influence what you're grading people on.
|
| His reasoning for participation grades is bogus.
|
| 1. Classes are not better if everyone is talking and asking
| questions. Often, this actually causes class to move more slowly
| and cover less ground and questions would be better after class
| one on one.
|
| 2. He doesn't want kids to act up and is punishing the kids that
| do by removing their future opportunities, which is not great
| because the kids most likely to act up are the ones most likely
| to have learning difficulties or hard home lives. So this makes
| things worse for kids that need the most help.
|
| 3. Participation grades are arbitrary and a tool for control. The
| initial arguments for other grades about how they can't be
| arbitrary and you need to be rigid are thrown out the window with
| participation grades.
|
| 4. You don't really have a major freeloader problem in classes,
| in part because it's not a commons. It's managed and controlled
| by one person or an administration. It is my opinion that it is
| unnecessary to punish what freeloading exists, which is what
| participation grades do.
|
| 5. Participation grades are not really an incentive, they are a
| penalty. If you make participation worth something you are
| forcing people to participate if they want the same grade they
| would have previously gotten without participation. You are
| penalizing non-participation by lowering their grade. For it to
| be a pure incentive, they would need to get extra points or
| something for participation, but they don't.
| plandis wrote:
| > 1. Classes are not better if everyone is talking and asking
| questions. Often, this actually causes class to move more
| slowly and cover less ground and questions would be better
| after class one on one.
|
| Covering more material isn't necessarily a good thing if
| students are not really understanding the material that's
| already been presented. I personally and benefitted greatly
| from others asking questions. Sometimes the questions asked
| were not even things I considered. In my college classes that
| were purely lecture based where the prof didn't allow
| interruptions, I certainly got more value out of studying with
| others because of the questions.
| ameister14 wrote:
| >Covering more material isn't necessarily a good thing if
| students are not really understanding the material that's
| already been presented. I personally and benefited greatly
| from others asking questions. Sometimes the questions asked
| were not even things I considered. In my college classes that
| were purely lecture based where the prof didn't allow
| interruptions, I certainly got more value out of studying
| with others because of the questions.
|
| Sure, that can also happen. I've had multiple lectures though
| where the questions caused pacing issues and where the
| questions were unique to the questioner. It's a catch 22
| because the teacher asked for this but still wants to cover
| the required material, and they need to balance it better to
| avoid losing control of the class. If in a college or grad
| school environment, a professor has office hours. If there
| are multiple students with similar questions, I have found
| that email or later lecture clarifications work well.
|
| I'd say I got a lot of value out of studying with others
| regardless of whether questions were allowed. It's a
| necessity where a professor yells at you for asking a
| question as did my college statistics professor;
| unfortunately he was also the head of his department so
| nothing we could do about it but learn on our own.
|
| That's not the trade-off without penalties for non-
| participation though. It's not 'no questions at all' or 'all
| questions, all the time.' It's some people ask questions,
| most people don't, the grades aren't impacted by your own
| introverted nature.
|
| Here's the kicker - most of the time, if participation is
| graded it doesn't massively increase the actual participation
| in discussion. It just gives the professor more control over
| the grading, something they desire especially if it's blind
| grading numbers. It's a penalty system for people that the
| professor doesn't like or behavior they don't like, and
| sometimes a way to reward favorites. That's all.
| tyjen wrote:
| I'm currently on a goal and motivation research reading interest,
| so I think I can add value to this.
|
| School pedagogical approaches are weird and appears broadly to be
| testing a student's ability to endure forcing themselves to learn
| material they may not find interesting. Obviously, this divides
| the student population and people with better executive
| functioning, or stricter parents, float to the top. It's what
| we've done for so long, we're anchored around the concept. From a
| motivational standpoint, for many students this can kill
| curiosity and desire for learning.
|
| Goal attainment research consensus clearly demonstrates specific
| and sufficiently difficult tasks lead to better performance. It's
| even more ideal when the individual sets the goal or at the very
| least is involved in developing the organizational goal. This
| goes against the grain in schools. Sometimes teachers are
| incredibly vague, others specific. And, unless the student is in
| a highly individualized learning environment, like working on a
| capstone project, they do not play a role in course goal setting.
|
| You start to see the potential problems when research
| demonstrates, the highest individual performance occurs when
| individuals are provided a specific and sufficiently difficult
| goal with a learning oriented approach and decreased emphasis on
| performance (tests and grades). On the other hand, when an
| individual already possesses skills and knowledge for assigned
| goals, then a performance approach, not a learning approach,
| yields an overall higher performance rating. Also, by far, the
| worst goal orientation, among the aforementioned, is performance
| avoidance, that is performing to avoid negative consequences.
|
| Students are in school, they're in the process of obtaining
| skills and knowledge for a career they may not even have
| solidified yet. Students are largely falling into the performance
| avoidance category, then the performance approach category, and,
| finally, for the luckier few, the learning approach category. Add
| in the teacher quality variable, whether they assign specific or
| vague and easy or sufficiently difficult assignments, and you
| start to see how this creates problems for students and for
| society.
|
| I speak from experience. I failed miserably during school, even
| dropping out of high school, for a variety of reasons outside of
| my control and am extremely fortunate to be where I am today.
| bricemo wrote:
| This opinion seems uninformed about a great body of research that
| has been done around standards-based grading. Stanford has led a
| lot of this and a family member of mine has collaborated with
| them on successful field studies in school districts. The result
| has been increased comprehension, better test scores, and
| especially improved performance for disadvantaged groups.
|
| By removing grades on homework, and making it so that what is
| being evaluated is not collection of points, but rather ability
| to demonstrate the skill against a rubric while retesting, it
| allows learning closer to the actual target skill. It also more
| closely mirrors an actual career: if you are running a project at
| a company and do not hit your quarterly goal, then you don't just
| say "Oh well, guess I got a F" and move on to phase 2 of the
| plan. You revise and try phase 1 again until you reach the
| objective.
|
| It should be noted that switching from normal grading styles to
| standards-based grading is not trivial. In school districts there
| are in fact entire training programs and coaches like my family
| member that help teachers, administrators, and parents understand
| the concept and put it into practice. There are not only
| practical obstacles, but also paradigm shifts that have to slowly
| happen. But the results are worth it, it is overwhelmingly more
| effective.
| warner25 wrote:
| 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 get it." I fear that
| this pattern could continue until I become my father in my 50s
| and 60s. I try not to judge people so much anymore.
|
| Anyway, I appreciate the article as someone who will soon try my
| hand at teaching. I will have a lot to learn.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| 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 negative consequences in the
| future that you'd rather avoid.
|
| I don't see what's sad about that, other than maybe the
| disappointment of losing naivete.
| warner25 wrote:
| The root of it, for me, is that most of my choices as I grow
| older are compromises for the sake of ease, or from of a
| sense of obligation to my wife and kids. Like I recognize
| that different, harder choices could make me richer, or
| leaner, or more accomplished, or whatever, but I'm often
| exhausted and such choices would often be harder on everyone
| else in the family too. So rather than ice cream and
| Lamborghinis and video games, my examples would be: living in
| a small downtown apartment, not having a TV, walking or
| bicycling everywhere, prioritizing 8 hours of sleep and
| another hour of exercise, and going into a long disconnected
| "deep work" state everyday. Instead, we live in a big house
| in the suburbs with a two-car garage for our minivan and tons
| of other stuff, and everybody watches too much streaming
| video, and sleep and exercise are things I do only after
| everything else is done, and I remain near-constantly
| connected for the people who depend on me. I love them, but I
| also just wish that I could "have it all."
| cnelsenmilt wrote:
| I feel ya. As a childless person of the same age, I have
| several of those things you mentioned. I count them as
| blessings but also see that there has been a big, big trade
| made for them. I see that my siblings have made different
| choices with different blessings. I suppose this is just
| life.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > and everybody watches too much streaming video, and sleep
| and exercise are things I do only after everything else is
| done
|
| I don't know, this kind of feels like the adult version of
| ice cream for breakfast.
|
| Maybe what you're describing is the difference between
| dreaming something and actually doing it. There's nothing
| forcing any of us to watch a ton of streaming video other
| than our own choices, although it's hard to decide to go
| out and do something different once you're in that habit.
| warner25 wrote:
| It's more that my kids watch too much, because my wife
| and I need breaks to get other things done or rest. Not
| way too much, and it's carefully curated content, but
| it's still one of those things that I thought, before
| having kids, I wouldn't allow. But now I get it. Once
| they stop napping, it really is a cheap way to buy a
| couple hours of peace and quiet.
| ElFitz wrote:
| It's still nice to finally have that ice cream for breakfast
| every now and then.
| brabel wrote:
| If it's fine now, it was fine back then also.
| loudtieblahblah wrote:
| the # if people in the US with glucose monitors says
| differently.
| brabel wrote:
| what you're saying is just that maybe it's not fine now
| as it was not fine then (as usual, this depends on the
| particular person).
| filoleg wrote:
| There is a difference between "for breakfast every now
| and then" and "all day every day". I have a feeling that
| those who would be putting themselves under the risk of
| using glucose monitors tend to fall more into the latter
| group.
| busyant wrote:
| > I don't see what's sad about that, other than maybe the
| disappointment of losing naivete.
|
| 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.
| nicolas_t wrote:
| Luckily some of those people might have recognized
| themselves doing the same thing when they were younger and
| accepted your behaviour for nothing more than youth.
| busyant wrote:
| Thank you. That makes me feel a little better!
| lupire wrote:
| It's sad to discover that the happiness you yearned for
| doesn't exist.
| Swizec wrote:
| "When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I
| could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got
| to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned
| in seven years."
|
| Always loved that quote.
|
| Unfortunately it doesn't always work out that way. Parents can
| also get worse as you age and learn that some actions or
| behaviors are inexcusable. But as a younger person you either
| didn't understand the context or thought it was okay.
| bckr wrote:
| > Parents can also get worse as you age and learn that some
| actions or behaviors are inexcusable
|
| Indeed, many would envy those in this thread who seem to have
| avoided having the truly stupid/insane/wicked adults in their
| lives.
|
| > I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.
|
| I actually interpret this as Twain saying that his father was
| a jerk, but that said father managed to mature with time. But
| he's written it in a way that the average person would
| chuckle and say "ah, see, his father wasn't a jerk all
| along!". Either that, or he's just written a perfect magic
| mirror.
| rayiner wrote:
| Why should you feel bad about it? You're learning from your
| life experience. I too cringe at stuff I believed before I was
| mid-30s and married with three kids. I'm also slowly becoming
| my dad. A lot of that's due to having seen a lot of things that
| made me realize my worldview when I was young had been limited.
| (Freedom of choice and freedom from norms sounds great when
| you're young and feel invincible and think you're in control of
| your destiny, but less so when you live life and see tons of
| people making all sorts of bad decisions that you managed to
| avoid because you did what your square parents told you to do.)
| That's life.
| oblio wrote:
| > Freedom of choice and freedom from norms
|
| I like to put it as: you give up some lower level freedoms
| (you have to wear a seatbelt) to gain other higher level ones
| (freedom to not die as an idiot on the way and to get to
| enjoy your trip to Disneyland).
| dionidium wrote:
| 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.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Same boat, same feeling. But I also think there are mistakes
| we aren't making, a maturity that will lead to perhaps
| enhanced outcomes for our kids even if not for us.
| nradov wrote:
| Which mistakes?
| bckr wrote:
| Not GP, but I suspect that increased emotional maturity
| would prevent one from lashing out, overreacting,
| underreacting, being unable to emotionally support one's
| child, etc.
| andi999 wrote:
| You dont have to live your dreams through your kids
| (happens to ppl with unfinished potential due to early
| parenthood)
| giantg2 wrote:
| Even kids have less responsibility and more oversight today
| than generations ago. I wonder if that contributes to speed
| of maturation.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| On the other hand (as a father of two) I find myself thinking
| about how my dad handled situations, comparing how I just
| handled it, and going, "wow did he have that backwards" haha.
| Not all the time of course and like you I have definitely come
| to appreciate how tough it is to make the "right" call, but we
| certainly have learned some things. One thing Boomer parents
| were really bad about - at least in my experience - was
| building a healthy relationship with food and meals in general.
| So much punishment and reward centers around food, it's quite
| upsetting when you really think about it.
|
| I've had quite a few friends in my life - men and women - with
| eating disorders of all shapes and sizes. You can almost always
| find stories involving their parents at the core of them.
| Making everyone sit at the table until the last person has
| finished their plate, the old "starving children in Africa"
| line we've all heard at least secondhand, forcing toddlers to
| eat everything and then they get dessert as a direct reward
| (which often ignores teaching them how to read signs that
| they're full). The list goes on.
| sul_tasto wrote:
| I wonder if that mentality was a residual aspect of a time
| when empty calories weren't so prevalent and food costs were
| a higher percentage of the monthly budget.
| jackallis wrote:
| dang this that we do - "forcing toddlers to eat everything
| and then they get dessert as a direct reward (which often
| ignores teaching them how to read signs that they're full).
| The list goes on"
|
| sometimes you do need another perspective. you go through the
| process without even thing about harm process could be
| causing.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I think the Boomer "Eat all the food on your plate" meme came
| from their parents, who lived through the Great Depression
| and food insecurity. Mindlessly passed down from a time of
| scarcity to a time of abundance. They just repeated it, but
| this time with gigantic, obesity-levels of food on _their_
| kids ' plates.
|
| We usually just ask our kid how much she wants to eat. It
| seems to work a lot better than the way my parents did it,
| with a lot less drama, and she's not growing up with an
| antagonistic and/or compulsive attitude towards food.
| flycaliguy wrote:
| Speaking of dinner time, the negative effects of all the
| boomer moms and their trendy diets on young girls at the
| time. Weight Watchers. Just the phrase "Weight Watchers"
| being in the house and in the air.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| No kidding. My wife talks about this a lot actually - how
| basically every mom she was around constantly talked
| about diets, losing weight, I need to fit in x or y
| outfit, etc. Just constant (usually negative) body talk
| _all the time_ by adult women.
| antishatter wrote:
| I like myself.
| fungiblecog wrote:
| 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 great way to sour your
| relationship with your kids when they get older and don't have
| to take it anymore
| kelnos wrote:
| I'm not a parent, but this really resonated with me. My
| childhood was full of dumb rules that I hated. After
| complaining, my parents would feed me platitudes like "you'll
| understand and appreciate this when you're older" (sometimes
| with "... and have your own kids" appended to the end).
|
| Today (at age 40) I still believe these rules were dumb and
| pointless, and actively harmful to my childhood development.
|
| I do expect that, not being a parent myself, I might be
| judging some of these things more harshly than I otherwise
| would. But certainly not all things, and I certainly would
| have turned out just as ok (and possibly more ok-er) had many
| of these dumb rules not existed in the first place.
|
| (Don't get me wrong, I still have a fairly good impression of
| my childhood, and I don't think these dumb rules did any
| permanent damage. But they were still dumb, and created more
| strife between my parents and me than was necessary when I
| was young.)
| SuoDuanDao wrote:
| 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?
| jhanschoo wrote:
| On the other hand, this observation must be qualified as not
| necessarily generalizable to all teenagers and parents.
|
| Sometimes a person may grow up and realize that their parents
| were indeed quite lacking, and be right in that assessment. I
| think this other circumstance is important to at least mention
| because children of objectively lacking parents can have doubts
| in their mind about their own judgment. In part because of this
| common trope of teenagers growing up and reflecting that they
| were foolish and their parents were wiser than they expected,
| in part because familial norms are so private that it's
| difficult for one to know what's abnormal for families in a
| harmful way.
|
| Sometimes, what underlies painful experiences for children
| aren't parents actually making a wise decision, but plain bad
| judgment on their part.
| notriddle wrote:
| Older people knowing better than younger people is one of
| those heuristics that's almost always right [1]. It's hard to
| tell the difference between a stupid kid and a stupid parent,
| because stupid parents are rare. Yet people keep searching
| for stupid parents, because it's really important to find
| them when they exist. There's a constant rate of kids pulling
| false alarms on their parents, but you don't want to ignore
| them, because if one of them is for real, you don't want to
| be the asshole that ignored all the warning signs.
|
| [1]: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/heuristics-that-
| almost...
| fallingknife wrote:
| > Older people knowing better than younger people is one of
| those heuristics that's almost always right
|
| Up to mid 20's, yes.
|
| > stupid parents are rare
|
| Not even uncommon.
| RobertMiller wrote:
| The mid-20s transition is the most obvious, I think
| simply because teenagers so often incredibly hot headed.
| But I believe emotional development continues throughout
| life as people acquire more experience with age (at least
| until senility kicks in.)
| fallingknife wrote:
| I think so too, but it's much more gradual, and
| therefore, not uncommon that the age vs age maturity
| level heuristic fails for a given pair of people.
| jl6 wrote:
| > Up to mid 20's, yes.
|
| Are you by any chance over 25 but under 40? :)
|
| I think it's inarguable that experience is valuable, and
| age correlates very well with experience up to that
| mid-20s point, but around that point people start to
| settle into a groove and the extra n years experience is
| actually just the same year's experience repeated n
| times.
| nicoburns wrote:
| Maybe I was just unlucky, but that isn't my retroactive
| judgement on my childhood at all. My experience was one of
| mostly adults making me do something that is really down to
| subjective preference because that was their preference.
| And now that I'm an adult and can make my own choices I'm
| much happier about it.
| ghostpepper wrote:
| If a rational and emotionally mature adult still believes
| that the decisions their parents made were bad then
| there's a much higher chance that they're correct
| (compared to when a kid believes such things)
| mwcremer wrote:
| Especially in like circumstances; that is, with regard to
| their own children.
| kikimora wrote:
| I think is how it is supposed to be - parents making
| decisions for their kids using their best judgement
| (preferences). It is ok for kids to disagree when they
| grow. It is less ok to make a problem out of it. Most
| parents really try hard to make rational decisions using
| information and background they have. Criticizing them
| for making mistakes does not make sense to me. We all
| humans and we make mistakes.
| plandis wrote:
| I've recently become a new father and have listening to a
| Cat Stevens song that your post reminded me of:
|
| "If they were right, I'd agree, But it's them they know,
| not me."
| andrepd wrote:
| You are making very sweeping claims with next to no
| evidence (ironically, a very un-wise thing to do!).
|
| The more I observe the more I understand good parents are
| exceedingly rare. The vast majority of parents fuck up one
| way or another. Which shouldn't necessarily be surprising,
| parenting is very hard!
| financetechbro wrote:
| Stupid parents are very much everywhere
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| But stupidity is relative and stupid children are more
| common. The heuristic can be reworded as adult parents
| are more knowledgeable and capable than children.
|
| Put the average child in the position of the average
| parent and you will see the difference.
| nicoburns wrote:
| > The heuristic can be reworded as adult parents are more
| knowledgeable and capable than children.
|
| I think that's true in general, but when it comes to
| making decisions _about the child_ I think that has to be
| weighted against another heuristic that 's often but not
| always true: that people know what's best for themselves
| better than other people do. I think people often wrongly
| neglect that principle when it comes to children assuming
| that they don't know what they're talking about without
| taking the time to listen and understand their point.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| "Children" aren't a homogenous group. Neither are
| "parents." And "stupid" is not a single metric.
|
| Pre-teens don't have practical adult skills and have poor
| or non-existent emotional regulation. Teens have some
| adult skills, are learning or experimenting with others,
| and have patchy self-regulation.
|
| So it makes perfect sense not to allow kids to do things
| that are dangerous to others, and to limit what teens can
| do with strong guide rails.
|
| But when it comes to world view and insight, teens can
| certainly be wiser than their parents. They may not know
| what to do with their insight, but they're not _wrong_ -
| just inexperienced.
|
| Meanwhile many adults are hopelessly naive and may be
| actively self-harming, especially politically and
| culturally. And when adults have addiction and/or Cluster
| B issues, even fairly young kids are more likely to be
| reliable and responsible.
| laserlight wrote:
| > stupid parents are rare
|
| How did you arrive at this conclusion?
| wutbrodo wrote:
| I had the same reaction, but from context, I think what
| he meant was "cases where the conflict is due to the
| stupidity of the parent instead of the stupidity of the
| kid". The base case is that kids are stupid, because kids
| are supposed to be stupid.
| yojo wrote:
| My dad's dad hit him with a belt when he misbehaved.
|
| My dad spanked me with his hand when I was a toddler. Not
| overly hard, and not after age 4, but still.
|
| Do I think my dad could have made better parenting choices?
| Yes. Am I happy that he made substantial advances from what
| he learned as a kid? Also yes.
|
| A small number of parents are legitimately abusive and should
| have their kids taken away. Some parents are amazing and
| talented care givers. Most are just muddling through and fall
| somewhere in between.
|
| As a parent I am doing my best to keep raising the bar - no
| corporal punishment over here! But I am sure my children will
| still find myriad ways in which I have failed them as a
| parent. Kids don't come with a manual, and "professional
| advice" is astoundingly inconsistent/conflicting. I think
| most parents are doing their best, it is just a hard and
| poorly understood problem.
| beebeepka wrote:
| That is an excellent point. Yes, usually parents do "what is
| best for their children". However, good intentions do not
| guarantee good results.
|
| It took me 20 years to undo some of the more direct damage
| done to me by forcing me into a path I didn't want. Parents
| being completely wrong for the right reasons is very much a
| thing.
|
| That doesn't even count psychological damage almost
| guaranteed to lurk in there pretty much forever
| Ntrails wrote:
| I think people find it very easy to judge parenting from
| the outside and/or with hindsight, whether their own or
| other peoples.
|
| I know that my children will wish I did things differently.
| Whether that is location, discipline, activities, internet
| access etc etc. I know they will wish I made more reasoned
| choices in the moment. That I was never tired, distracted,
| frustrated. That I let them spend their time as they wished
| not as I feel is best for them.
|
| Parenting is a parade of tough choices using vague
| heuristics and life experience. Being well intentioned is a
| bloody good start.
| beebeepka wrote:
| I am glad you had a nice childhood. Now, would you try to
| be as understanding to children as to you to fellow
| parents.
|
| Being well intentioned and caring is the bare expected
| minimum. Why do we need to repeat this?
| Ntrails wrote:
| I am talking about adults judging other adults decision
| with hindsight and out of real time with time to reflect.
|
| You are welcome to throw stones if it makes you feel
| better, but try not to get hit when one flies back
| through your window in a few years.
| beebeepka wrote:
| Look, I know exactly what you meant. It's the most common
| take there is.
|
| Bad parenting is a thing. Not sure if anything can be
| done about your apparent inability to recognize that.
| turkishmonky wrote:
| I fully expect to make many mistakes as a parent, and
| there's a lot of things I could have done better.
|
| As a child though, many decisions my parents made were
| with the view of demonizing outside groups and
| "protecting" their kids from any contrarian viewpoints.
| Catching up socially took years, and there are some
| extreme harms that I still deal with to this day. My goal
| is to make sure my kids have a well-rounded social life,
| a consideration for others, and an understanding of a
| gamut of ideas.
| zamfi wrote:
| > Being well intentioned is a bloody good start.
|
| This sadly depends a lot on the community. Being well-
| intentioned but misinformed in fundamental ways can cause
| a _lot_ of harm.
| turkishmonky wrote:
| Those types of generalization have always been troublesome
| for me - While I admit I was an idiot as a kid, the respect I
| had for my parents has decreased even further the older I
| get. I understand more and more how harmful their behaviors
| were for me as a child, and have been intentional about not
| falling into the same behaviors with my kids.
|
| Some parents are just really really inadequate or abusive as
| parents.
| bbarnett wrote:
| _have been intentional about not falling into the same
| behaviors with my kids_
|
| Some behaviour is just plain borked, but other behaviour is
| just more nuanced.
|
| An example, some kids are extroverted, others intro. What
| works for one, may not be the same for another.
|
| You may need to constantly work with an extrovert, so they
| are eventually, as an adult, be in control of their own
| exuberance. And with an introvert, work with them, trying
| to help them expand thier ability to interact.
|
| An ability for both to live in a shared society.
|
| But imagine a parent who was an extrovert, was constantly
| upset at, as a child, being told to calm down, or stop
| asking 1000 questions per second. Or even, just "give
| another a moment to talk".
|
| So they, with an extrovert, do not do such things. And the
| extrovert does not learn control, and dicipline, and to
| give others some space sometimes, and becomes less capable
| of interacting with others as an adult.
|
| Of course, this is a poor example, and poorly phrased, but
| I hope my point comes across.
|
| We should focus more strongly on what is correct for the
| child, not how a parent may have misapplied childhood
| lessons to ourselves. For those lessons may be right for
| your child, even if not for oneself.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| The heuristic can be reworded as adult parents are more
| knowledgeable and capable than children.
|
| Put the average child in the position of the average parent
| and you will see the difference.
|
| Think of how abusive the average parent is, then imagine
| them trying to parent with 10-20 years less development.
| kelnos wrote:
| I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. Are you
| suggesting that we should excuse parental abuse, because
| a child would be a worse parent than an adult?
| pc86 wrote:
| And somehow also strangely arguing that most parents are
| abusive?
| rayiner wrote:
| But there's a reason for the generalization. Some parents
| are inadequate and abusive, but virtually every kid is an
| impulsive and short-sighted creature whose brain isn't
| fully developed until their mid 20s.
| cracrecry wrote:
| Usually when someone has abusive parents, they become
| abusive themselves. It is a good idea that they get
| professional help in order to break the cycle.
|
| >and have been intentional about not falling into the same
| behaviors with my kids.
|
| This is usually the problem. You are intentional on NOT
| falling into THE SAME behaviors, and probably will
| overreact on the opposite behaviors that is as abusive as
| the original.
|
| Just because something is bad does not mean that the
| radically opposite is good.
|
| It is not a good idea focusing on what not to do instead of
| on what to do.
|
| E.g I have seen parents that were too constrained as kids
| removing all limits for their children. The kids getting
| into bad friendships and destroying their lives as a result
| of the neglect from their parents.
|
| Or someone educated as a Catholic with sexual restrictions
| promote sexual promiscuity on their children, with very bad
| outcomes.
| thrashh wrote:
| Personally I find the solution is to meet and hang out
| with very diverse crowds.
|
| I find that whenever you make a decision, you are really
| sampling from what you've already seen.
|
| If haven't seen a lot, your decision making is really
| constrained. If you've only seen bad decisions, you will
| make a lot of the same ones. You won't even know that
| they're bad.
|
| The hardest part of life really is figuring out what you
| don't know yet. And it's really, really hard.
| jcims wrote:
| Fortunately your children will almost certainly find new
| ways to critique and disparage your decisions as a parent
| and their respect for you also diminish as they grow older
| and calcify their opinions of what makes a good parent.
| warner25 wrote:
| True, and I wouldn't limit this to only be about my own
| parents, but more broadly about all kinds of people like
| teachers, coaches, aunts and uncles, older co-workers, people
| in the news... even slightly older siblings who had kids a
| few years before I did.
| brightball wrote:
| Yep. Your point of view as a parent is often very different
| than as a teen/20-ager. Different priorities. You're suddenly
| aware of all of the things in society influencing your kids.
| You're very aware when things your read online don't match up
| with reality and especially with math.
|
| It's just life experience. I don't know many parents who look
| back at their younger years thinking, "I had it all figured out
| back then."
|
| And the longer you watch it the more aware you become of the
| people trying to influence kids for different reasons
| specifically because those kids don't look at it and call BS
| immediately.
| loudtieblahblah wrote:
| As a parent it becomes super apparent how many interested
| parties, especially child-less interested parties, are
| interested in capturing the minds of your kids. Be it to make
| a buck, to further their political cause or for something
| sexual/nefarious. Or even usurping their minds and psyche
| into something destructive as an ignorant and unintended
| consequence.
|
| Then all the "stupid" authoritarian, seemingly arbitrary and
| maybe even paranoid shit your parents pulled all of a sudden
| comes into focus and understanding. You, more easily see, how
| irrational panics happen/occur and sometimes when those
| panics aren't entirely unjustified
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| More age, and requisite life-experience, changes you as a
| parent. In some ways it's better, in some ways it's worse.
| I've been a better parent and a worse parent for my younger
| children - IMO 30-32 is/was the right age to get balance in
| these things.
|
| I expect that differs by cultural setting, nationality, etc..
|
| Couple of examples: I'm less hot-headed as I age; I'm less
| physically able (much more than I expected).
| fallingknife wrote:
| Adults don't look at it and call it BS immediately, either.
| If anything kids are better at it. e.g. we all knew that the
| moral panic over violent video games was a bunch of BS.
| svnt wrote:
| I think these are two different classes of issues you're
| comparing.
|
| Kids are perhaps often intuitively good at evaluating the
| severity of unintended consequences.
|
| Adults are much better at being aware of deliberate efforts
| to take advantage of developmental stages and tendencies.
| germinalphrase wrote:
| I may not make the same problems I judge my parents for, but I
| will certainly make new mistakes my children will judge me for.
| Just trying to be better.
| bckr wrote:
| That might be true, but I think there is a threshold called
| "good enough" that every parent can reach with some effort.
| derbOac wrote:
| My grandfather, when he was in his mid 80s, once said something
| to me like "you never stop being his dad, and he never stops
| being your son", when talking about his own father, who was in
| his 50s or something at that point. He wasn't being
| sentimental, he was saying that he was always in the role of
| trying to provide advice to his son, being older, and his son
| was always in the position of going to him for advice and
| looking to him for help.
|
| I guess your comments reminded me of that in the sense that you
| always have something to learn from people who went before you.
| Sometimes they have made mistakes you don't want to repeat, and
| sometimes you all collectively face things no one has faced
| before, but usually people who are experienced have some wisdom
| to impart.
|
| Sometimes I think agism is partly a sign that the pendulum has
| swung too far in the direction of assuming everything we do is
| new. The Chesterton's Fence analogy in the original post is apt
| in this regard.
| sturgill wrote:
| 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."
| VeninVidiaVicii wrote:
| Don't judge your former self too harshly either. It's easy to
| forget why you were an idiot at 16.
| andi999 wrote:
| Make that 25.
| jfengel wrote:
| 50
| ZYinMD wrote:
| 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.
| lupire wrote:
| Harry Potter on Kindle readers are probably young adults.
| lostlogin wrote:
| Amazon probably has the exact demographics.
| vishnugupta wrote:
| HP on Kindle is my go-to-sleep-at-night book. I'm in
| early 40s.
| withinboredom wrote:
| I'm reading it out loud to my family (every character has
| a different voice). It's a very mixed group with lots of
| discussions.
| swayvil wrote:
| Larry Niven. Protector.
|
| Human eats mutagenic yam. Among various changes, it greatly
| augments intelligence.
|
| The first thought of a Protector, just awakened from his
| mutative trance, is, "Wow, I have been really really dumb".
| adverbly wrote:
| > 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."
|
| Yup. Until people abstract over their previous experiences
| they will continue to find themselves in situations where
| they have had and discarded 5 different previous viewpoints
| only to think to themselves: "I've got it right this time,
| and anyone that disagrees is stupid".
|
| Some would call this "Wisdom". Also interesting that learning
| this lesson does not make your current understanding any more
| accurate - it just reduces your confidence in it. Wisdom !=
| Ability to understand.
| madrox wrote:
| I don't know if you've ever read Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse,
| but I get something different out of it at every stage of my
| life and your comment made me think of this book.
| AvocadoPanic wrote:
| I'm already the river.
| Clubber wrote:
| "When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could
| hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be
| 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in
| seven years."
|
| -- Mark Twain
| Bayart wrote:
| > I fear that this pattern could continue until I become my
| father in my 50s and 60s. I try not to judge people so much
| anymore.
|
| I'm getting to the same age but I don't have kids yet. Still,
| I've grown to come to the same realisation as you did somewhere
| in my mid to late 20s (older people were, for the most part,
| right and I must have been an inssufferable twerp). I just
| thought it was something that came naturally to everybody with
| age.
| swat535 wrote:
| You clearly haven't had incompetent parents.
|
| I'll give you a personal example: both my parents _completely_
| failed to manage their finances, they kept on borrowing money,
| refinancing the house 3-4 times.
|
| Since the age of 17, as a young software engineer, I was
| constantly asked to help with the payments. Now that my mom has
| passed away, my dad has 0 income, he didn't bother to plan
| anything for his retirement and thus, we are forced to sell the
| house and both my brother and I have to forgo our share of the
| money so that he can survive.
|
| In addition, I _still_ have to give help him financially and he
| refused to put his money in an investment account so that he
| can at least profit from the returns.. now he will basically
| eat every single dollar and then my brother and I have to yet
| again provide for him few years down the line.
|
| Not only I got no support from them, I had to _on top of it_
| fight my way through an uphill battle (they didn't even want me
| to study CS) and provide for them. They took all the child tax
| benefit money and ate it.. when I wanted to move at 20, I left
| with nothing, I just took my clothes.
|
| Sure, parents are wise when it's about "not eating ice cream
| before dinner", but don't tell me they actually make good
| decisions.
| kelnos wrote:
| I think most of what you are talking about here is your
| parents being incompetent _people_. Even if they hadn 't had
| kids, they still would have been in financial trouble their
| entire lives.
|
| I don't even think this is due to a lack of financial
| education on their part. Feels more like compulsive spending,
| something a therapist might have been able to help them
| through had they been willing to talk to one.
|
| Either way, it really sucks that you and your brother had to
| suffer so much for their failures.
| oblio wrote:
| I'm always amazed how these kinds of folks survive. Do they
| luck out into well paying jobs? What do they even spend the
| money on? Don't they noticed the bad patterns after a while?
|
| Soooo many questions :-)
| tchalla wrote:
| Chesterton's Fence is a nice mental model to ensure we don't
| harshly judge choices
|
| https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/
| temp8964 wrote:
| 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 bs, totally made up by the
| teacher, even the author didn't think of those. Then after you
| get older and you may realize: those subtle messages are just
| so obvious and they just can't be explained to people without
| life experiences.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| I don't know even in hindsight there were plenty of
| "sometimes a door is just a door" moments with my teachers
| haha.
|
| Jokes aside, totally agree with you. Definitely something you
| learn with age
| zafka wrote:
| Indeed- Which author?
| skybrian wrote:
| Which author?
| b3morales wrote:
| I don't know if this is who parent meant, but it's
| certainly one of C.S. Lewis's not-so-subtle themes in the
| Chronicles of Narnia.
| [deleted]
| Hendrikto wrote:
| > You and all your classmates are like: this is bs, totally
| made up by the teacher, even the author didn't think of
| those. Then after you get older and you may realize: those
| subtle messages are just so obvious
|
| I think about this a lot. When consuming media, I constantly
| notice these kinds of messages. As you said: It's almost
| impossible not to. But back in school, I was convinced that
| 95% was made up.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I wonder if there's a way to reduce and soften the classic
| generational gap you describe.
|
| Just like you I find myself constantly realizing most of my
| intuitions were wrong from being partially informed (and too
| keen on believing my perspective and intuitions)
|
| On the other hand, our elders were young hot heads too at some
| point. They know we don't. :)
| sdeframond wrote:
| Sometimes I wonder how much we just repeat what our parents did
| instead of trying to find a better way, just because that's
| what we already know...
| staticassertion wrote:
| > But some are an assault on reason, with every word of the
| assignment creatively misinterpreted. It was never stated which
| temperature circuit to build or how to prove it works or what
| level of explanation was necessary. And who's to say what "build"
| means?
|
| OK? So your students tried to do something and failed creatively.
| Sounds good. Reward them for their efforts, ask them to try again
| if you feel that they still need to get something out of the
| assignment.
|
| > But some don't, and they keep complaining and asking for
| regrades, and if those aren't accepted they (or their parents)
| contact the principal/chair/dean/ombudsperson, who are required
| to have an investigation.
|
| OK.
|
| > hat gets misinterpreted too, so more details are added, and by
| the time the teacher retires you have a monstrosity that's
| universally despised but almost impossible to complain about.
|
| So your bad solution is good because it started off bad and ended
| worse. OK.
|
| > Well, enjoy re-grading every single assignment from every
| student near a boundary,
|
| Round up by default? If someone has an 89, just give them the 90.
| Honestly, who cares if a few students come up to you and want
| regrades, I imagine it takes all of 30 seconds to cross out the
| old grade and add the new one. How onerous...
|
| > As far as I can tell, most follow the incentives and make
| little effort to stop cheating.
|
| Cool. Most of the time cheating entails something like access to
| notes on a test that is artificially made more difficult by
| requiring memorization. That's why open note tests are far
| better.
|
| > But some teachers are principled
|
| Bummer. They don't sound principled so much as they sound
| unimaginative.
|
| > Say you suspect students are copying from each other on an
| exam. You can silently prepare multiple versions of the exam with
| "micro differences" in questions.
|
| Sounds dumb, I don't like the idea of trying to "trap" kids. I
| cheated exactly once on a test and got away with it - why?
| Because I was unhappy in school and I went home and spent my time
| distracting myself rather than preparing for it. Me cheating one
| time had literally no negative impact on my life, you trapping me
| and once again teaching me that education goes hand in hand with
| punishment would have done years of damage.
|
| > They realized that they could skip learning the material, and
| instead complete the project by running an evolutionary algorithm
| with my father's grading as a reward function.
|
| Creative. Without knowing more about the assignment it's hard to
| judge, but I'm wary of any assignment that you can just brute
| force like that.
|
| > your students will be lazy and fallible.
|
| I had to undo years of being told I was "smart but lazy".
| Teachers need to erase that word from their vocabulary.
|
| > So they won't learn anything. That's OK, most people don't
| learn much from school.
|
| > And then they will blame you for not forcing them to do the
| homework.
|
| a) OK
|
| b) I mean, maybe the parents would? I frankly don't believe that
| any student will blame a teacher for not forcing them to do
| homework.
|
| > Surely what matters is if a student understands things, not if
| they ask questions in class?
|
| Good question. What exactly is the point? To me, education serves
| a few functions.
|
| 1. Babysitting kids so that parents can work
|
| 2. Providing young people with a safe place for them to explore
| their emerging identities, interests, and view of the world
|
| 3. Stoking an interest in learning and providing the tools and
| resources to build a baseline knowledge for future education
|
| So, is understanding really the goal? I don't see understanding
| as being particularly critical to the education system.
|
| > Participation credit helps to internalize positive
| externalities.
|
| 100% agreed.
|
| My transcript is an odd mix of grades - even within a single
| class, within a single semester I could go from an A or B to a D
| or F, or coast by on a C. What I value most is that during that
| time I dated, made lifelong friends, read books on physics and
| philosophy, discovered New York City while I skipped classes,
| played video games, learned to bike, etc. All of the stuff you're
| talking about, it's the stuff that got in the way of everything
| that has produced value in my life.
|
| Anyway, those are my thoughts. I think school is pretty stupid,
| as is, but I find that I pretty much exclusively disagree with
| teachers about why. I sometimes read /r/teachers and the self
| indulgent pity party, and the "I wanted to be good but I just
| hate kids now!" theme, is sickening.
|
| I also find it sad that so many people become what they hate. I
| think people seem to have an incredibly hard time empathizing
| with their former selves, which I find so weird. But I've had
| adults trivialize teenagers' problems, as if just because now
| they have "adult problems" that somehow means that when they were
| a kid they were just dramatic.
|
| Maybe try to regain some insight into why your younger self would
| be disappointed, and what they might suggest.
| foldr wrote:
| >Round up by default? If someone has an 89, just give them the
| 90. Honestly, who cares if a few students come up to you and
| want regrades, I imagine it takes all of 30 seconds to cross
| out the old grade and add the new one. How onerous...
|
| Ahh, here speaks someone who's never taught a class :) If word
| gets out that you round 89 up to 90, then next you'll be
| dealing with all the people who got 88.5. At some point you
| have to have a grade boundary. It may just as well be at 90 as
| at 89 or 88.5.
|
| >Me cheating one time had literally no negative impact on my
| life
|
| As the article explains, cheating has negative effects on
| everyone else. Of course cheating can be good from the
| cheater's point of view - that's why people cheat!
| staticassertion wrote:
| > If word gets out that you round 89 up to 90, then next
| you'll be dealing with all the people who got 88.5.
|
| Why would word get out if you just grade that way? No one
| would know you were rounding up...
|
| > As the article explains, cheating has negative effects on
| everyone else. Of course cheating can be good from the
| cheater's point of view - that's why people cheat!
|
| I think you've completely missed my point. Cheating had no
| negative impact - on anyone, at all. Getting caught cheating
| would have huge negative impact.
| foldr wrote:
| >Why would word get out if you just grade that way?
|
| Students compare grades and talk to each other. It's also
| not uncommon for students to ask about your policy on
| rounding in the first class, when you're going through the
| syllabus.
|
| >Cheating had no negative impact - on anyone, at all.
|
| I'm afraid your cheating did have a negative impact on
| others, albeit a small one. For example, suppose that the
| class you took was graded on a curve. Then by adding a
| false datapoint, you may have pushed up the cut off point
| for the higher grades. More generally, the larger the
| number of cheaters, the less meaningful grades become for
| everyone. Every fake A grade contributes to the devaluation
| of real A grades.
|
| >Getting caught cheating would have huge negative impact.
|
| You'd be surprised. As the article explains, punishing
| cheaters isn't really in anyone's narrow interests. It's
| sadly rather easy to get away with cheating at university,
| even if you do get caught.
| staticassertion wrote:
| > Students compare grades and talk to each other.
|
| That works for multiple choice. Given the ".5" I'm
| assuming partial credit is discretionary. So you can just
| discretionarily choose to give +.5.
|
| > For example, suppose that the class you took was graded
| on a curve.
|
| It wasn't. Also I'm pretty sure I still failed the test
| because cheating is hard, I couldn't really read much of
| what the person in front of me wrote.
|
| > You'd be surprised.
|
| I would be, yeah. My school took that very seriously.
|
| > t's sadly rather easy to get away with cheating at
| university, even if you do get caught.
|
| Yeah, my CS degree had a hilarious amount of cheating
| going on.
|
| My point isn't "cheating good".
| foldr wrote:
| >That works for multiple choice. Given the ".5" I'm
| assuming partial credit is discretionary. So you can just
| discretionarily choose to give +.5.
|
| Yep, and then you'll deal with the students who want to
| know why their friends got the discretionary +.5 and they
| didn't! And you'll be in a difficult position, because
| arbitrarily adding points to some answers and not others
| does seem pretty unfair on the face of it. (Remember that
| the students who weren't sitting on a grade boundary will
| be comparing their scores with the students who were, so
| they'll see if you added +0.5 points to question 1 for
| Jack on 89.5 but not for Jane on 85.)
|
| By the way, "partial credit" in this context means
| "credit for a partially correct answer", not "non-integer
| credit". You can perfectly well have a scoring system
| where a single correct answer is worth 0.5 points, as
| test points are a completely arbitrary unit :)
|
| > My point isn't "cheating good".
|
| It's not clear to me what your point is regarding
| cheating. You seem to not like the idea of people being
| punished for cheating. But as cheating is easy to do, it
| would run rampant without at least a tangible possibility
| of punishment. So I don't really understand how you (i)
| think that cheating is bad, (ii) recognize that it
| happens frequently, and yet (iii) don't think that
| cheaters should be punished.
| staticassertion wrote:
| > think that cheating is bad
|
| I don't think that cheating is bad.
|
| > recognize that it happens frequently,
|
| Naturally. If you give people stupid chores they will
| almost universally try to find a way to avoid them.
|
| > don't think that cheaters should be punished.
|
| Even if I bought into everything else ie: that testing is
| good and cheating is bad, I would still not punish
| cheaters. As I said, I cheated that one time because I
| had _other issues_ that made school difficult. Punishing
| would have done nothing except add additional stress,
| making me retreat further from my education. But of
| course, as I just said, I don 't buy into all of that
| other stuff, so it's not only an ineffective and cruel
| way to approach education, but it serves no purpose.
|
| > It's not clear to me what your point is regarding
| cheating.
|
| My point is that most tests are stupid, and a lot of what
| "cheating" is is just making them less stupid. For
| example, I remember students would hide their notes
| during a test so that they could reference them. That's
| just good sense - in what real world situation do you
| need to have instant recall for arbitrary information? It
| teaches kids to memorize shit, which is damaging.
|
| Two students checking each others answers? Sounds a lot
| like any normal adult problem solving.
|
| So you can try to "tweak" the system until cheating is
| impossible or so scary that people will rarely try, or
| you can "give up" and let people cheat... or you can take
| a step back and realize that you've made up a problem
| with no solution.
|
| As I said, school should focus on the three things I
| mentioned. Nonsensical testing strategies and finding
| ways to trick kids for doing what is, frankly, the sane
| thing to do, is purely damaging.
| jackblemming wrote:
| Sounds like ruining the system for everyone because a minority of
| abusive, lazy, or incompetent students. That doesn't seem
| reasonable at all, and it sounds like the root cause needs to be
| addressed.
|
| That minority is not going to be spoon fed when they enter the
| real world.
| jdrc wrote:
| In the light of remote teaching, remote work, gamification, AI
| etc, we should rethink teaching as a whole
|
| It feels there is very little experimentation in the space,
| mostly trying to mimic a classroom in digital
| cushychicken wrote:
| Reminds me of a quote I read long ago - I think it was from
| Sartre - that I'll try paraphrase:
|
| _" Teaching in public schools suffers from the same problems as
| cooking in public cafeterias - and generally produces similarly
| mediocre results."_
|
| I don't buy into the sentiment that public education is a
| mistake, or even that it's outputs are generally mediocre. I do,
| however, think that the insight that public education is more
| akin to an industrial process than an interpersonal relationship
| holds some water.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > 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, proud of myself for
| going above and beyond.
|
| I got back a 66 on the assignment. I asked why and he said, "you
| didn't even attempt round robin". I pulled up the assignment
| where it VERY CLEARLY said "or" and he said, "well, it should
| have been obvious I meant 'and'".
| kelnos wrote:
| While I think a student _could_ read the instructions in the
| way the teacher intended (though I would not be one of those
| students either), I think the problem here is that the teacher
| is a poor communicator, and is too arrogant to believe that
| they could be fallible here.
|
| The fix for this particular issue isn't over-specification,
| it's changing one word in the instructions. Or at most, adding
| a few more words to make things clearer.
| portpecos wrote:
| That's pretty sad. As a CS Professor, he should understand the
| distinction between a conjunction and disjunction.
| sneak wrote:
| As an educated human, he should understand that when you
| provide written instructions it is implicitly a "do what I
| say" and not "do what [you infer] I mean".
|
| It is obviously unfair and unprofessional to penalize the
| student for the professor's error.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| I think It's a question of scope not of the logical operator.
| One way to interpret the question is:
|
| 1. You choose X or Y or Z
|
| 2. You provide a scheduler that does the thing you chose
|
| Another is:
|
| 1. You provide a scheduler where I choose X or Y or Z and the
| scheduler does the thing I chose.
|
| The question is whether the disjunction applies to the input
| configuration of the scheduler or the output of the
| assignment. That is, whether the output of the assignment has
| type (X_scheduler | Y_scheduler | Z_scheduler) or type (X | Y
| | Z) -> scheduler.
| kelnos wrote:
| I agree with you, but not as the assignment is worded:
|
| > _"implement a job scheduler, using FIFO, LIFO or round-
| robin job scheduling"_
|
| To me, "using" modifies "implement"; that is, the teacher
| is telling me to implement something, and then telling _me_
| what to use. (That is, "using" does not modify "job
| scheduler".) If the teacher wanted the second
| interpretation, they should have said:
|
| "Implement a job scheduler that can use FIFO, LIFO, or
| round-robin scheduling."
|
| In this case, "that can use" is clearly referring to the
| job scheduler, not to me. To be fair, though, I think some
| students might still (reasonably!) believe this means they
| only have to implement one algorithm. I would probably use
| this second wording, but also change the "or" to "and".
| Even better, though more wordy:
|
| "Implement a job scheduler where the user can select
| between FIFO, LIFO, and round-robin scheduling."
|
| Let's also remember that boolean logic and English usage
| are not the same thing. I don't think my two suggested
| wordings would be considered "over-specifying" in the same
| way that OP is talking about. They're just a better use of
| language.
|
| The teacher here should just have re-read the problem
| instructions, shown understanding and empathy toward the
| student, and either a) just changed the grade right then
| and there, or b) offered to let the student complete the
| rest of the assignment and turn it in again. And then made
| the wording of the problem more clear for the next batch of
| students.
| ihunter2839 wrote:
| I have to say I think it's quite possible and comical that the
| professor interpreted your work on two of the three questions
| as additional evidence that you did know it should be an "and",
| since I would guess relatively few students would attempt any
| more than _one_ permutation if the assignment only asked for
| one.
|
| Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| 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 got half a question
| right. I still don't really know quantum mechanics basics but my
| grades say otherwise.
| [deleted]
| kazinator wrote:
| > _But some are an assault on reason, with every word of the
| assignment creatively misinterpreted. It was never stated which
| temperature circuit to build or how to prove it works or what
| level of explanation was necessary. And who's to say what "build"
| means?_
|
| You have to think like a software engineer. Test first: write the
| requirements fro the perspective of a test which fails if the
| requirements are not met.
|
| Rather than dictating irrelevant details of the apparatus that is
| to be made during the assignment, describe a procedure by which
| it can be verified to meet the requirements.
|
| "Build a temperature monitor circuit.": what is it monitoring:
| the temperature of what? Where is that taken? What is the output?
| Decimal temperature in Celsius to the tenth of a degree? In what
| range? Or else is there just a control output: is there a
| hysteresis to turn something on and off like a thermostat? Etc.
|
| "Test it to prove it works." That's a poor way of giving
| requirements. You need specific test cases. You may have to have
| specialized equipment on hand that the students can use, like a
| controlled source of reference temperature.
| ksml wrote:
| It's a silly exaggerated example. Point still stands, at least
| from my experience. Even with a rubric, people still
| (intentionally or unintentionally) find ways to do things that
| circumvent the learning goals/outcomes of the assignment
| kazinator wrote:
| If the real objective is learning goals/outcome rather than
| (or in addition to) a working temperature circuit, then that
| objective has to be somehow encoded into the requirements. Or
| else, sometimes all the stated requirements will be met
| without that unstated one being hit.
|
| This is difficult because, for instance, the possibility of
| cheating means that the person who says they performed the
| assignment might have contracted it off to someone else and
| learned nothing.
|
| Someone who already has all the required knowledge can also
| just spin out the assignment without learning anything.
|
| Basically, learning is a state change in the pupil; if you
| want to validate that some state change occurred, you have to
| have a way of measuring the state before and after and
| calculating a difference.
| buo wrote:
| Absolutely. In my experience teaching in college, this is the
| correct approach.
|
| A very useful thing to have, both for teachers and students, is
| a "rubric": a succinct description of how the work will be
| evaluated, and the importance (weight) of each feature.
| castillar76 wrote:
| Yes! And then the rubric should actually define the pieces of
| the assignment you care about them getting right. I have this
| debate a lot when we're designing assignments for an intro to
| Python class (which, sadly, we have to do very regularly
| because of sites like Chegg...). Figure out _what it is you
| want the student to get out of the assignment_ (e.g.,
| manipulating dictionaries or sorting values) and evaluate
| their results based on whether they did that thing. If they
| did the thing but missed some nitinoid details they don't get
| a perfect grade, but they should get a solid, passing grade
| for it.
| derbOac wrote:
| So I've taught a lot at the university level, and reading this
| and the original blog post they were responding to I realized
| that I gradually shifted in how I saw exams.
|
| The traditional model, the one implicitly adopted in the posts,
| is one where the instructor presents material, maybe with some
| discussion or engagement with the material in the form of
| activities or assignments, and then evaluates understanding on an
| exam of some sort. In this model, the exam is a measurement. It
| makes sense from this standpoint that all you really need is some
| megaexam that measures your comprehension of the material, and if
| you pass it, you pass. There _is_ something to be said for this
| in all sorts of areas of life.
|
| There's another model, though, where the teacher is a sort of
| coach. In this paradigm, your role as instructor isn't just to
| present material and then measure it, but to provide incentives
| along the way for the student to engage with the material and
| process it. In this model, the exam is activity. You present a
| series of quizzes or exams for the student to problem solve, and
| you incentivize this by giving credit or not giving credit. It's
| the equivalent of training drills in sport. All those assignments
| and midterm exams are incentives for staying engaged with the
| material along the way, to practice.
|
| I suppose you could say something like "well taking the final
| exam repeatedly could serve that role, and you can't literally
| give the same exam over and over again due to cheating and
| learning to the test, so what you'd really be doing is giving
| multiple exams, which is kinda like assignments" but then at that
| point you've redefined things so much it's a moot point. There's
| also little point in assigning material the student doesn't
| understand yet, so what you end up with is what usually is done,
| which is units, with assignments or interim exams that are graded
| along the way.
|
| Ideally you'd have tailored material, activities, and exams that
| are tailored to specific students and their specific progress,
| but in practice at universities there's just not enough resources
| to do that. It's too expensive, if you include social components
| as part of the learning process. There are also general trends
| that are too hard to ignore (most students whereever you are will
| be in some peak of a bell curve of some sort), and so you end up
| with what usually happens (which is sort of the point of the
| author).
| jvvw wrote:
| At Oxford, my degree depended entirely on 8 three-hour exams at
| the end of the final year, which were mostly set by different
| people from the people teaching you. There are issues with this
| (not least that if you are slightly ill say during the two
| weeks of exams, it affects your whole degree) but one thing
| that was really nice compared with the other universities where
| I have taught is that the relationship with the people teaching
| you feels fair less adversarial and more cooperative. Also by
| not having exams in the second year (there were exams in the
| first year you had to pass but which didn't count towards your
| degree), there was more emphasis on really understanding the
| subject rather just jumping through hoops.
|
| But I think this only worked because of the teaching system
| there - as a general rule you had two tutorials a week which
| were usually one-to-two (or sometimes one-to-one or one-to-
| three) and it was very hard to slack too much or not do the
| work for them. Such a system requires a significant amount of
| funding so probably isn't scalable. Colleges did sometimes set
| their own internal exams too during the course which didn't
| count towards your degree (but for which you could get monetary
| prizes if you did well in them!) but which you could fail which
| would set a process in motion in which you could be kicked out
| of the university.
| titanomachy wrote:
| The tutorial system seems way better than what most schools
| do. Interesting that one of the oldest schools seems to have
| one of the most sensible systems, possibly because they've
| resisted the pressure to make everything more scalable.
|
| The average American private university costs $45k per year
| (about the same as Oxford's international tuition) so you'd
| think they'd have the resources to do this as well. As far as
| I know only a couple actually do it (e.g. MIT) and their
| student-tutor ratio isn't as good.
| [deleted]
| Daneel_ wrote:
| 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?
| tbihl wrote:
| I feel that I have requirements that don't benefit students
| much or at all, but I just don't spend much or any time on
| them. At the end of my courses, I administer a test graded by
| me, so I can just not fail anyone. I know on day 2 if someone
| needs to be failed, when they do their first practical
| exercise. I'll probably have them removed from the course so as
| to not waste everyone's time, if that happens (but it almost
| never does.) I also have a very specific curriculum that is
| meant to be followed, but it's mostly not very good or focuses
| on things that are no longer major focus areas, because the
| development process lags so far behind reality. Again, I just
| do whatever I want, especially for practical exercises.
|
| On the other hand, I teach another course that couldn't be more
| different. On the first day I give students every question to
| all the tests and tell them to start studying. If they can
| answer every question, they know plenty. I almost always give
| the same test, so different cohorts could (and, I'm quite
| confident, do) cheat by tracking which questions will be asked.
| I warn them against this, but ultimately I don't care because
| the final exam is not generated or graded by me, so it will be
| their predictable downfall if they go down the road of
| cheating.
|
| You could reasonably say I neglect the second course; I do, for
| good reasons that mostly have to do with what I said about the
| first set of courses. I also the systems that provide education
| and training to my students relating to both courses, which
| further justifies my allocation of attention.
| germinalphrase wrote:
| I teach high school English, so I have a greater degree of
| freedom in my curriculum development (there is no textbook. I
| create everything). That is actually not my issue.
|
| My problems are mostly reality/logistical constraints. There is
| _always_ more I could do, more I could give, more I could help
| every single student, but I would have to learn to freeze time
| or never sleep.
|
| It's unhealthy and irrational, but I feel shame for not giving
| more when I _know what a kid needs_ but I circumstantially lack
| the capacity to give it to them.
| dwater wrote:
| 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.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| > Do you ever feel like you're forced to teach topics you know
| won't benefit students?
|
| Normally, professors teach things they have some expertise in,
| and they're biased to think that this is useful to students.
|
| Besides, it's often very debatable whether something is useful
| or not. For instance, I used to teach things such as theory of
| computation, automata theory, and similar so-called theoretical
| classes. You could debate ad nauseam whether this benefits
| students or not. Some would argue it's useless and students
| should do more javascript labs, other think that these are the
| foundations of our field, unlike the latest JS framework which
| will be obsolete in 2 years.
|
| Some of my colleagues go to great length to convince students
| that the class they teach is useful, but I'm not convinced this
| is necessary. I've noticed that students are happy as long as
| they think they learn something from the class, and that the
| class is neither too hard or too easy. They don't question the
| utility of the class if the teacher manages to make the topic
| fun. For instance, labs, exercices, exams, should be of gradual
| difficulty, so each student feels they can make progress. This
| is challenging to achieve when the class audience is
| heterogenous.
|
| So rather then the choice of topic, what had happened to me was
| that I disagreed with the way the topic was taught. In my
| university, sometimes we would work in team with little saying
| on the class syllabus, labs, exams... This can be frustrating
| and I'd just leave the team.
| kevinventullo wrote:
| Ha! As a pure mathematician-turned-software engineer, Theory
| of Computation was one of the few classes I took that remains
| even remotely applicable. At the time I thought it was really
| cool, and probably made CS a little more appealing.
|
| Conversely, in my current role as a backend/systems/researchy
| person, a JS class would broaden my horizons a bit like a
| literature class might, but I think both would be equally
| useful to my current job.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| In what sense theory of computation is applicable to your
| current job?
| kevinventullo wrote:
| My current role involves analyzing and understanding
| customer-provided SQL. Although vanilla SQL is not Turing
| complete, in the past I've definitely decided to
| deprioritize thinking about certain approaches due to
| growing complexity and because they "smelled" like the
| Halting problem.
|
| Going farther back, I've seen a handful of instances
| where someone was looking for help trying to solve a
| graph problem, until it was pointed out that it could be
| reduced to an NP-complete problem. Unfortunately I can't
| recall the details.
| chubot wrote:
| _And most of the students are amazingly gracious and drop the
| issue. But some don't, and they keep complaining and asking for
| regrades, and if those aren't accepted they (or their parents)
| contact the principal /chair/dean/ombudsperson, who are required
| to have an investigation._
|
| Reminds me of _The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the
| Small Minority_
|
| https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
|
| But it's the other side of the coin
|
| _The minority rule will show us how it all it takes is a small
| number of intolerant virtuous people with skin in the game, in
| the form of courage, for society to function properly._
| slaymaker1907 wrote:
| As a student for many years, I completely agree I would not
| prepare as well without some stakes in the homework. However,
| using those super precise instructions can be harmful to
| students. It's very difficult for me as someone with ADHD to
| follow these instructions and not miss something.
| temptemptemp111 wrote:
| szundi wrote:
| When I give my course to the students, I kind of feighten them on
| the first homework grading that has low weight in the final
| grade. Some of them even quit as I seem to be a crazy strict guy.
| Then they stay and I ease up, they study as needed, end of
| semester: "best course" / "best teacher" / "this course made most
| sense this year" etc.
| bernulli wrote:
| 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.
| bmacho wrote:
| (On homework)
|
| > And you know what? When the students blame you, maybe they are
| right. The teacher is supposed to use their experience to help
| students learn. Shouldn't you help the actual imperfect humans in
| front of them, rather than imagining a bunch of perfectly
| rational Platonic objects?
|
| This is an extremely mean accusation. As a former student, I've
| never ever blamed any of my professors for not giving me enough
| homework. I am sure I passed the final exam classes with much
| better grades and knowledge than the homework classes (which I
| usually failed and dropped very early). And if I've not, I've
| still felt extremely annoyed and mad about the system, and how
| nonsense and unfair it is.
|
| I can accept a statistics about homework and no homework classes
| (which the article fails to provide), that the majority of
| students perform better, or the average is better, or the lower
| range is better, or anything. But this kind of arguing is simply
| worthless (less than worthless).
| justinlloyd wrote:
| I have taught at college and university in STEM subjects, and
| also professional corporate training courses on software
| development to senior and lead engineers for about a dozen
| <companies you have heard of and use their products every day>.
| And I will say that universally, every single class runs the
| exact same way. There are those that want to learn, and there are
| those that are killing time and will argue with you until they
| are blue in the face that they deserve a different grade, and
| they have come up with more excuses and reasons why something
| wasn't done than I could think up in a decade.
|
| When I used to teach at college and university I would think
| "there's no way you are ever getting a job in this field" and
| then when I did professional corporate training I would think "I
| have no idea how you keep your job, but I do know that if I
| showed up for an interview, you wouldn't give me the time of
| day."
|
| You can argue with "well maybe you're a lousy teacher" and
| whether that is true or not, it doesn't account for the flat out
| denial and debating, and dare I say it, outright lying, about why
| the assignment wasn't done.
| Cerium wrote:
| In high school I had a chemistry teacher who offererd that the
| grade submitted at the end of the year would be the greater of
| your grade with and without homework. He also warned that only
| occasionally the latter is a benefit rather than a harm. This
| intrigued me so much that I did the homework and didn't submit it
| in order to get a bad homework grade and overall top marks in the
| class. Anonymous grade info was posted on the wall periodically,
| everyone wanted to know who had the zero in homework.
| apstats wrote:
| High school AP stats teacher here in their first year of
| teaching. While I think this article holds some water much of it
| is a hyperbole.
|
| In reality a good teacher will learn they can't make everyone
| happy and learn to deal with students who complain.
| superposeur wrote:
| As an instructor, agree about everything but will add that I try
| to keep a positive framing.
|
| That people procrastinate and need incentives is human nature --
| no more use bemoaning this than bemoaning politics. The job of
| instructor is precisely to enforce a system of rules and
| incentives _while_ not being too dogmatic about them that the
| class turns into a grind _while_ promoting enthusiasm for
| learning _while_ creating inspired course content, _while_
| balancing all this with the instructor's own scholarship
| priorities. It's a tall order and very few people do it well.
|
| That mastery is difficult and subtle does not distinguish
| pedagogy from other professions, but what is different is that
| every shmo off the street remembers being a student, so _thinks_
| they know the secret formula for pedagogy.
| oconnor663 wrote:
| 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 you give them an example input
| and an example correct output, and for each submission you tell
| them what their output should have been. But each grading run
| uses a randomized input, so they can't just hardcode the answers.
|
| Compsci is perfect for this, because students can fix their bug
| quickly and resubmit their whole assignment. For math, I guess
| you'd want to avoid having them repeat problems they already got
| correct. But for other subjects that don't really have a place
| for "random input", I guess this doesn't work?
| mr_cyborg wrote:
| 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 method that does X" it would say "write a
| method named NAME that takes in XYZ parameters and outputs
| exactly in QRS format".
|
| After having taken so many open-ended assignment classes that
| really hurt my brain.
| professoretc wrote:
| > "write a method named NAME that takes in XYZ parameters and
| outputs exactly in QRS format".
|
| That's a pretty realistic requirement, though, isn't it? If
| you're writing a class that's supposed to interoperate with
| other systems, it's not like you can just name things
| whatever you feel like. They have to fit the expected
| interface.
| oconnor663 wrote:
| 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.
| danjc wrote:
| Are people less reasonable than they used to be? I mean, was it
| necessary to use these kind of nudge/incentive techniques 30
| years ago, 60 years ago?
| cpach wrote:
| TBH reading this article really didn't give much, IMHO.
|
| I guess the context here is mainly a university? Or is it senior
| high?
|
| Anyway, I spent around three years in college and the value-add
| for me wasn't the grades I got. The value I got out of it was the
| foundation that I laid and the inspiration I got. I got in touch
| with materials/domains that I might never have encountered
| otherwise. And to me that's truly a gift that keeps on giving.
| [deleted]
| kizer wrote:
| Every year I age I respect good teachers more and more. I think
| it's one of the hardest jobs. And at the risk of getting some
| blowback I think much stems from our broken and outdated public
| education system.
|
| There has to be choice and freedom, both for the students and the
| teachers. I know I'm speaking vaguely but that's because I myself
| can't articulate a solution. But I know there's a better way.
| punnerud wrote:
| I feel the same with Wikipedia, the Norwegian articles are often
| better than the English ones because they often are shorter and
| to the point.
|
| I don't want to read 2000 words for something that could be
| explained in under 100.
|
| Have been thinking of a 200word limit per article version of
| Wikipedia.
| Ardon wrote:
| I'm not sure that's really in the spirit of an encyclopedia,
| unless you really could get all the information you had in
| those 200 words.
|
| I think this would be a valid imposition on the summary
| sections of most pages though, they can be a little unfocused I
| find.
| punnerud wrote:
| You get to put all the information there, but have to place
| it in a sub-article. That way you force the writer to have a
| more faster introduction.
| Hendrikto wrote:
| > Have been thinking of a 200word limit per article version of
| Wikipedia.
|
| Hard limits are not a good solution either. They may still be
| better than the status quo though.
| mattwilsonn888 wrote:
| Any visionary attempting to restructure traditional learning
| should read this, and I say that with no ounce of malice or
| sarcasm - its a nice hazard map, and it at least one constructive
| change that should be enacted:
|
| 1. Grades should be a continuum (percentage), not bins (A, B,
| C,..). "When you are forced to discretize into a small number of
| bins, injustice is inevitable." Report cards have no rational
| reason for not being an aggregate of numbers rather than low
| resolution numbers (letters).
|
| The crux of the justification given for enacting these policies
| students hate is that students need motivation; their human
| nature, even given a clear end goal, is not enough for most of
| them to learn at the required pace without intermediate and
| forced goals. Of course this leads into the problem of carefully
| interpreting assignments to do as little work as possible, and
| lowering the quality of all student's experience to make
| assignments painfully clear.
|
| All this leads so naturally back into the temptation to loosen
| standards of the class. If students are going to lazily and
| disingenuously complete assignments, they will not learn, and it
| should reflect on their exam grades - but making every student
| perform the same problems every time will waste half the students
| time if your assignments are catered to the slowest learners -
| the fastest learners will feel completely patronized and waste
| the most time. Don't punish your best students.
|
| The real solution is breaking up classes. One class as a
| monolithic, multi-month, atomic unit causes problems. Each
| intermediate exam should serve to split the class into many
| smaller classes, which can be failed and retaken modularily. In
| fact, students should decide _when_ they want to take that
| modular class 's exam, and can stay in or attempt to test out at
| their discretion. Now all of the sudden the relationship between
| doing assignments and performing on these intermediary tests is
| tangible, and need not be forced through forced assignments and
| over-specified instructions. Students can still be required
| complete a _final_ exam encapsulating all material from each
| modular class (longer re-test periods could be applied if need
| be), and if they performed poorly students would have the option
| to retake those modular sections to build up a more robust
| understanding.
|
| This has other benefits as well: pre-requisites can be much
| smaller, and more specific pursuits of knowledge can have
| constructed an express course of just the strictly necessary
| modular courses from each full course. Students wanting complete
| understandings can always go back and pick up where they left
| off.
| smogcutter wrote:
| > Any visionary attempting to restructure traditional learning
| should read this, and I say that with no ounce of malice or
| sarcasm...
|
| 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. Until you're actually
| in front of a classroom it's not obvious why seemingly sensible
| ideas are often ineffective or unworkable (see also: any HN
| thread about k-12). Reading a blog post, rubbing some brain
| cells on it, and then making pronouncements is exactly the kind
| of thing TFA warns against.
|
| Any visionary attempting to restructure learning should teach.
| mattwilsonn888 wrote:
| > 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 have gained through first hand
| experience. That is the meat of the article: common pitfalls
| new teachers trying new ideas fall into - if your goal is to
| change education you must experiment, and if you are going to
| experiment, this blog post is invaluable.
|
| Forever more an experimenter attempting a classroom
| restructuring who read this post now has artificial first
| hand experience to draw from - to state that anyone
| attempting to do such a thing should ignore this piece and
| generate first hand experience is asking them now to retread
| mapped territory. Unless your prescription is that people
| shouldn't experiment - a notion which warrants no respect.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Interesting. I grew up in an "exams count only" system that used
| a 2 decimal point score precision. So if you scored 89.75 at the
| end, you completed the course with 89.75. It wasn't bucketed into
| grades.
|
| There were 4 exams: two quarterlies, a half, and the final.
|
| I don't think it ever struck any of us that if we failed to study
| for an exam that it was anyone's fault but our own.
|
| I actually really like articles like this because they have so
| many unnecessary assumptions:
|
| "Things are this way because students will complain if they suck
| at things"
|
| The unstated assumptions are that students in this schooling
| system mostly have external loci of control.
|
| The second thing is that courses are designed in an adding-
| epicycles manner based on the least reasonable member of the
| previous class. That is, it is a cost function that aims to
| minimize the failure of the greatest idiot which implicitly leads
| to it adding cost for the smart guy.
|
| So you have built a schooling system optimized for the greatest
| idiot who believes someone else is responsible for all of his
| failures. This actually explains why so many college students
| here are like they are.
| plandis wrote:
| > I don't think it ever struck any of us that if we failed to
| study for an exam that it was anyone's fault but our own.
|
| This is interesting to me. If you're noting working through
| problems how do you get the feedback to even know if you really
| understand the material? Generally assigned homework was nice
| because a professor will know the key ideas and can efficiently
| assign work covering those parts.
|
| Right now I'm self studying real analysis and I wish I had
| someone to pick problems for me because otherwise I'm just
| trying to do them all to ensure that if I don't know something
| critical it will come out when I can solve some particular
| problem.
|
| On the other side of the same coin. How does a teacher know if
| their teaching is effective without frequency feedback until he
| form of students grades? I feel like waiting several weeks to
| determine if you need to change course is doing a great
| disservice to the students.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Oh we worked through problems all the time. But if you didn't
| then the next class would be impossible to understand and
| you'd just sit there like a fool. So the incentives were
| already aligned there.
|
| And you get feedback from your peers as you work through
| stuff and also from the lecturer at the end of the next
| class.
|
| It just wasn't graded.
| hbarka wrote:
| A complementary proposition would be Teaching is a slow process
| of becoming something you love.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| Much of the article and comments here can be explained the death
| of good faith. People no longer believe in competent, benevolent
| power, and a process of maturation that challenges power in
| acceptable ways. Instead we build "systems". We pretend these
| systems are equitable. They merely hide power and force it to
| become malevolent, incompetent and terrified of challenge. We
| call this stagnation "progress"
| sdenton4 wrote:
| The example about the ever-increasing list of assignment
| requirements appears in many other domains than teaching. Think
| of the AirBNB with a fifty-page guide whose 'rules' are all
| thinly-disguised anecdotes about something that went horribly
| wrong. And I'm sure we've all seen business processes like
| this...
|
| This ends up (somewhat) preventing asshole behavior at the
| expense of making life worse for all of the non-assholes. But in
| reality, assholes will find new and imaginative ways to be
| assholes, no matter how many specific rules are in place.
|
| One hopes that better solutions are possible. In the teaching
| example, we could imagine keeping the rules broad and simple, and
| including a reward for any student who doesn't require 'special
| treatment' through regrade requests, etc. (I have seen systems
| where regrades include a grade reduction if no errors are found.)
|
| In AirBNB, deposits and waive-able cleaning fees serve a similar
| purpose.
| camgunz wrote:
| It's regulations in general. Whenever someone complains about
| regs and red tape stifling innovation, it's generally that
| someone tried to game the system. "This is why we can't have
| nice things", etc
| neap24 wrote:
| As a teacher (CS and Math) for over a decade, I agree with much
| of this. I will only add that, as far as grading is concerned, I
| think the long-term incentive for the teacher is actually to put
| almost no effort in at all. There is no pay or status increase
| for teachers who are tough, consistent graders. In fact, some of
| the most revered teachers I've known essentially hand hold their
| students to a guaranteed A in the class. At first, principled
| teachers may stick to tough grading, but as the years go by and
| they watch their friends easily make 3x more in industry, the
| incentive to just put a check mark on every paper is about the
| best you can do to close that benefit gap.
| analog31 wrote:
| When I was an adjunct (EE and Math), it was widely known
| amongst all of the teachers, that the student evaluation scores
| were primarily a measure of what grades the students expected.
| And I had to ask myself: If I were a student again, why would I
| adopt any other strategy?
| lazyant wrote:
| I don't remember if it was a formal study but somebody has
| asked students at the beginning of the course what grade they
| _think_ they'll get and at the end it fit very well.
| Basically all students try to make a particular grade with
| the least effort, since that's what they are incentivized to
| do.
| MyHypatia wrote:
| I wish I had read this essay before the start of every year in
| high school and college. It would have saved me a lot of
| frustration, and helped me understand why things are this way.
| Vaslo wrote:
| Easy solution to the regrade. Never do one off regrades. Always
| say that a regrade of one question will require the entire exam
| be regraded. This will be done by someone else or the prof who
| may grade it worse than a rushing grad student who is just saying
| "yeah, yeah, fine, ok". Most students fear this, especially when
| it's the professor doing it. Almost never had to do regrades with
| this policy.
| adminprof wrote:
| This doesn't work when I've tried it. How many students or
| times have you implemented this policy? First, it doesn't make
| sense when the regrade is most objective (like points were
| calculated wrong, or the grader didn't see something that the
| student wrote). And if you say that it doesn't apply for
| straightforward grading mistakes, then you get emails asking
| you whether something is a grading mistake or has the chance of
| lowering a grade.
|
| And I've tried this policy before, and got students who wrote
| in my course evals something like "the professor intentionally
| tries to scare students from asking for regrades by threatening
| to lower their grade even more." And then what about when you
| are still asked for a regrade (which in my experience was not
| zero, but maybe about a third or half as much as without this
| policy). In those cases, you end up doing way way more, so the
| level of effort actually increases.
| LaserToy wrote:
| 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.
| dominotw wrote:
| 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.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| Grading is not dissimilar to setting up arbitrary metrics on a
| business or an engineering team.
|
| People will find ways to optimise for the metric.
|
| If you give bonuses based on number of commits created or number
| of tickets closed you'll end up with a lot of useless commits and
| tickets.
|
| If the only thing that matters in order to pass a course is to do
| an exam, people will optimise for that. If someone doesn't like
| the subject or doesn't like the teacher or doesn't like being
| taught (especially disagreeable boys), they will happily skip the
| subject and just try to get a passing score.
|
| In university I was already working as a professional developer
| and I attended only a few classes I cared about and hacked my way
| out of exams with a mix of cheating and cramming the night
| before.
|
| I enjoyed all the project work instead and I excelled at that.
| But that was worth just 1-2 points out of 30. Why was I forced to
| memorise bullshit I didn't need and that I would have not
| remembered 3 seconds after the exams in order to get a piece of
| paper saying I graduated? Isn't being able to do the projects
| more important than that?
|
| When I hired people with degrees from "good schools" I was always
| surprised to realise how little were they able to get done on
| their own. I quickly stopped even checking their qualifications
| as they're completely worthless for anything related to work.
|
| If I had to reform education I would make it totally based on
| projects. There would be no grades or titles when you get a job,
| just an increasingly longer list of projects you worked on.
|
| When I was in school I had to take a Latin class. I didn't want
| to take it but I picked the best course according to my interest
| - and unfortunately it had Latin.
|
| I spent those lessons secretly working on my own projects, then I
| downloaded a bunch of famous texts with their translation and I
| just wrote a J2ME application to look things up and used it for 5
| years (Mobile internet was very expensive back then and searching
| on the internet would have been way harder).
|
| After I finished my written finals in all the subjects, luckily
| my score was already high enough not too pass, even if I got zero
| at the oral exam and I kind of bullshitted my way through that
| last exam.
|
| Was there any point in trying to force me to learn something? Why
| do we put people in this situation?
| shikoba wrote:
| > There would be no grades or titles when you get a job, just
| an increasingly longer list of projects you worked on.
|
| And you'll obtain the good obeying sheeps. You would miss all
| the competent rebels, those who think outside the scope.
| jrm4 wrote:
| Soooo..I teach IT for a living and am thankfully thankfully free
| of being on the research side of things. I am incredibly lucky to
| be able to generally do things how I like.
|
| I let them know mostly early on: I do grades because I have to,
| not because I enjoy them. I've settled on the following: I try to
| make the biggest assignment an ongoing project-thing that they
| "turn in" more than once, and try to coach them into primarily
| learning and doing -- and turning in something that I can
| reasonably slap a good grade on.
|
| I do one or two small quiz type deals on top of that. Very hard
| multiple choice, but take-home, and you're on your honor to not
| to consult live humans. Also, I do the nice type of "curve," so
| if your fellow students' grades are average low, that helps you.
| Honestly, this is much more to maintain classic ideas about
| grading, though I suppose it helps keep the younger ones on their
| toes. Also, I find the psychological effect of "QUIZ" to be
| sufficient to get people to prepare, even when they don't check
| the syllabus and see that these aren't all that much of their
| final grade.
|
| This seems to be a pretty good way to do IT type classes.
| zenlf wrote:
| The title could also be why communism is fundamentally
| incompatible with human society.
|
| The realization of human nature really disappoints.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| Firstly, I sympathise that teaching seems to be awful. I think a
| lot of the problems are misaligned incentives (universities are
| judged by their research output; it is hard to have a career as
| an excellent teacher rather than an excellent researcher)
|
| But I worry that the argument has strayed too far from one based
| on Chesterton's fence to one with a lot of status quo bias and
| rationalisation. I say this because my university (outside the
| United States) followed a system much like the one the author is
| arguing against.
|
| - Almost all of the degree was determined by a final exam. In
| fact there wasn't even a final grade for the degree but one for
| each year and the convention was to take your final-year grade so
| in some sense only the final exam mattered (you might be expelled
| or advised to transfer to another course/university if you did
| particularly poorly in earlier exams). However, there were no
| resits.
|
| - There was homework but it was not graded (at least for my
| subject. Your individual questions would be marked as right/wrong
| and problems would be pointed out)
|
| - Attendance to lectures was not required however one had to
| spend a certain reasonable number of nights at the university
| (for a particular definition of 'at' and 'university') in order
| to graduate.
|
| - Attendance to lectures was strongly encouraged (because you
| would struggle to get notes/homework without attendance as
| ~everything was handwritten or on physical paper)
|
| - Attempting homework was strongly encouraged because you would
| go to small (one on one or one on two) group teaching sessions to
| discuss it, so there was social pressure to not be (extremely
| conspicuously) absent and to have something to discuss Let me now
| briefly discuss how this alternative system addressed some of the
| author's points.
|
| - Preparing for exams by doing homework (and also a 'homework'
| set of example exam questions) was incentivised by the social
| pressure of it being very obvious if you didn't do the work
|
| - The homework system also addressed the problems of asking
| questions being scary in a big group and the (not discussed)
| system where lots of students in the US don't realise that they
| are meant to seek out help in office hours (and worse, I
| understand this is a particular problem for poorer students who
| are less likely to know that unlike high school you aren't meant
| to touch it out alone)
|
| - Because homework wasn't graded, some questions would be very
| difficult (because attempts and discussion could be interesting)
| or chosen for the pedagogical value. Looking at homework offered
| good opportunities for feedback
|
| - Converting examinations to grades was complicated (you would
| get regular partial credit marks plus two different kinds of
| bonus mark for different levels of significant progress on a
| question which got outsize rewards to encourage doing fewer
| questions well over having a crack at more questions; there was a
| vector which you could dot with your vector of the three marks to
| get an 'overall mark') and borderline candidates would have their
| submitted answers carefully reviewed by the examination committee
| to allow for more fair subjective grading
|
| - The university didn't really offer many opportunities to appeal
| which reduced the pressure on teachers but has its own problems.
| There were some rare allowances for extenuating circumstances but
| in general it was encouraged to not start exams if there were
| serious complications (eg some health problem) and to wait a
| year, which was also a problematic system.
|
| - But they did try to be particularly fair to students, e.g. they
| would collect the rubbish paper after the exams and if some
| student claimed that they had answered a question for which no
| answer had been submitted, the bins would be searched
|
| - Cheating was relatively difficult as there was only one big
| opportunity for it: the final exams of which there were four (to
| allow for more time and averaging out a several days) which
| contained questions from all courses. More could be invested in
| invigilation for these few exams.
|
| That doesn't mean the system was without complaints. The big
| complaints were (1) pressure, which was slightly mitigated by the
| selection procedures of the university somewhat selecting
| students who were able to handle big exams; (2) unfairness with
| regards to poor performance during the exam week for random
| reasons (e.g. injury/personal circumstances/mild illness like a
| bad cold); (3) different standards for different courses,
| particularly a divide between pure and applied and harder courses
| tending to have easier questions; (4) The university is selective
| and many students felt that they could have gotten a higher grade
| by going to a less selective university, and many students felt
| their future would depend on the grade and not the institution
| next to it (many companies claimed to have 'institution blind'
| hiring for example) and therefore the university was unfairly
| damaging students' career prospects with their desire to grade
| students based on how much they might be allowed to continue
| education/research at the university.
| hajile wrote:
| Unfortunately, even graduating students usually still have the
| life experience of a child and can't see the real purpose in
| education.
|
| Most are better off without a degree.
|
| Most who get a degree would be better off with an apprenticeship
| tailored to their field.
|
| Most of the rest would benefit from getting a few years of real
| life experience first.
|
| The reduction in attendance would lower costs and reduce degree
| inflation in the job market. More productive years would be
| available and people could replace their college debt with a
| mortgage and have something of tangible value when they were
| done.
| mordae wrote:
| This. I would enroll, but nobody would help me financially like
| they were ready to do when I was younger. Also, let me
| customize the track a little bit. It's so focused on the
| inexperienced kids it hurts.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Sounds like you don't have the life experience to see that
| there is more point to getting a degree than learning. Maybe
| you don't like that, but it is true.
| hajile wrote:
| What things are supposed to be learned alongside said degree?
|
| I graduated years ago and I still have yet to see what these
| other points are.
| motohagiography wrote:
| That relationship of a teacher being an obstacle to a grade that
| signals institutional approval, it is totally broken. This is
| gamefied "education," where the course material and even the
| instructors recognition doesn't persuasively have intrinsic
| value.
|
| I'm dealing with something now outside academia, where there is
| absurd bureaucracy, and I'm sidestepping and shortcutting it
| because I see the mission outcome as separate from the prescribed
| process, and the trickling and breadcrumbing of details is an
| abuse of my time, so I sympathize with the student perspective -
| but in an educational setting, the prescribed process is
| essentially a sacrificial cost that enables you to "become," a
| person who has mastered it, as it makes the skill the _effect_ of
| a skill, and not just the _affect_ of the outcome. Education is
| necessarily transformative, otherwise it 's just rote training.
|
| Example would be, I take music lessons, I'm difficult to teach
| because I really like Bach and Chopin and I can play some simple
| preludes by ear, but my sight reading is maybe at a gr. 2 level,
| which is just enough to get the pieces under my fingers with a
| hill climbing struggle, but makes me useless as an actual
| musician, and probably very irritating to musicians whose
| performances are the _effect_ of their years of real skills, and
| not the _affect_ of hackery or savantism that an unskilled
| observer can 't easily distinguish. Even if we played the same
| piece, comparing them to me would be insulting and debasing to
| them because it's like saying a recording of something is the
| same as a performance of it, so it's very diminishing.
|
| In the case of the temperature monitoring circuit in the article,
| the process is designed to facilitate a mental transformation of
| exercising elementary skills, and being educated means being able
| to commit to that process of being molded by the experience. The
| details are to force commitment to the process and filter out
| those who aren't. Unfortuately, credentialism incentivises this
| _affect_ of skills and drives enrollment, so if you are doing a
| job oriented degree, you 're basically trained and not really
| educated through a process of becoming.
|
| It would almost make sense to offer students a deal, where they
| can choose a training track that leads to a 52% / C- grade and do
| the minimum, which takes them out of the way of the TAs, they
| don't participate in discussions, and they can coast and draft
| others, maybe date each other and say they went there, but they
| can't impose costs, where others can elect to aim higher and
| choose the education track with an understanding of what that
| means.
| nostrademons wrote:
| This phenomena has plenty of analogues in the corporate &
| government worlds as well. A formal performance review system is
| instituted to keep people from spending all their time sucking up
| to their boss, and then is progressively refined to deter all the
| ways that it has been gamed, until it is very well adapted to
| preventing the historical forms of gaming the system but bears no
| relation at all to incentivizing good business results. A
| codebase gets a series of bugfixes, until it ends up slow and
| impossible to maintain, and then is thrown away when a competitor
| adapts to market conditions faster. A new government bureaucracy
| is formed to identify and prevent all the ways that terrorists
| could bring down airliners, and only serves to violate flyers'
| privacy and add millions of hours to accumulated travel time.
|
| The root cause, I think, is that humans are really bad at
| considering both the specific and the general in their decision-
| making. A new procedure might perfectly solve the problem you're
| having _right now_ , but the cumulative effect of all these new
| procedures is to make the overall system useless.
|
| Long-lasting systems provide for ways to throw away whole parts
| of the system and replace them with something simpler, without
| throwing away the system itself. Whole industries get outcompeted
| by a nimble startup. Codebases get refactored, and gnarly
| subsystems deprecated and replaced with clean interfaces. Elected
| officials get thrown out of office.
|
| Perhaps the right way to look at this is to embrace change, and
| position yourself as the destroyer and replacer of systems that
| have become overcomplicated and bloated. That's why the tech and
| finance industries have been so highly compensated over the last
| 20 years: together, they're throwing away whole parts of the
| 1980/90s institutions that had become bloated through 40-50 years
| of progressive micro-optimization.
| quijoteuniv wrote:
| If you have lived all your life in a basement you tend to think
| the flourecent light is the sun. Could not make sense of the
| article... my take on teaching is... you teach because you are
| the most capable on the subject in the community, is a
| responsability and you do your best. As with most professions
| when you do it for the money, you become cinic.
| derangedHorse wrote:
| Teaching should definitely not be done by the "most capable on
| the subject", it should be done by those who are the best
| educators (with "best" being based on some metrics relating to
| student outcomes). Both roles are _not_ the same. Just because
| someone is knowledgable about a subject doesn 't mean they know
| how to convey that subject for consumption. Conversely I think
| that those who don't know as much about an entire subject but
| understand the material of a particular course very well
| _could_ be better suited for the task of teaching than the
| "most capable".
| kaycebasques wrote:
| Tangential: The article mentions Chesterton's Fence. I clicked
| the link to learn what that means and didn't find it (it's just a
| link to the guy's Wikipedia page). But check out the beautiful
| signature of this Chesterton fellow!
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#/media/File...
| phalangion wrote:
| Chesterton's fence refers to a principle that before changing
| something, you should first understand why it is the way it is.
|
| > Chesterton's Fence is a heuristic inspired by a quote from
| the writer and polymath G. K. Chesterton's 1929 book, The
| Thing. It's best known as being one of John F. Kennedy's
| favored sayings, as well as a principle Wikipedia encourages
| its editors to follow. In the book, Chesterton describes the
| classic case of the reformer who notices something, such as a
| fence, and fails to see the reason for its existence. However,
| before they decide to remove it, they must figure out why it
| exists in the first place. If they do not do this, they are
| likely to do more harm than good with its removal. In its most
| concise version, Chesterton's Fence states the following: Do
| not remove a fence until you know why it was put up in the
| first place.
|
| [0] https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/
| MengerSponge wrote:
| To first order, you can solve the regrade _and_ homework issue
| with policy: gate regrades on completion of homework assignments,
| and limit the number of regrades that may be submitted per week.
|
| You need a rate limiter to prevent students from just spamming
| regrades until the evaluation returns "A", and you want to
| incentivize the desired behavior--homework is intended to help
| students develop skills.
|
| If you want to learn more, some useful keywords and phrases to
| find cutting edge thought: "ungrading", "Standards Based
| Grading", "learning objectives-based assessment"
|
| There is literature on this, but don't let that stop you! It's
| much more fun to speculate about pedagogical practices based
| solely on what you remember from high school and college.
| derangedHorse wrote:
| That's exactly my problem with this post, the author makes it
| seem like a lot of thought was put into their teaching when it
| seems like most of their "progressive" ideas were half-baked.
| When talking about the abundance of regrades, instead of re-
| iterating on the idea, they gave up on it and deemed it
| impractical.
|
| > "We could change from the current "mandatory Odysseus" regime
| to an "optional Odysseus" regime: On the first day of class,
| offer students an irrevocable choice: They can have homework
| and deadlines imposed on them, or not. Perhaps the students who
| need deadlines would learn to opt for them and others could
| live freely."
|
| I don't see why there can't be more happy-mediums like having
| deadline schedule where if you miss one assignment, you can
| turn it in within the next 2 assignments. There's a lot more
| options in the space of possibilities that aren't being
| explored.
|
| And maybe this is not exactly a criticism in the author's eyes
| depending on what their priorities are. I'd have to find out
| how the author ranks the priorities of being a teacher. Is the
| main priority to have the students leave with an understanding
| of the course material, to just do the job well enough to not
| get reprimanded by the school (by doing the minimum to reduce
| student complaints and have a "healthy" pass/fail ratio), or to
| aid the student in their education however far they are able to
| go with points given for effort (which could vary depending on
| what the student will actually pursue). This also isn't even
| touching on the topic on the quality of teaching being done and
| whether as much thought has been put into that as grading
| policies.
| jzer0cool wrote:
| Examples of "You understand when you're older ...". Any examples
| of when you thought you understood then, but only, truly
| understood when older?
| jccalhoun wrote:
| I always say "Never underestimate a student's ability to
| misinterpret an assignment."
| iancmceachern wrote:
| So is management in a large company.
| anon946 wrote:
| As a professor, this completely resonates with me. For example, I
| take attendance and make it 5% of the grade. Then I give 5 free
| days and am generous with absences due to whatever. Why? Because
| it's a nudge for many students to get them to come to class,
| which makes them stay engaged, and ultimately get a better grade.
|
| (The other reason I take attendance is so that I can recognize at
| least most of them by mid-semester, so can call on them by name
| when they raise their hand.)
|
| And I'm often torn with taking points off for submitting work
| late. On one hand, why should it matter exactly when they
| submitted the work, if it's good work? On the other hand, I know
| that if I just said that there's no late penalty, some
| significant fraction of the students would wait till the end of
| the semester, then realize that they haven't been keeping up,
| then create headaches for everyone involved, including
| themselves.
| leetrout wrote:
| I ran my class like a job (senior level interactive media). We
| had assignments with deadlines and I did PR reviews.
|
| Deadlines are deadlines. Cut scope, features, etc but
| absolutely no late work.
|
| You can guess how it went.
| professoretc wrote:
| > I ran my class like a job... Deadlines are deadlines.
|
| We were having a conversation at my college about deadlines
| at some training thing and someone pointed out that _almost
| no job is like that_. That movie scenario where the guy has a
| big presentation, but it 's also his daughter's dressage
| recital or whatever, and if he misses the presentation he'll
| lose his job? That doesn't happen. In the real world, you
| just say "I can't do it that day, let's reschedule for next
| week." and that's fine. Most real world deadlines are soft.
| ameister14 wrote:
| >That movie scenario where the guy has a big presentation,
| but it's also his daughter's dressage recital or whatever,
| and if he misses the presentation he'll lose his job? That
| doesn't happen.
|
| Sure it does. If you are scheduled to present to a major
| client you can't easily reschedule for next week.
| Especially if it's presenting something that will have
| impact. Now you probably won't lose your job if you tell
| your team why you can't make it and it's legit but frankly
| you may if you no-show.
| titanomachy wrote:
| As a software engineer, I generally agree.
|
| My partner is a corporate lawyer, though, and deadlines are
| a _big deal_ for them.
| evilotto wrote:
| Rocket launches, if you're a rideshare are not soft
| deadlines. You don't get your payload delivered on time,
| you lose. Even if you're the only payload, you have hard
| deadlines - there may be a few windows to launch in but if
| you miss those the next opportunity might not be for
| another 26 months. Someone _will_ lose their job over that.
| fma wrote:
| Definitely depends on your deliverables. My recent
| deliverables were campaigns for CES and Superbowl. I can't
| say lets schedule for next week for those. On the other
| hand, I think if I screwed up I won't get fired,
| either...maybe someone up the management chain :)
| omegaham wrote:
| A nice compromise that I've appreciated in the classes that
| I've taken - have strict deadlines, but offer X days (say, 2)
| of a no-questions-asked extension. It creates the clear
| expectation that work be turned in on time, but offers a small
| relief valve for one-off problems.
|
| The problem is that this adds extra bookkeeping for a professor
| who's already busy with everything else going on, which gets
| back to the original poster's point of becoming everything that
| they hated.
| pacman128 wrote:
| I taught college CS for 10 years before moving to industry.
| Cheating wasn't a huge problem, but I did run have some issues.
|
| Gave a makeup exam to one student with an altered programming
| problem than the original exam. The student answered the original
| problem, not the one on the exam they was given. That made it
| very clearcut.
|
| I also had a written requirement that students must be able to
| explain their homework programs to me. Had a few that couldn't
| explain what parts of "their" own program was doing.
| manquer wrote:
| Most professionals don't know parts of their SO copy pasta code
| does either
| djoldman wrote:
| Theres much to talk about here.
|
| A lot of this is sensitive to context. Students in high school,
| college, and grad school have different levels of maturity. There
| are also different incentives for each setting.
|
| I would say that high school and college students are more
| similar than grad students though.
|
| Perhaps more important is the fact that the power the teachers
| have in each setting is different as well: high school teachers
| have little power whereas college professors have much more
| leeway in designing and grading their courses.
| golemiprague wrote:
| caddemon wrote:
| I feel like a lot of development happens between 14 and 18, so
| I don't understand why freshmen and senior years of high school
| are so similar from an academic philosophy perspective. Even in
| a private school where the teachers have a bit more freedom. I
| think a lot of kids get thrown into college with no idea how to
| manage themselves because they never had to before. There ought
| to be a better way to ease into that.
|
| I agree it is very context dependent though. Not just academic
| year but also class content. Some courses need to lay a strong
| foundation, others would be most useful as a survey, still
| others are about synthesizing knowledge from across prior
| courses. Some classes contain students mostly forced to be
| there and others contain mostly students that are excited about
| that particular material. Different fields lend themselves to
| different assignment styles. And so on.
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