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.
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.
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.
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.
And unfortunately sometimes people grow up with parents who are quite lacking, then themselves fall into the same patterns, and think, "Oh, now I get it," while taking away exactly the wrong lesson. I know people who grew up in an abusive household, then eventually went on to have kids, and different siblings from that same family ended up going in completely different directions, from carrying on many of their parents' hated behaviours on one side, to being excessively permissive on the other. (And one ended up being a great parent, having put serious thought into their childhood and what they wanted to do differently.)
These two observations can be synthesised into recognising that most people are poor at empathy and haven't seriously thought through the question of why other people do what they do (fun fact, a skill that can actually be practised by arguing about politics).
Most parents are probably bad at parenting, based on the observation that most people are bad at most things and there isn't much in the way of training available compared to the size of the task. But most youths are even worse parents and have wildly misunderstood the constraints, goals and threats involved.
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.
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
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.
I frequently say that 16 y/o Chris would be very disappointed in 40 y/o Chris. But 16 y/o Chris was an idiot.
As you touched on, the fun twist is when you abstract the learning so it’s not just “I was wrong about X” but “I should be much more accepting of contrarian views.”
I remember reading Harry Potter on Kindle, and Dumbledore had a line "Youth cannot know how age thinks and feels. But old men are guilty if they forget what it was to be young", and Kindle has this feature to show how many other readers have highlighted a sentence, and this sentence were highlighted by thousands. I guess they're all teenagers.
> 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.
I am in my late 30ies and was recently thinking something like that about my 24 year old self... but sometimes I think, what if 3X-year old me is the one who's the idiot? Your brain has to go downhill at some point... judgment too, probably, even if the brain is not going downhill yet. How does one know it didn't start happening at 25/35/...?
Like, I was much more excited about tinkering with tech when I was 25. I know I was, I know it made me happy, I know that is what got me where I am now in terms of money/etc., but I can rarely summon these feelings now. That is clearly degradation, if I could swap some "wisdom" or whatever that I gained for enthusiasm I would do it.
What else has degraded?
Let's consider a more ambivalent one, I was excited when Facebook/etc. came out but I think TikTok/Snapchat etc. are stupid gimmicks... am I wiser, or just older and more boring?
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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
The money from the house? Since your dad didn't save for retirement, there was never any money to share. If you meant that you're forgoing some of your current income so he can survive, that's a different issue.
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.
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
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.)
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.
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
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).
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.
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.
"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.
> 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.
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.
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).
“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.”
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.
> 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.
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.
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 naiveté.
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."
> I don’t see what’s sad about that, other than maybe the disappointment of losing naiveté.
From my own experience, some sadness is due to treating a few people with disdain in my youth. At times, I was an arrogant, pissy teen. I wish I could make amends, but some of those people are gone.
For 30 years, I had a very specific vision of how I'm going to be different. Whether in serious relationships or single, I was not really buying into my parents' generation OR my own generation ideas.
Then:
1. I met "The One"
2. We had kids
And now I'm living a fairly stereotypical North American lifestyle. And not... begrudgingly or resentfully or bitterly so! It's just that nothing could prepare me or give me true empathetic understanding of how my priorities, goals, and lifestyle would change.
An extremely superficial example is vehicle; I always had sport small hatchbacks. I used to have endless debates with my SUV-loving friends about how unsafe and overly large they are.
I now have a minivan. I love it. It's not a necessity, it's a luxury, but it's a luxury I WANT as a married parent of kids in North American suburb who loves to travel with extended family.
Myriad other things about raising kids too; e.g. I will never ever again judge another human being when their kid misbehaves in public, or how they're handling it. I'm humbled with deeper understanding of how little of a clue I have as to their relationship, parenting style, or what long long LOOONG chain of events precipitated the outburst and what may be the right way to handle it given the background... or, what the parent's energy levels and day are like.
While I see some truth in your argument I disagree one the whole.
I am a parent and a teacher and I think the process is very different. Yes I sometimes differ from how I thought I would raise my children, but only in the details.
Now with teaching the problem is that you have to deal with all the kids/adults that were raised in ways that you strongly disagree with.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There's a great quote about being a parent that's often attributed to Mark Twain:
> 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.
It's unlikely he personally said it, because his father died when he was about 11. But it sounds like something that he would have said in one of his books. [0]
> 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.
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. :)
This is a bit paradoxical because it also works the other way around.
I definitely have the same resonance in terms of understanding, but I am also feeling like "Gosh, they had no clue what they were doing when they [game me this advice], [prevented me to do this], [scolded me for doing that] etc. etc.
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.
It is interesting but I had the opposite experience.
I think two things led to this.
1. In ante-natal classes the person took us through child development and what children are capable of at different ages. In particular, newborns to about 6-8 months do not even have a concept of themselves as separate people. All they can learn at that time is whether the world is a good place where their needs have a chance of being met. They are incapable of e.g. deliberately crying in order to get picked up. If you do not respond to their suffering you are just going to create a needy and insecure child. So we dodged that bullet.
2. The book "Parent Effectiveness Training" which was a revelation to me. The basic idea is that children own their lives and the consequences of their decisions. Of course there is a limit - you don't let a 3 year old run into traffic. But as far as possible let children make their own decisions. They learn really fast that way. If you micro-manage their lives you end up with 18 year old children.
This does not mean you do not have rules in your house. You are not allowed to play drums at 3am, but that would apply to everyone.
So many parents impose their own choices and preferences on their children for no good reason, and it creates resentment and stops children from learning from their own decisions.
As one example, I have lactose intolerance but I was forced to drink milk, with resulting stomach aches, etc, for many years. I literally knew better than my parents and school in this matter. Similarly if you think you know better than your children in every matter, may I suggest contemplating the spectacle of a 15 year old dressed for a party by Mom.
After our daughter turned 12 we only overrode her on two things - becoming a vegatarian (not allowed until she completed her growth) and a change of school. In both cases we carefully listened to her point of view and considered it, and explained why on these rare occasions we overruled her. Because this was so rare, and handled in a respectful manner, she accepted the decisions.
My own mother waited with great anticipation for the teen rebellion that she had forced her own children into, but it never came with my daughter. Why rebel when there is no need? She never lost the love of learning and ended up with a PhD in a hard science.
One other comment on the OP. There seems to be a wider issue here. If you let children not work, and fail, then the first time there will be a commotion. But if teachers did this consistently, word would get around and it would be accepted. Students whose life goals required passing the test would do the work. But in fact many school subjects are useless to many people and not studying is a rational response to being taught irrelevant nonsense.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
When I was a college student, I wasn't diligent enough to always do ungraded assignments. I'd do reading, but for actual questions I'd only do them maybe 50% of the time when preparing for a test on the material. And out of my peers I felt like even doing assigned reading and trying to do ungraded homework put me well ahead of the pack.
I think it's a maturity thing. Probably until I was ~24 I just didn't have the executive function to be able to do things like that. It seems beneficial to have graded assignments as a forcing function especially given some college students are literally teenagers.
Also, I took an accelerated math curriculum as a freshman where I went from never having written a proof/knowing how to prove something rigorously, to pretty good at it. The feedback from the assigned homework was absolutely crucial in helping me learn these skills. It's easy to follow a proof from the answer section, but since there are usually several ways to prove something, it doesn't always help just to see an answer, plus you don't know what kind of divergences/hand waves are acceptable or not without feedback.
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".
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
"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.
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.
> 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’”.
> every word of the assignment creatively misinterpreted
I hear you, communication is hard, but trust me your statement and the authors are an AND not an OR :) the difference is scale. the students are about 1v30 when it comes to opportunities for badly written assignments. In a typical semester, I am 1v120+ hostile attacks on my communication skills
The number of students I have that actively presume I am trying to trick them is truly astonishing. It's a learned behavior, sure, but it is the behavior.
I've put parts of answers in the question text, underlined them, and then had students tell me they thought it was a trick. I'm at the point when I write tests I leave pretty blatant hints because I have found they are a useful way to punish students who have opted out of thinking and try and brute force answers. I've had students actively invent parts of assignments in their head. In the last one, I asked for three examples in a short answer problem...and gave one of them as a 'for example'. less than 10% of people used that. More than 10% told me they thought it was a trick.
I'm not mad, I'm worried. I get why IT is moving towards zero trust, but it is fundamentally at odds with actual learning. The saving grace is that I can actually use the term 'headcannon' with this generation and they know what I mean.
> The number of students I have that actively presume I am trying to trick them is truly astonishing.
> I've put parts of answers in the question text, underlined them, and then had students tell me they thought it was a trick.
Why wouldn't they assume that?
Tests are nothing but games where students figure out what answers you want. They can do that by learning the material, but there's a metagame. What were you thinking when you wrote down this question on the exam?
For example, once I took a english test which asked me the correct pronoun for ships. Choices: he, she, it, they. I know that "she" is almost always used to refer to ships, but I also know that "it" is also grammatically correct. So which is it? Is the teacher trying to test my understanding of this historical tradition? Does the teacher think "she" is antiquated? Will I lose if I pick "she"? There's enough uncertainty here for me to pause even though it's an absurdly simple question. I know the answer but I'm not 100% sure what will happen if I choose it.
There are serious consequences to getting these answers wrong and students simply can't afford to trust you.
Entire books could be written about this teacher-student metagame. Another example: choice order. Suppose the choices to the above english question were ordered so:
Which pronoun is used to refer to ships?
A. It
B. He
C. They
D. She
Deliberately positioning an almost correct answer as the first choice was extremely common in the schools I attended. A student who's overly anxious or running low on time might read that, pick choice A without even reading the other options and move on. The second we noticed this, "letter A is never right" became a meme and to this day I feel uncomfortable choosing the first option presented to me in any context. Preparatory schools actually offered test taking classes where we were taught to read questions backwards because of this.
Teachers eventually noticed that we noticed and suddenly the right answers were the first choices. Do you have enough confidence in your knowledge to assert that letter A is correct? Now it's a deeper level metagame: does this teacher know that I know?
This is what you get when education determines your future job prospects. It is no longer about "actual learning". It is a game and our future hangs in the balance.
> The number of students I have that actively presume I am trying to trick them is truly astonishing.
Because we all have experience of you guys doing just that.
I once had a question on an exam for high voltage power “why do high voltage transmission lines have 3 wires”. The answer I put seemed obvious, that each wire is for one of the 3 phases of electricity. This is the standard config for HV lines in the US.
The answer was wrong, because the professor was talking about INSIDE the cable and wanted an answer relating to how the electromagnetic field rotates around the wire so they bunch wires inside each line to improve efficiency.
Professors, especially elite ones, have seemingly perfected the art of being vague. As a student you have zero recourse against them for their terrible communication skills, your only hope is to dodge the whacky ones by befriending upperclassmen/being in a frat.
> In the last one, I asked for three examples in a short answer problem...and gave one of them as a 'for example'. less than 10% of people used that. More than 10% told me they thought it was a trick.
What did you expect? To me, it would be painfully obvious that the already given example is void and no longer up for grabs. I would never construct such an exam question. Dangerous slope, but in this case obvious.
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.
But what did the other students the class do? If almost everyone in the class did only one, the professor would have to give almost the entire class 33% for a mistake he made.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
If you have a goal that cannot be evaluated... how do you know if you're achieving it? How do you know if you're improving or worsening?
Evaluation is necessary. It doesn't have to be quantitative, we all know there are infinite problems with purely quantitative measures of human behavior, but evaluation itself is fundamentally part of any goal.
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 ;-)
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
There is a flip side...a lot of students are reaching college now without the experience of the decision or blame being on them. College is viewed as so important that it cannot be left to these children who will screw it up. Grades are inflated, kids are told to do more activities but with less depth...everyone is trying to game every metric. It is a functionally nihilistic world view that becomes embedded in students minds in a way that totally lacks agency.
They feel that if they fail its because the teacher failed them...because in their priors the teacher fixed it, because failing and the consequences were not an option - especially for the 'gifted' students. It isn't a personality, it's a lived experience. Its confusing to the students just as much as to me because they don't understand what has happened or how their parents/teachers/leaders/society have failed them.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
>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?
One of the most effective exam techniques I have seen, which is uncommon in my country but maybe common elsewhere, is oral exams. I TA’d for a German professor who did them for his stat/ML course, and so got to sit in on all of them (I also took the course myself in an earlier year so had the experience as a student as well). The process was:
1. Give students a list of about 100 questions in advance, more than you could memorise. Some were simple like “write down the formula for X”, some were more complex like “derive the backprop update algorithm”.
2. Pick the first question difficulty based on the student’s assignment grades
3. If they go to it right, pick a harder question, otherwise an easier one. If you aren’t sure whether they really understand, interrogate them about the answer, ask follow up questions etc.
4. Choose a grade based on which questions they got right.
Firstly this was highly effective at making students actually learn the material because most were worried enough about embarrassing themselves in front of the professor that they prepared well. But also, it was extremely fair because it’s essentially impossible to cheat and fake what you know.
I suspect many professors would avoid this because it’s harder to justify the grades at the end to a third party. But if you record the exams, and the student is clearly failing to answer simple questions, it’s quite hard for them to argue they were treated unfairly.
Of all the written exams I’ve seen and taken, I’ve never seen a process as fair or effective as these oral exams.
> the student is clearly failing to answer simple questions, it’s quite hard for them to argue they were treated unfairly.
I know you didn't quite say that, but to be clear: Fairness isn't defined by someone being able to argue that they were treated unfairly. You still have room for bias in how you treat weaknesses in student answers, and few students are going to give perfect answers for everything. And even without any specific-to-the-student bias I'm going to be more consistent in grading the same question if I go through a stack of written answers en-bloc than if I grade replies with hours or days inbetween.
Randomized questions also has potential for bias that feels like it could be stronger than question selection for a written exam.
That's not to say there isn't value in doing oral exams, but they are not the solution for everything either.
Oral exams are awesome. The problem is they don't scale up to a high number of students. A teacher with hundreds of students literally cannot afford the time and effort to properly examine the knowledge of the students. So they make these multiple choice tests they can just apply to every student in parallel.
All of these problems with academia are rooted in the fact it's a mass education system designed to teach hundreds if not thousands of people all at once.
You’re right, it was a lot of effort on the part of the lecturer and it didn’t scale well as the course got more popular. I think it’s best suited to smaller, later year niche courses.
To back this up - I went through the oral exam experience on both sides (student and TA) with two different German professors and it worked incredibly well. We offered oral exams as a remedy for a few situations:
- suspected/known cheaters
- students who missed exams due to illness
- times in the course where we needed to get a good grip on whether our students understood the coursework the way we'd taught it
It was scary for a lot of students, especially the ones without great English, but it was always, in my view, incredibly fair.
edit: based on your comment history you're also in Australia - I have a feeling we might be talking about the same place :)
My experience is completely different. Due to the lack of record and a lot of both personal experience and trusted accounts I deem such exams completely untrustworthy.
The bias is both ways. Some teachers/examiners decide on the spot which questions to ask. Not all questions are the same. Some are easier and depending on the sympathy one can get one.
Sometimes due to lack of accountability I even experienced complete dummy exams - a reason for which I decided to drop off from one. In college there was known strategy around one exam to not take part in written one as it was hellishly hard but instead go for oral one, where exam consisted of simply showing up.
This goes other way around, too. E.g. powerful member of exam committee of exam I took long time ago commission was infamous for failing people if not bribed in a very specific manner (not cash to hand but require buying specific set of services from family member). I dismissed that as malicious rumors but it proved to be true. I wasn’t failed but was scored inadequately which slowed my career progress for next few years.
I was told by academic staff foolproof strategies for failing students on oral exams. Like provide quick series of questions from various areas of topic, when they stumble due to stress finish them off with few extra ones. Other - ask questions so deep and profound they’ll either omit the details or start argue on ambiguity which are both enough reasons to fail.
There was small scandal about PhD exam recordings (which are obligatory) being purged 10 days after the exam, even though one of failed student decided to fight the result. Due to lack of evidence the exam result was held valid.
It really depends what kind of person is doing the exam. I’ve been always told that if one wants to skip exam they should go for oral instead of written one. Currently many are recorded but as they are widely used there’s minuscule chance they’ll ever be reviewed, and I recommend reviewing any piece of video if you think it’s easy. Find 3 seconds on 90 minutes video where student hands envelopes to the committee.
People on generally aren’t nice and while there is a sentiment for the teachers they aren’t any more special than and other group. You get lazy, power hungry or simply malicious people there too. And thus written record is a safe two way.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Readit News
Anyway, I appreciate the article as someone who will soon try my hand at teaching. I will have a lot to learn.
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.
Some parents are just really really inadequate or abusive as parents.
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.
Most parents are probably bad at parenting, based on the observation that most people are bad at most things and there isn't much in the way of training available compared to the size of the task. But most youths are even worse parents and have wildly misunderstood the constraints, goals and threats involved.
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
[1]: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/heuristics-that-almost...
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.”
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.
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".
Like, I was much more excited about tinkering with tech when I was 25. I know I was, I know it made me happy, I know that is what got me where I am now in terms of money/etc., but I can rarely summon these feelings now. That is clearly degradation, if I could swap some "wisdom" or whatever that I gained for enthusiasm I would do it.
What else has degraded?
Let's consider a more ambivalent one, I was excited when Facebook/etc. came out but I think TikTok/Snapchat etc. are stupid gimmicks... am I wiser, or just older and more boring?
Etc.
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.
Soooo many questions :-)
You are choosing to do it despite them stealing from you.
At some point you bear responsibility for how you are treated.
Cut him off. Let him die alone. Not your problem.
I had to do the same with my alcoholic mother.
It was very hard it the moment her antics started affecting the quality of life of my family she had to go.
The money from the house? Since your dad didn't save for retirement, there was never any money to share. If you meant that you're forgoing some of your current income so he can survive, that's a different issue.
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.
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
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.)
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.
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
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).
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.
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.
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.
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).
― Mark Twain
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.
Jokes aside, totally agree with you. Definitely something you learn with age
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.
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https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/
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 naiveté.
From my own experience, some sadness is due to treating a few people with disdain in my youth. At times, I was an arrogant, pissy teen. I wish I could make amends, but some of those people are gone.
For 30 years, I had a very specific vision of how I'm going to be different. Whether in serious relationships or single, I was not really buying into my parents' generation OR my own generation ideas.
Then:
1. I met "The One"
2. We had kids
And now I'm living a fairly stereotypical North American lifestyle. And not... begrudgingly or resentfully or bitterly so! It's just that nothing could prepare me or give me true empathetic understanding of how my priorities, goals, and lifestyle would change.
An extremely superficial example is vehicle; I always had sport small hatchbacks. I used to have endless debates with my SUV-loving friends about how unsafe and overly large they are.
I now have a minivan. I love it. It's not a necessity, it's a luxury, but it's a luxury I WANT as a married parent of kids in North American suburb who loves to travel with extended family.
Myriad other things about raising kids too; e.g. I will never ever again judge another human being when their kid misbehaves in public, or how they're handling it. I'm humbled with deeper understanding of how little of a clue I have as to their relationship, parenting style, or what long long LOOONG chain of events precipitated the outburst and what may be the right way to handle it given the background... or, what the parent's energy levels and day are like.
I am a parent and a teacher and I think the process is very different. Yes I sometimes differ from how I thought I would raise my children, but only in the details.
Now with teaching the problem is that you have to deal with all the kids/adults that were raised in ways that you strongly disagree with.
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.
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.
sometimes you do need another perspective. you go through the process without even thing about harm process could be causing.
> 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.
It's unlikely he personally said it, because his father died when he was about 11. But it sounds like something that he would have said in one of his books. [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Marshall_Clemens
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.
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. :)
I definitely have the same resonance in terms of understanding, but I am also feeling like "Gosh, they had no clue what they were doing when they [game me this advice], [prevented me to do this], [scolded me for doing that] etc. etc.
I think two things led to this.
1. In ante-natal classes the person took us through child development and what children are capable of at different ages. In particular, newborns to about 6-8 months do not even have a concept of themselves as separate people. All they can learn at that time is whether the world is a good place where their needs have a chance of being met. They are incapable of e.g. deliberately crying in order to get picked up. If you do not respond to their suffering you are just going to create a needy and insecure child. So we dodged that bullet.
2. The book "Parent Effectiveness Training" which was a revelation to me. The basic idea is that children own their lives and the consequences of their decisions. Of course there is a limit - you don't let a 3 year old run into traffic. But as far as possible let children make their own decisions. They learn really fast that way. If you micro-manage their lives you end up with 18 year old children.
This does not mean you do not have rules in your house. You are not allowed to play drums at 3am, but that would apply to everyone.
So many parents impose their own choices and preferences on their children for no good reason, and it creates resentment and stops children from learning from their own decisions.
As one example, I have lactose intolerance but I was forced to drink milk, with resulting stomach aches, etc, for many years. I literally knew better than my parents and school in this matter. Similarly if you think you know better than your children in every matter, may I suggest contemplating the spectacle of a 15 year old dressed for a party by Mom.
After our daughter turned 12 we only overrode her on two things - becoming a vegatarian (not allowed until she completed her growth) and a change of school. In both cases we carefully listened to her point of view and considered it, and explained why on these rare occasions we overruled her. Because this was so rare, and handled in a respectful manner, she accepted the decisions.
My own mother waited with great anticipation for the teen rebellion that she had forced her own children into, but it never came with my daughter. Why rebel when there is no need? She never lost the love of learning and ended up with a PhD in a hard science.
One other comment on the OP. There seems to be a wider issue here. If you let children not work, and fail, then the first time there will be a commotion. But if teachers did this consistently, word would get around and it would be accepted. Students whose life goals required passing the test would do the work. But in fact many school subjects are useless to many people and not studying is a rational response to being taught irrelevant nonsense.
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.
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.
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.
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Because your job is to educate them. They also complain about the task which in effect waste your time or give you trouble.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
I think it's a maturity thing. Probably until I was ~24 I just didn't have the executive function to be able to do things like that. It seems beneficial to have graded assignments as a forcing function especially given some college students are literally teenagers.
Also, I took an accelerated math curriculum as a freshman where I went from never having written a proof/knowing how to prove something rigorously, to pretty good at it. The feedback from the assigned homework was absolutely crucial in helping me learn these skills. It's easy to follow a proof from the answer section, but since there are usually several ways to prove something, it doesn't always help just to see an answer, plus you don't know what kind of divergences/hand waves are acceptable or not without feedback.
There are many other options for evaluating the students, but not many to force them to learn something.
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".
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.
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.
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’”.
I hear you, communication is hard, but trust me your statement and the authors are an AND not an OR :) the difference is scale. the students are about 1v30 when it comes to opportunities for badly written assignments. In a typical semester, I am 1v120+ hostile attacks on my communication skills
The number of students I have that actively presume I am trying to trick them is truly astonishing. It's a learned behavior, sure, but it is the behavior.
I've put parts of answers in the question text, underlined them, and then had students tell me they thought it was a trick. I'm at the point when I write tests I leave pretty blatant hints because I have found they are a useful way to punish students who have opted out of thinking and try and brute force answers. I've had students actively invent parts of assignments in their head. In the last one, I asked for three examples in a short answer problem...and gave one of them as a 'for example'. less than 10% of people used that. More than 10% told me they thought it was a trick.
I'm not mad, I'm worried. I get why IT is moving towards zero trust, but it is fundamentally at odds with actual learning. The saving grace is that I can actually use the term 'headcannon' with this generation and they know what I mean.
> I've put parts of answers in the question text, underlined them, and then had students tell me they thought it was a trick.
Why wouldn't they assume that?
Tests are nothing but games where students figure out what answers you want. They can do that by learning the material, but there's a metagame. What were you thinking when you wrote down this question on the exam?
For example, once I took a english test which asked me the correct pronoun for ships. Choices: he, she, it, they. I know that "she" is almost always used to refer to ships, but I also know that "it" is also grammatically correct. So which is it? Is the teacher trying to test my understanding of this historical tradition? Does the teacher think "she" is antiquated? Will I lose if I pick "she"? There's enough uncertainty here for me to pause even though it's an absurdly simple question. I know the answer but I'm not 100% sure what will happen if I choose it.
There are serious consequences to getting these answers wrong and students simply can't afford to trust you.
Entire books could be written about this teacher-student metagame. Another example: choice order. Suppose the choices to the above english question were ordered so:
Deliberately positioning an almost correct answer as the first choice was extremely common in the schools I attended. A student who's overly anxious or running low on time might read that, pick choice A without even reading the other options and move on. The second we noticed this, "letter A is never right" became a meme and to this day I feel uncomfortable choosing the first option presented to me in any context. Preparatory schools actually offered test taking classes where we were taught to read questions backwards because of this.Teachers eventually noticed that we noticed and suddenly the right answers were the first choices. Do you have enough confidence in your knowledge to assert that letter A is correct? Now it's a deeper level metagame: does this teacher know that I know?
This is what you get when education determines your future job prospects. It is no longer about "actual learning". It is a game and our future hangs in the balance.
Because we all have experience of you guys doing just that.
I once had a question on an exam for high voltage power “why do high voltage transmission lines have 3 wires”. The answer I put seemed obvious, that each wire is for one of the 3 phases of electricity. This is the standard config for HV lines in the US.
The answer was wrong, because the professor was talking about INSIDE the cable and wanted an answer relating to how the electromagnetic field rotates around the wire so they bunch wires inside each line to improve efficiency.
Professors, especially elite ones, have seemingly perfected the art of being vague. As a student you have zero recourse against them for their terrible communication skills, your only hope is to dodge the whacky ones by befriending upperclassmen/being in a frat.
What did you expect? To me, it would be painfully obvious that the already given example is void and no longer up for grabs. I would never construct such an exam question. Dangerous slope, but in this case obvious.
Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
It is obviously unfair and unprofessional to penalize the student for the professor's error.
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.
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.
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.
No, both learning and certification of learning (in a way legible to 3rd parties) are real and proper goals of teaching.
Evaluation is necessary. It doesn't have to be quantitative, we all know there are infinite problems with purely quantitative measures of human behavior, but evaluation itself is fundamentally part of any goal.
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 ;-)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Your idea of superior groups and so on based on success on the free market is basically social darwinism.
(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
""" 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.
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.
There is a flip side...a lot of students are reaching college now without the experience of the decision or blame being on them. College is viewed as so important that it cannot be left to these children who will screw it up. Grades are inflated, kids are told to do more activities but with less depth...everyone is trying to game every metric. It is a functionally nihilistic world view that becomes embedded in students minds in a way that totally lacks agency.
They feel that if they fail its because the teacher failed them...because in their priors the teacher fixed it, because failing and the consequences were not an option - especially for the 'gifted' students. It isn't a personality, it's a lived experience. Its confusing to the students just as much as to me because they don't understand what has happened or how their parents/teachers/leaders/society have failed them.
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.
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…
It is such an immense amount of labor. Now i know why people regurgitate the same content everywhere or dont bother
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.
Are those traits what we’re testing for, or are we testing for knowledge of the subject?
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1. Give students a list of about 100 questions in advance, more than you could memorise. Some were simple like “write down the formula for X”, some were more complex like “derive the backprop update algorithm”.
2. Pick the first question difficulty based on the student’s assignment grades
3. If they go to it right, pick a harder question, otherwise an easier one. If you aren’t sure whether they really understand, interrogate them about the answer, ask follow up questions etc.
4. Choose a grade based on which questions they got right.
Firstly this was highly effective at making students actually learn the material because most were worried enough about embarrassing themselves in front of the professor that they prepared well. But also, it was extremely fair because it’s essentially impossible to cheat and fake what you know.
I suspect many professors would avoid this because it’s harder to justify the grades at the end to a third party. But if you record the exams, and the student is clearly failing to answer simple questions, it’s quite hard for them to argue they were treated unfairly.
Of all the written exams I’ve seen and taken, I’ve never seen a process as fair or effective as these oral exams.
I know you didn't quite say that, but to be clear: Fairness isn't defined by someone being able to argue that they were treated unfairly. You still have room for bias in how you treat weaknesses in student answers, and few students are going to give perfect answers for everything. And even without any specific-to-the-student bias I'm going to be more consistent in grading the same question if I go through a stack of written answers en-bloc than if I grade replies with hours or days inbetween.
Randomized questions also has potential for bias that feels like it could be stronger than question selection for a written exam.
That's not to say there isn't value in doing oral exams, but they are not the solution for everything either.
All of these problems with academia are rooted in the fact it's a mass education system designed to teach hundreds if not thousands of people all at once.
- suspected/known cheaters - students who missed exams due to illness - times in the course where we needed to get a good grip on whether our students understood the coursework the way we'd taught it
It was scary for a lot of students, especially the ones without great English, but it was always, in my view, incredibly fair.
edit: based on your comment history you're also in Australia - I have a feeling we might be talking about the same place :)
The bias is both ways. Some teachers/examiners decide on the spot which questions to ask. Not all questions are the same. Some are easier and depending on the sympathy one can get one. Sometimes due to lack of accountability I even experienced complete dummy exams - a reason for which I decided to drop off from one. In college there was known strategy around one exam to not take part in written one as it was hellishly hard but instead go for oral one, where exam consisted of simply showing up.
This goes other way around, too. E.g. powerful member of exam committee of exam I took long time ago commission was infamous for failing people if not bribed in a very specific manner (not cash to hand but require buying specific set of services from family member). I dismissed that as malicious rumors but it proved to be true. I wasn’t failed but was scored inadequately which slowed my career progress for next few years.
I was told by academic staff foolproof strategies for failing students on oral exams. Like provide quick series of questions from various areas of topic, when they stumble due to stress finish them off with few extra ones. Other - ask questions so deep and profound they’ll either omit the details or start argue on ambiguity which are both enough reasons to fail.
There was small scandal about PhD exam recordings (which are obligatory) being purged 10 days after the exam, even though one of failed student decided to fight the result. Due to lack of evidence the exam result was held valid.
It really depends what kind of person is doing the exam. I’ve been always told that if one wants to skip exam they should go for oral instead of written one. Currently many are recorded but as they are widely used there’s minuscule chance they’ll ever be reviewed, and I recommend reviewing any piece of video if you think it’s easy. Find 3 seconds on 90 minutes video where student hands envelopes to the committee.
People on generally aren’t nice and while there is a sentiment for the teachers they aren’t any more special than and other group. You get lazy, power hungry or simply malicious people there too. And thus written record is a safe two way.
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.