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.
As an advisor of PhD students I've learned that both things are important in different amounts. Much of what our education system measures right now is "willingness to work really hard from a young age." When I meet students from top-tier institutions I see a lot of this: it's really impressive. I also see a good deal of of selection for what I'd consider raw problem-solving ability. I see a smaller degree of selection for raw creativity.
The most creative students I've met have been the ones that didn't accumulate credentials, and often suffered because of (possibly undiagnosed) ADHD. They did well when they found their passion, either because they found it later in life or because they really, really cared about it. Our system doesn't do as well with these people, but they can usually make their way through.
Unfortunately there's a downside to this: all the creativity in the world isn't going to help you if you can't execute. A brilliant idea only takes you so far. And gaining sufficient background to have brilliant ideas is often an even more demanding task, which passion alone doesn't suffice for. I don't exactly know what to do about all this. What I do know is that a system that bases future success on how well individuals do at age 16 is fundamentally, profoundly stupid... And I wish I had a better one.
I know this is harsh but if you have ADHD, difficulty prioritizing work or are disorganised to the extent that you can't perform academically at the required level to complete a degree then you shouldn't be wasting your money and time going to university and should instead look for something that better suits your talents.
I see where you are coming from in that there is only so much burden on the teacher that would be reasonable accommodation. However I think it comes across as harsh because many of these students could successfully complete a degree if they received adequate treatment from a healthcare provider.
People sometimes get diagnosed with ADHD in their 30s. It's not that they are incapable of doing things, depending on the kind of ADHD they have, they might just not feel any drive to do it, or have no sense for deadlines whatsoever. It can take years to get into the habits which help you overcome it.
It's their money and time to decide if an allocation of same is wasted or not; your opinion of what is or is not a waste of someone else's time is not relevant.
Source: extreme ADD sufferer who has "wasted" tons of time swimming upstream to learn to do things easy for some others but insanely difficult for me, simply because I wanted to.
Ironically, measures like discussed in this article can actually make classes much harder for students with ADHD. Keeping on top of busy work, maintaining a tight schedule, etc. is not easy with executive functioning issues, and could lead to a student that actually did learn the material and performed well on exams receiving a bad final grade.
This may be more relevant to "twice exceptional" students that can still pick up on the material without following the whole class. There is certainly heterogeneity and I don't mean to speak for all ADHD students in what they would prefer. I just think it is funny your comment could be read as supporting either side of the debate without the parent context. And given the parent context I have to say I disagree.
Now whether the hand holding of attendance policies and weekly assignments and the like is better for the class on the whole I can't comment on. It's not an easy tradeoff and I don't think the decision should be made primarily based on how people with ADHD perform, unless you are teaching a class where it is disproportionately represented.
Attention deficit disorder is particularly interesting because these people actually have hyperattention when it comes to stuff that's interesting to them. They'll have trouble even starting boring tasks like homework but they can easily maintain their attention for 12 hours straight on some programming problem if that's what they enjoy thinking about. They are likely to be incompatible with this mass education system where people sit in a classroom to listen to lectures, especially if there's associated hyperactivity.
>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?
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…
As an CS instructor, my solution for that was to have a skeleton level of unit tests but to switch in a full suite once the deadline passed. Your grade was based on passing the full tests.
Practically everyone who "played fair" got the same grade for both. Occasionally, I would add a test that tripped everybody up and I'd have to go see what happened. Anybody who overfitted, however, got crushed.
My favorite assignment was always the next to last project (before end of semester deadlines start getting crushing). I created only a single unit test to verify the test suite runner was functional, and the students had to submit the rest of the pre-deadline unit tests. And I would switch in my full suite at the deadline. I told people that anybody who passed that suite would get bonus points that everybody was always bugging me for.
It was always absolute chaos. I only ever had one student pass the switched in suite (he got some nice bonus points out of that--didn't need them, of course). I would then reopen the project for a week (I planned for it) to let everybody else clean up their work and resubmit.
You could see and feel the difference in the students after that assignment. The fact that testing was an integral part of programming and that testing was, in and of itself, a difficult problem was a revelation--and not a particularly welcome one.
I'm currently dealing with a kind of similar situation, and honestly I find it a little odd -- I get questions from students which I'm pretty sure are honest and asked in good faith, but they seem to think they are very close to having solved the problem, despite having just over-fitted most of the tests.
It is possible that the problem is poorly written (I'm just a TA, I didn't write it, and it looks pretty clear to me), or it is possible that I'm just really gullible and they aren't actually asking in good faith (I'm a trusting person, but I've been doing this kind of work for a while and so I've seen most of the dishonest questions, this doesn't look like one to me). I dunno, I think I'll just chalk it up to the long tail of weirdness that can occur when dealing with a bunch of students.
My guess is CS1 is often the first time a student has been given a problem they have to actually reason about to solve (rather than follow a script).
This is hard to understand and adapt to and stresses out students that have been trained (for years) to learn the expected script.
You eventually get to this level in math, but only way later in post graduate work (unless you’re exceptional).
I think there’s likely a benefit in explicitly tackling this directly for young/new students, it might help them see the bigger picture. At least the earnest ones struggling to do well anyway.
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.
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.
There could be teachers who are fanatics about some political issue, and if you even hint you might disagree with them they'll try to lash out. I also recall some university level class (I didn't take it but a friend did) where religion was a topic and the professor intentionally set very loaded questions in online tutorials. While it's fair to ask people to question their own assumptions, it often seems the people most keen on this are ones who would become very irate if their own assumptions got questioned.
Perhaps that why some groups of people tend to gravitate to STEM, where teacher bias is less likely to have an impact.
Ah, the student didn't know one of the secret college hacks: Teachers with an ideological axe to grind are almost always the easiest graders, because they can be manipulated by dog whistles, and need to be liked. I got my best grades in the obligatory religion classes.
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.
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.
The whole thrust behind this article is that grading and testing is a bunch of crap. And that's entirely correct, IMHO.
We should restructure our whole Western (and Eastern, for all I know) education system on the lines of Ivan Illich's book Deschooling Society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deschooling_Society which (simplified) suggests that everyone gets an educational grant that they can spend about which and who they study with they can freely choose. But it is not going to happen, and we will stay with the whole grading and testing bullshit.
That's putting the cart before the horse, people need teaching to learn how to spend, trial and error is the slowest learning strategy and should only be used when there are no alternatives
That is not at all what I got out of the article. The main thrust is that policies that are apparently dumb to non-teachers are not actually dumb. They are well-justified responses to the ways students will attempt to defeat the purpose of the system.
Yes, people will attempt to defeat systems to their own benefit. That is why these policies discussed in the article exist -- to harden the system to such attempts.
"Wrong" in your comment is underspecified. It depends what you mean by the word.
I do not understand how self directed learning like this is expected to work at all for children.
If you replace a high school with letting the students do whatever interests them, a small fraction might study something, and the majority will spend the time watching tiktok, playing league or legends / fortnite, listening to music, etc. maybe you think that letting kids do whatever they want for “education” like this is better, but IMO this proposal is much worse than the current system of directing students to spend time on things that are moderately useful to society and determined to be valuable to intellectual development
Evaluation has always been the biggest challenge for teachers in the tech industry, because education is largely driven by assessment (I've been teaching IT for 23 years now).
But things are changing, and the pandemic is speeding that process. A decade ago James Paul Gee outlined where we want to go, and I think it will largely come to fruition before the end of this decade: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNfPdaKYOPI
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.
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.
Personally I always preferred quizzes for that. I've always been a very strong autodidact though, there are probably people who prefer getting dragged through things by homework.
I think it is mostly the latter. At least -- I rarely got useful feedback other than a little x (best case it would be on the error, more likely on the questions).
Personally, when grading I keep a file of all my feedback so I can easily copy-paste it into their feedback files (since everything is digital nowadays). For a given assignment, usually only a handful of mistakes are made (repeated by each student). If anything, having the file makes my grading more consistent -- same points for the same error.
I'm under the impression that this is a not-unpopular system, but try as I might, I cannot get anyone else to adopt it.
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?
I get what you're saying but I also disagree with it as a generalization, and say it would depend on the subject. For theoretical subjects, an exam is about the only way to test your understanding. Memorization is not going to help you solve math problems.
I’m someone who crammed their way through 4 years of computer engineering exams at a challenging university. It’s possible. It’s hard and the worst few weeks of life before exams, but it’s possible.
Can confirm. There's 0 retention. Maybe if I kept cramming over an extended period of time I could retain it. Typically though I stop after taking the exam so within about a week or two things I thought I understood disappeared.
I was a physics undergrad who hopped into a few grad classes, and to be honest I was terrible at homework and great at exams (mostly due to some youthful obstinance on putting the time in on homework). At the time I believed that the exams showed who really knew the material and who applied time to solve the problem. With some time past I see that the larger/tougher problem sets were where the real challenge was.
I recall a few unique problem sets from Graduate QM such as
- Derive from first principles the color of the sky.
- Prove that charge must be Quantized if there is one magnetic mono-pole in the universe.
The exam questions were far simpler than the theory questions asked in the problem sets. The work for the first question easily totals > 20 hours of pen and paper time.
> The work for the first question easily totals > 20 hours of pen and paper time.
I guess grad students generally take less coursework than undergrads, but how could a professor expect students to have 20+ hours on hand to solve a single question, given other demands on a student's time?
> Memorization is not going to help you solve math problems.
On the contrary, memorization is the way most people I know got through most of their math classes, at least through calculus and linear algebra. You memorize the steps by rote repetition without really learning why they work, then the test is mostly an exercise in guessing which steps and formulas you should apply to the given problem.
Is that really memorization? Memorizing multiplication tables is one thing. Practicing the techniques over and over isn't memorization imo. In grad level maths, you are solving proofs pretty much, you can't just memorize facts in a textbook to do that.
It's memorization insofar as you can do all of that practice and become proficient at solving math problems without really knowing what they mean or why the steps work. You're regurgitating what you were taught, not making connections and using your understanding.
You used math as an example of a subject where tests are used to check understanding. I disagree, because most people that I know who did well in math did so by being good human computers, not by understanding anything.
I expect that doesn't continue to be true at the grad level, but most people don't get that far.
Many engineering programs have their most challenging courses set up as semester long projects.
In chemical engineering the final boss is the process design class, a project where you are asked to produce a chemical substance with desired properties at scale without losing money. Almost everything you learned during the program has to be used to pull it off. Programming, numerical methods, CAD, Transport phenomena, kinetics, physical chemistry, thermodynamics. It really is the best all around test for a chemical engineer.
While this is feasible for the senior year, I am not sure if you can convert for example calculus 1 into a semester long project.
Calculus 1 is an interesting subject as there certainly is a degree of memorization required (you can't re-derive the derivative of x^n every time it comes up in your career). There is a similar to intro to Organic Chemistry, Algorithms and DataStructures, intro to programming etc. But the goal is to build detailed understanding of these methods more so than memorization.
On the other hand we live in a world where access to derivative rules is trivial. I'd imagine in 1800 mathematicians would assume that you would need to have multiplication tables to be productive and not reduced to pen and paper their entire career.
I wonder if there is an opportunity to push more challenging material into the earlier classes and make them more project like.
I am currently in the last few days before submitting my Chemical Engineering Design Project (I'm designing a packed bed methanol reactor), and yes I can confirm it is absolutely fucking brutal and hands down the hardest thing I've done in my life so far
>tests simply estimate whether someone has memorized the material sufficiently for a short 1 hour exam.
I feel a deep sadness reading this. Is your computer science curriculum more accurately described as a software engineering curriculum?
Memorization should be virtually irrelevant on most computer science exams. Proofs should be core to computer science exams; the ability to reason is the most fundamental skill to all scientists, especially for fields which are tightly coupled to mathematics.
> Is your computer science curriculum more accurately described as a software engineering curriculum?
Given that most CS students want to go into software engineering, it would surprise me if this isn't the case for most CS curriculums. In my experience CS students don't generally want to be scientists, so most CS classes are more application-oriented than proof-oriented.
Schools are starting to provide separate software engineering programs, but we're not all the way there yet.
I disagree, but at least you didn't use the word "regurgitate".
I always find it funny when people say that tests are just about "regurgitating" information. It's such a cliché that just gets regurgitated in every argument over testing, as though it's visceral imagery actually gives it any real weight.
Tests can assess whether the student learnt the material covered in class. They can also test problem solving abilities.
Assignments test conscientiousness, and the ability to make good design trade-offs when working with a single customer who is buying 100 different custom products and doesn't really care about any of them.
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.
It does sound like a pointless arms race (between different courses)
I majored in Law but took a couple CS courses on the side so I saw the contrast between traditions in different departments. CS courses had a constant stream of non-trivial graded homework. Even if I knew the materials it took me quite some time to complete them. Law courses usually one essay that counts for ~15-25% (or less frequently, a mid-term test), and the rest is the final exam.
Obviously, both methods work (I guess). But if you're already in an environment where courses give out lots of graded assignments, your concerns definitely make sense.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> it seems possible the teacher's instructions were confusing.
Yes; I've been on both sides. I've written assignments that I thought were clear and unambiguous, only to find that a significant number of students misunderstood what I meant. They weren't intentionally trying to make the problems easier, they just weren't sure what I wanted. (And, of course, who is going to interpret an ambiguous problem so as to make more work for themselves? A few students will do it both ways -- the easier interpretation and the harder one -- but most won't.)
And on the other side, I've taken continuing education classes taught by other teachers where the instructions were confusing, ambiguous, or sometimes just plain impossible to follow ("You'll find the answers to this quiz in the article you just read." but the article was revised and now uses different terminology from the quiz.)
> who is going to interpret an ambiguous problem so as to make more work for themselves?
I did.
In fact I always tried to find a unique or novel solution to my problem sets, ambiguous or not. (If the problem set contained a hint I tried mightily to not use the hint, I'd always try to replace a proof by contradiction with a constructive proof etc...)
My marks suffered for it. I even almost failed a first year exam cos I didn't want to perform a grody 4x4 matrix multiplication. Later the prof said: "Your exam was crap, but you came up with a better answer for problem four than I'd thought of."
It's still one of my most cherished memories from undergrad.
I always hated the: "Will this be on the test" type of attitude. Are you there to learn and break new ground or to just get marks? I had crappy marks but my work spoke for itself.
Students should put more effort into creating their own body of work. If they spent half the energy they put into finding tricks and gaming the system, they'd be much better off for it.
I was never one to game the system until I was failing 3 classes while on academic probation (2 Fs would have gotten me kicked out). Then I gamed the shit out of the system.
That was my breaking point. Others it's losing a scholarship; others, getting a B.
I find that students talk to each other and spread interpretations of the assignment. They might be correct, they might not - either way the interpretation spreads (never through anything like 'official' course forums set up for students to ask about interpretations, of course). They've also gone through shared experiences in other courses beforehand and will often simply come up with the same incorrect interpretation. For 5 years the basic assignment was clear and easily understood, then the next year it's almost universally misinterpreted. Those shared misunderstandings have easily outnumbered creative interpretations to help grades in my experience.
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.
There's a deeper reason for not allowing cheating: you are building cheaters. People who cheat in courses will cheat in industry, why wouldn't they? They normalize this behavior. So you end up with major corporations that steal, politicians that lie, etc.
If for example, Harvard and Yale's law schools stopped rampant cheating. Maybe so many of their graduates wouldn't go on to routinely lie to the public?
I don't teach because it's some sort of penance that I need to pay. I teach because I like it and I want to help build smart humans. Not contribute to our society degenerating.
I would be willing to bet that most of the politicians/ceos/etc that currently lie to everyone's face and went to harvard/yale didn't need to cheat their way through and didn't bother more often than not.
just out of curiosity, did they cheat more than the average cheater? I knew a few of people who cheated in college but it was infrequent and varied by class, friend group, etc.
> 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.
So instead you force all your students to do busy work, like signing a statement accepting no grade if they use the wrong size bread board or photographing the breadboard next to a compass to prove it's the alignment?
To me this sounds like lazy teachers punishing students rather than working to solve the problem.
> 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.
"Creatively misinterpreting" instructions means to me that the students are intentionally doing this (to get away with doing less work, or whatever). I think marking them down and moving on is educating them: it very quickly tells them that sticking to the letter of the law but ignoring the spirit is not ok, and will not be tolerated. It's pretty good preparation for being in the real world, too.
Regardless, giving ridiculously over-specified assignments will not be good preparation for the real world, where many (most?) things are under-specified and ambiguous. Adults need to learn how to read between the lines, interpret things properly, be comfortable asking follow-up questions for things that are not clear, and just figure things out when such clarity doesn't exist.
> They also complain about the task which in effect waste your time or give you trouble.
That sounds annoying, but to me it feels like over-specifying tasks in this way is the opposite of education. And it feels like the time dealing with the misinterpreters wouldn't be wasted; it would be spent actively teaching students that the world is not black and white, there's often no instruction manual, and that getting out of doing work through "creative misinterpretation" will not get you far.
It seems like a good learning experience to get an answer wrong because you didn't succeed in interpreting the question. Nobody takes pains to describe things in minute detail in real life.
> 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.
OTOH, I've definitely taken classes with years out-of-date syllabi. It is a funny thing, where some instructors consider it to be the fundamental contract between them and the student, and others consider it to be an annoying bit of extra busywork.
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
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".
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.
Yeah that's why you can have a catch-all rule like "TA is conferred final discretion on evaluations"
Though as I said, some things are good to have in writing, if it's an exception that happens with some frequency or some corner case that's not as rare as thought
> I've seen salesmen who couldn't multiply two three-digit numbers together turn into Albert Einstein when the year's bonus structure got published.
I kinda think you are arguing against your point, here. IMO these sorts of sales people are a result of over-specifying homework questions to this degree, because they haven't been shut down or washed out at the stage where you find out they can't deal with a reasonable (or even too-low) level of detail.
But the problems you talk about in your first paragraph are real problems, and the solution is that the entirety of the school's administration needs to take a zero-tolerance approach with this sort of behavior. Rules-lawyering should be shut down at every step of the way. Yes, that might result in some actual lawsuits, which will suck up time and money, but I think that's just the price of educating people. And might still end up being less trouble overall.
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.
"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.
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.
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 ;-)
> So maybe the problem is simply, that tests are linked to grades ;-)
I agree with this. Students cannot afford to get questions wrong and learn from their mistakes. A bad grade can alter a person's future, there's too much at risk.
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.
> 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.
That two things both involve politics does not, by itself, imply they cannot be usefully discussed separately. You need to actually argue that the issues the author discusses go away or become moot given the imperfection of real-world evaluation. It is not enough to argue that the world would look different were perfect evaluation possible.
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
They still outperform other mechanisms we have of resource allocation. They're massively parallel systems with ample signaling of different agents' state.
And the worst corner cases of externalities can be mostly offset with proper regulation, even if we struggle to do it.
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.
You don't need oral arguments throughout the process. One at the end of the course is sufficient. It is then up to the students to learn the requisite knowledge in the given time period.
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.
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.
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.
I am really looking forward to doing that as well with my daughter when she is older. Narrating books well with distinct character voices is a lot of fun!
> 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?
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.
There is a difference between "for breakfast every now and then" and "all day every day". I have a feeling that those who would be putting themselves under the risk of using glucose monitors tend to fall more into the latter group.
> 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.
Luckily some of those people might have recognized themselves doing the same thing when they were younger and accepted your behaviour for nothing more than youth.
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 feel ya. As a childless person of the same age, I have several of those things you mentioned. I count them as blessings but also see that there has been a big, big trade made for them. I see that my siblings have made different choices with different blessings. I suppose this is just life.
> and everybody watches too much streaming video, and sleep and exercise are things I do only after everything else is done
I don't know, this kind of feels like the adult version of ice cream for breakfast.
Maybe what you're describing is the difference between dreaming something and actually doing it. There's nothing forcing any of us to watch a ton of streaming video other than our own choices, although it's hard to decide to go out and do something different once you're in that habit.
It's more that my kids watch too much, because my wife and I need breaks to get other things done or rest. Not way too much, and it's carefully curated content, but it's still one of those things that I thought, before having kids, I wouldn't allow. But now I get it. Once they stop napping, it really is a cheap way to buy a couple hours of peace and quiet.
Upon further reflection: What you wrote is actually central to the idea that I'm trying to express. When I was younger, I thought that I'd always make different choices and live my life "better" than older people I knew (e.g. going to the gym everyday for a serious workout), but once I grew up I understood why most people do what they do (e.g. working out irregularly, because having so many other demands on their time and energy makes it hard, or due to injury), and now I'm living much the same way in many areas of life for the same reasons. That's the sad part.
"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.
The quote isn't about his temperament but his knowledge, so I think that interpretation is a bit of a stretch.
I think the same kind of quote would absolutely apply in exactly the same way to temperament though. The 14 year old thought his dad was a jerk who mellowed out by the time he was 21, the reality again being that the biggest change was actually the child's temperament.
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
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.
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).
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 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. :)
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.
Not GP, but I suspect that increased emotional maturity would prevent one from lashing out, overreacting, underreacting, being unable to emotionally support one's child, etc.
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 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.
Speaking of dinner time, the negative effects of all the boomer moms and their trendy diets on young girls at the time. Weight Watchers. Just the phrase “Weight Watchers” being in the house and in the air.
No kidding. My wife talks about this a lot actually - how basically every mom she was around constantly talked about diets, losing weight, I need to fit in x or y outfit, etc. Just constant (usually negative) body talk all the time by adult women.
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.
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.
“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.”
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.
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.
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.
Maybe I was just unlucky, but that isn't my retroactive judgement on my childhood at all. My experience was one of mostly adults making me do something that is really down to subjective preference because that was their preference. And now that I'm an adult and can make my own choices I'm much happier about it.
If a rational and emotionally mature adult still believes that the decisions their parents made were bad then there’s a much higher chance that they’re correct (compared to when a kid believes such things)
I think is how it is supposed to be - parents making decisions for their kids using their best judgement (preferences). It is ok for kids to disagree when they grow. It is less ok to make a problem out of it. Most parents really try hard to make rational decisions using information and background they have. Criticizing them for making mistakes does not make sense to me. We all humans and we make mistakes.
> I think is how it is supposed to be - parents making decisions for their kids using their best judgement
Yes.
> (preferences).
No. The parent is supposed to use their best judgment about what is best for the kid given the kid's reasonable long-term preferences [1]--not the parent's preferences. Or, to put it another way, what is best for the actual kid, not what would be best for the parents if they were in the kid's position. The two are often very different.
[1] I say "reasonable long-term preferences" to make it clear that I am not saying parents should indulge a kid's preferences for sugary foods instead of nutritious ones, lots of TV instead of a better mix of intellectual activities, and no exercise. I'm talking about cases where the adult the kid will grow up to be will genuinely say they are different from the parents in this respect and wish their preferences as a kid had been respected.
I think we are on the same page. A parent has a mental model of the world and the kid inside it. Based on this model the parent makes projections and take actions. The problem is this mental model which never the same between the parent and the kid.
> Or, to put it another way, what is best for the actual kid, not what would be best for the parents if they were in the kid's position.
Most parents act in the best interest of a kid, not themselves. The outcome varies because parents model of the world usually flawed in many ways and they actually make bad decision thinking they have made good ones. E.g. my friend is obsessed with pre-school development. This is likely because she perceive herself as not smart and wants her son to be smart. She force her son to exercise, he can read and do some math at the age of 3. Long term this is bad for the kid. Unfortunately she cannot realize this. Doing so would require a level of knowledge and self-awareness she does not have. I her eyes she makes perfect decisions.
The mid-20s transition is the most obvious, I think simply because teenagers so often incredibly hot headed. But I believe emotional development continues throughout life as people acquire more experience with age (at least until senility kicks in.)
I think it’s inarguable that experience is valuable, and age correlates very well with experience up to that mid-20s point, but around that point people start to settle into a groove and the extra n years experience is actually just the same year’s experience repeated n times.
But stupidity is relative and stupid children are more common. The heuristic can be reworded as adult parents are more knowledgeable and capable than children.
Put the average child in the position of the average parent and you will see the difference.
> The heuristic can be reworded as adult parents are more knowledgeable and capable than children.
I think that's true in general, but when it comes to making decisions about the child I think that has to be weighted against another heuristic that's often but not always true: that people know what's best for themselves better than other people do. I think people often wrongly neglect that principle when it comes to children assuming that they don't know what they're talking about without taking the time to listen and understand their point.
"Children" aren't a homogenous group. Neither are "parents." And "stupid" is not a single metric.
Pre-teens don't have practical adult skills and have poor or non-existent emotional regulation. Teens have some adult skills, are learning or experimenting with others, and have patchy self-regulation.
So it makes perfect sense not to allow kids to do things that are dangerous to others, and to limit what teens can do with strong guide rails.
But when it comes to world view and insight, teens can certainly be wiser than their parents. They may not know what to do with their insight, but they're not wrong - just inexperienced.
Meanwhile many adults are hopelessly naive and may be actively self-harming, especially politically and culturally. And when adults have addiction and/or Cluster B issues, even fairly young kids are more likely to be reliable and responsible.
I had the same reaction, but from context, I think what he meant was "cases where the conflict is due to the stupidity of the parent instead of the stupidity of the kid". The base case is that kids are stupid, because kids are supposed to be stupid.
You are making very sweeping claims with next to no evidence (ironically, a very un-wise thing to do!).
The more I observe the more I understand good parents are exceedingly rare. The vast majority of parents fuck up one way or another. Which shouldn't necessarily be surprising, parenting is very hard!
Of course, if you're an adult of average intelligence, then 50% of parents will be dumber than you. Parents who are dumber than you are would not be rare at all.
But I'm not comparing adults with other adults. I'm comparing adults with children. I would be surprised to find a child that was smarter than their parents; it happens, but it's rare.
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
I think people find it very easy to judge parenting from the outside and/or with hindsight, whether their own or other peoples.
I know that my children will wish I did things differently. Whether that is location, discipline, activities, internet access etc etc. I know they will wish I made more reasoned choices in the moment. That I was never tired, distracted, frustrated. That I let them spend their time as they wished not as I feel is best for them.
Parenting is a parade of tough choices using vague heuristics and life experience. Being well intentioned is a bloody good start.
I fully expect to make many mistakes as a parent, and there's a lot of things I could have done better.
As a child though, many decisions my parents made were with the view of demonizing outside groups and "protecting" their kids from any contrarian viewpoints. Catching up socially took years, and there are some extreme harms that I still deal with to this day. My goal is to make sure my kids have a well-rounded social life, a consideration for others, and an understanding of a gamut of ideas.
No shit sherlock. Here are some more hot takes for you:
- too much screen time is bad
- hitting children is generally counter productive
- feeding a toddler highly processed foods full of sugar is not a good idea
Armed with this incredible wisdom you can go off and spend more time thinking how stupid and bad other people are at parenting. Have fun!
This isn't about "other peopke" though, recognising that your own parents are bad parents is very important, not sure why you try to dismiss that. People telling you that you are wrong, your parents actually did good, is just gaslighting and damaging.
Have you spent much time interacting with children of abusive parents? I encourage you to go do some research a learn how bad it can get and how difficult it can be for them to struggle towards acknowledging and coming to terms with that abuse.
Ah, there it is. You somehow feel personally offended that someone might not like the important choices made for them.
Sorry this conversation frustrates you. Guess you're still dealing with toddlers which is not something I had considered until now. I thought we were talking about much, much older children. Teens even.
It never adds anything meaningful to a discussion. Most often, it’s used by someone with little or no experience with a role or responsibility judging someone who is trying to carry out that role, however imperfectly.
> I think people find it very easy to judge parenting from the outside and/or with hindsight, whether their own or other peoples.
Surely it is easier in hindsight. Nevertheless, there’s this golden rule of “parents should always be forgiven” when if fact it should be “children should not be forced to keep their connection to parents if they don’t want to”.
You, as a parent, are not giving them the “chance to live”, you are bringing them to a world where they probably want to be happy, and if you failed to make them happy they should not be forced to keep you in their life because “a parent gave them the privilege of living”.
Yes parenting is hard. Yes I understand parents make unoptimal decisions all the time. That’s their problem.
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.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. Are you suggesting that we should excuse parental abuse, because a child would be a worse parent than an adult?
not at all. Some people are objectively bad parents.
I'm just that in general, the heuristic is accurate that parents have better decision making than their children. The very real counter examples (eg abuse) don't negate the trend.
have been intentional about not falling into the same behaviors with my kids
Some behaviour is just plain borked, but other behaviour is just more nuanced.
An example, some kids are extroverted, others intro. What works for one, may not be the same for another.
You may need to constantly work with an extrovert, so they are eventually, as an adult, be in control of their own exuberance. And with an introvert, work with them, trying to help them expand thier ability to interact.
An ability for both to live in a shared society.
But imagine a parent who was an extrovert, was constantly upset at, as a child, being told to calm down, or stop asking 1000 questions per second. Or even, just "give another a moment to talk".
So they, with an extrovert, do not do such things. And the extrovert does not learn control, and dicipline, and to give others some space sometimes, and becomes less capable of interacting with others as an adult.
Of course, this is a poor example, and poorly phrased, but I hope my point comes across.
We should focus more strongly on what is correct for the child, not how a parent may have misapplied childhood lessons to ourselves. For those lessons may be right for your child, even if not for oneself.
But there’s a reason for the generalization. Some parents are inadequate and abusive, but virtually every kid is an impulsive and short-sighted creature whose brain isn’t fully developed until their mid 20s.
It's a matter of probability like everything in life.
A good parent can lead to good outcomes, say, 60% of the time. A bad parent, 20% of the time. The numbers are random, but that's the idea. In retrospect, the vast majority of parents I knew when I was a kid were "bad," not in the sense of abusive, but in the sense of having no idea. They didn't have any clue about their own lives, how many could they have about their children?
They didn't even want to inquire and then decide what was best for their children. Too many parents are given a pass because some sort of "sacred virtue" is assigned to parenting and any mistake that does not include beating their children is somehow forgiven or given a pass.
The "they did the best they could" is a cop-out: did they do the best they could given their laziness, poor impulse control, vision that doesn't go beyond the fence of their backyard?
For example, I was an excellent student, the best in the school, in terms of awards and recognition. Not Einstein, mind you, but someone they should have identified as very talented from a scholastic/intellectual standpoint. My parents never saw this in me, for some reason, because now, I would immediately identify as very talented someone who did as well as I did.
My parents never hit me or told me I was stupid or anything like that. They simply acknowledged that I was a good student and that was it. If they had said, this woman is talented, we need to support her, find her mentors, send her to the best universities, I have little doubt that I would have been very successful.
I was successful anyway, after traveling a winding and long road, but my path to professional and financial success could have been (these are my a priori odds) much easier and faster.
Now, you might say, if they had acted differently, maybe you wouldn't be here, etc., which is a very defeatist way of thinking. Their process was wrong and for no other reason than their "intellectual laziness".
>the best in the school, in terms of awards and recognition. Not Einstein, mind you
I thought the conventional wisdom was that Einstein wasn't academically accomplished until his great works were published.
A lot of your story reminds me of my own but I've reached a different conclusion. Specifically I suspect I would have been accepted into certain magnet schools (pre college) with the sourcing and simple suggestion of taking practice tests. If I had a kid that I suspected would be capable of excelling in that kind of environment that is exactly what I would do to help improve the odds of said kid achieving that goal.
But I don't resent my parents for not bothering to help in this way. I'm honestly not sure why but I suspect it has to do with an unspoken and mutual lack of respect for "academics". The system is so easily gamed, and a gameable system is a flawed one.
i think you're making the mistake of judging them with hindsight. they made the best possible decision with the resources they had, their mental model and their risk tolerance and belief in the world
"they made the best possible decision with the resources they had, their mental model and their risk tolerance and belief in the world"
Can this not be said for any action, any thought, including, if we are talking about parenting, beating the kids up? "It is the way I was brought up, my father always told me, a few slaps and they'll learn!". "I was feeling so alone and I could not control myself when they were crying, I am so sorry I decided to use the stove gas to put them to sleep, that's what my grandmother used to do!".
My belief is that that kind of "therapist's speech", which as becoming more popular as therapy became the fashionable path for people wanting to make changes in their lives, of "you did your best", "those were the tools that you had available at the time", has caused many to avoid their responsibilities by paying therapists (people who got "second hand smoke" did not even had to pay) like times back they used priest to carry the same function and getting the same result: absolution and comfort.
Usually when someone has abusive parents, they become abusive themselves.
It is a good idea that they get professional help in order to break the cycle.
>and have been intentional about not falling into the same behaviors with my kids.
This is usually the problem. You are intentional on NOT falling into THE SAME behaviors, and probably will overreact on the opposite behaviors that is as abusive as the original.
Just because something is bad does not mean that the radically opposite is good.
It is not a good idea focusing on what not to do instead of on what to do.
E.g I have seen parents that were too constrained as kids removing all limits for their children. The kids getting into bad friendships and destroying their lives as a result of the neglect from their parents.
Or someone educated as a Catholic with sexual restrictions promote sexual promiscuity on their children, with very bad outcomes.
Personally I find the solution is to meet and hang out with very diverse crowds.
I find that whenever you make a decision, you are really sampling from what you’ve already seen.
If haven’t seen a lot, your decision making is really constrained. If you’ve only seen bad decisions, you will make a lot of the same ones. You won’t even know that they’re bad.
The hardest part of life really is figuring out what you don’t know yet. And it’s really, really hard.
My great grandfather used to beat my grandfather - going as far as to stab him through the leg with a pitchfork on occasion.
My grandfather, partly from trauma and partly from what I believe is hereditary mental illness, swung back the other way, peacing out instead of parenting, leaving my father to get into a lot of trouble as a kid, and witness some different traumatic things.
My father swung back towards being unable to control his anger, and with frequent mood swings between depression and rage. Although, aside from spanking he didn't beat his kids, just pets and walls.
I'm the first generation that has been working towards treating my hereditary mental issues - taking mental health meds, going to counseling. I'm hopeful that I can break the cycle, but enough of a realist to realize I am lacking on a lot of parenting things that I need to learn from outside sources instead.
Fortunately your children will almost certainly find new ways to critique and disparage your decisions as a parent and their respect for you also diminish as they grow older and calcify their opinions of what makes a good parent.
You're missing the point here. Ideally the 3rd gen kids will grow up to realize their 2nd gen parents made reasonable decisions even though they disagreed as kids, just as the cliché says (and like so many testimonials out there).
e.g. If gen 1 only used witty condescending remarks to teach their children that they're dumb, then 2nd gen can realize that this severely damages their kids' self-esteem. If gen 2 recobers from that abuse they may choose the path of taking their kids serioisly even with their shortcomings. The 3rd gen might take some kind of offense in that but there is less of a reason to grow in resentment towards gen 2 while they raise gen 3.
This assumes that the kids themselves actually learn and grow at some point.
Some don't. It may be that the parents overcorrect and never teach their kids right/wrong, or it could just be the kid being a problem, or any number of other issues.
People are not purely products of their parents behavior. You have not only genetic variation, but a lifetime of all the incredible complexity of life experience that happens outside the house and with all other humans. I could imagine these factors moving each person backwards and forwards along any scale of “progress” we chose to measure people by, generation by generation, at times overwhelming the positive or negative influence of their 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.
Totally agree. My mom might get roasted for the few times she swatted me on the ass, but nobody would say a word about her moving my brother and i to a place five hours away from our dad and huge extended family. I would take the former every day if it would have prevented the latter.
A similar thing happened to me. Except my parents decided, somehow, that moving one of us to live with my mom and the other to live with my dad five hours away was a good idea. I've tried to forgive them for doing this, but I'm not making much headway.
A helpful way to deal with childhood trauma, I've found, is to take a wide perspective. The speech that Tom Hanks as Walt Disney, who was abused by his father, gives in the 2013 movie "Saving Mr. Banks" beautifully encapsulates this idea and eloquently delivers this advice: overcome your past. Here is the full speech: https://moviewise.wordpress.com/2015/05/27/saving-mr-banks/
Thank you for responding, but I don't find this advice particularly helpful. Yes, I am tired. Yes, I would love to overcome my past. How does one go about doing that?
This quote also leaves out the second part of their conversation -- the speech's emotional climax -- where Disney tells Travers she needs to forgive herself. This doesn't apply to me. I have nothing to forgive myself for.
Not necessary; a child's pain tolerance is very low. The goal is not to hurt them, but to dissuade them through unpleasant stimulus. The spank doesn't even need to be very hard. But you knew this already
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.
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.)
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.
> 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'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?
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.
> 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.
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.)
Family members have babysat my kids, and this is a mistake I see all the time. If you tell kids not to do something, always tell them why. And be honest about it. It’s kids’ job to learn about the world, and it’s your job as a parent to teach them about it.
That's not a dumb rule, that's a bad explanation of a rule that may in fact be good.
"You can't stay up until midnight because I said so."
Few parents would argue that not letting them stay up until midnight is a dumb rule. But the example certainly has a bad explanation.
The problem with this entire thread is that without concrete examples everyone is imagining their own which, not coincidentally, happen to match their already existing world view.
That’s true, I guess I think bad explanations of good rules are insidious: they alienate kids and create an us-vs-them mentality. If parents stay up late but don’t allow their kids to stay up late, it seems like parents are entitled and even a five year old can sense entitlement.
Here’s the thing, though: it’s true that going to bed early is a good rule, and it’s also true that parents feel entitled; that their rules apply to their kids but not them. That’s one reason kids hate their parents - they often deserve it!
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).
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.
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.
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]
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.
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.
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.
Reminds me of a quote I read long ago - I think it was from Sartre - that I'll try paraphrase:
"Teaching in public schools suffers from the same problems as cooking in public cafeterias - and generally produces similarly mediocre results."
I don't buy into the sentiment that public education is a mistake, or even that it's outputs are generally mediocre. I do, however, think that the insight that public education is more akin to an industrial process than an interpersonal relationship holds some water.
For the most part I actually had wonderful teachers during my school career. What I bitterly disagreed with was a lot of the curriculum, and I knew they didn’t have a say in that.
So my question to educators here would be: Do you ever feel like you’re forced to teach topics you know won’t benefit students?
I teach high school English, so I have a greater degree of freedom in my curriculum development (there is no textbook. I create everything). That is actually not my issue.
My problems are mostly reality/logistical constraints. There is always more I could do, more I could give, more I could help every single student, but I would have to learn to freeze time or never sleep.
It’s unhealthy and irrational, but I feel shame for not giving more when I know what a kid needs but I circumstantially lack the capacity to give it to them.
> Do you ever feel like you’re forced to teach topics you know won’t benefit students?
Normally, professors teach things they have some expertise in, and they're biased to think that this is useful to students.
Besides, it's often very debatable whether something is useful or not. For instance, I used to teach things such as theory of computation, automata theory, and similar so-called theoretical classes. You could debate ad nauseam whether this benefits students or not. Some would argue it's useless and students should do more javascript labs, other think that these are the foundations of our field, unlike the latest JS framework which will be obsolete in 2 years.
Some of my colleagues go to great length to convince students that the class they teach is useful, but I'm not convinced this is necessary. I've noticed that students are happy as long as they think they learn something from the class, and that the class is neither too hard or too easy. They don't question the utility of the class if the teacher manages to make the topic fun. For instance, labs, exercices, exams, should be of gradual difficulty, so each student feels they can make progress. This is challenging to achieve when the class audience is heterogenous.
So rather then the choice of topic, what had happened to me was that I disagreed with the way the topic was taught. In my university, sometimes we would work in team with little saying on the class syllabus, labs, exams... This can be frustrating and I'd just leave the team.
Ha! As a pure mathematician-turned-software engineer, Theory of Computation was one of the few classes I took that remains even remotely applicable. At the time I thought it was really cool, and probably made CS a little more appealing.
Conversely, in my current role as a backend/systems/researchy person, a JS class would broaden my horizons a bit like a literature class might, but I think both would be equally useful to my current job.
My current role involves analyzing and understanding customer-provided SQL. Although vanilla SQL is not Turing complete, in the past I’ve definitely decided to deprioritize thinking about certain approaches due to growing complexity and because they “smelled” like the Halting problem.
Going farther back, I’ve seen a handful of instances where someone was looking for help trying to solve a graph problem, until it was pointed out that it could be reduced to an NP-complete problem. Unfortunately I can’t recall the details.
I feel that I have requirements that don't benefit students much or at all, but I just don't spend much or any time on them. At the end of my courses, I administer a test graded by me, so I can just not fail anyone. I know on day 2 if someone needs to be failed, when they do their first practical exercise. I'll probably have them removed from the course so as to not waste everyone's time, if that happens (but it almost never does.) I also have a very specific curriculum that is meant to be followed, but it's mostly not very good or focuses on things that are no longer major focus areas, because the development process lags so far behind reality. Again, I just do whatever I want, especially for practical exercises.
On the other hand, I teach another course that couldn't be more different. On the first day I give students every question to all the tests and tell them to start studying. If they can answer every question, they know plenty. I almost always give the same test, so different cohorts could (and, I'm quite confident, do) cheat by tracking which questions will be asked. I warn them against this, but ultimately I don't care because the final exam is not generated or graded by me, so it will be their predictable downfall if they go down the road of cheating.
You could reasonably say I neglect the second course; I do, for good reasons that mostly have to do with what I said about the first set of courses. I also the systems that provide education and training to my students relating to both courses, which further justifies my allocation of attention.
I was a high school math teacher for 9 years and taught classes with high stakes state administered tests at the end, and the content of the curriculum was the least of my complaints.
My teaching experience is limited, but for teaching compsci I've had good results with programmatically graded assignments, where the students get unlimited submissions but also machine-enforced deadlines. (I liked this when I was a student, and I've liked structuring my own class this way too.) One of the big benefits is that you can be maximally clear about what the problem set is asking the students to do, because you give them an example input and an example correct output, and for each submission you tell them what their output should have been. But each grading run uses a randomized input, so they can't just hardcode the answers.
Compsci is perfect for this, because students can fix their bug quickly and resubmit their whole assignment. For math, I guess you'd want to avoid having them repeat problems they already got correct. But for other subjects that don't really have a place for "random input", I guess this doesn't work?
As a student I’ve taken computer science classes with and without some kind of autograder. I’ll say that depending on how it’s set up it can be complete nightmare fuel. In one class I recall that 3/4 of my time was formatting comments correctly to not trip the chest detection that came from not “properly attributing” the code I wrote.
Also the assignments were written to the autograder. So instead of saying “write a method that does X” it would say “write a method named NAME that takes in XYZ parameters and outputs exactly in QRS format”.
After having taken so many open-ended assignment classes that really hurt my brain.
Ugh automating the cheat detector sounds awful. The tool we used had a nice similarity detection feature for me to look at, and I used it by hand a few times, but of course it had false positives.
> write a method named NAME that takes in XYZ parameters and outputs exactly in QRS format
Yeah I hate that too. Personally I went with "your program should read JSON from stdin and write JSON to stdout". For students who had never seen JSON before, that was definitely some extra friction. But the upside is that it's something they're going to see a lot of in the real world.
> “write a method named NAME that takes in XYZ parameters and outputs exactly in QRS format”.
That's a pretty realistic requirement, though, isn't it? If you're writing a class that's supposed to interoperate with other systems, it's not like you can just name things whatever you feel like. They have to fit the expected interface.
TBH reading this article really didn’t give much, IMHO.
I guess the context here is mainly a university? Or is it senior high?
Anyway, I spent around three years in college and the value-add for me wasn’t the grades I got. The value I got out of it was the foundation that I laid and the inspiration I got. I got in touch with materials/domains that I might never have encountered otherwise. And to me that’s truly a gift that keeps on giving.
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.
Indeed, since the evaluations are handed out before the final grades are tabulated, they can only be based on expected grades. But expected grades are still a better performance metric than a coin toss.
I wish I had read this essay before the start of every year in high school and college. It would have saved me a lot of frustration, and helped me understand why things are this way.
what makes you happy being a manager. i mean how does it provide you satisfaction. I've been trying to see if its a good idea to go into managmement but dealing with people isn't my strong suite.
Grading is not dissimilar to setting up arbitrary metrics on a business or an engineering team.
People will find ways to optimise for the metric.
If you give bonuses based on number of commits created or number of tickets closed you'll end up with a lot of useless commits and tickets.
If the only thing that matters in order to pass a course is to do an exam, people will optimise for that. If someone doesn't like the subject or doesn't like the teacher or doesn't like being taught (especially disagreeable boys), they will happily skip the subject and just try to get a passing score.
In university I was already working as a professional developer and I attended only a few classes I cared about and hacked my way out of exams with a mix of cheating and cramming the night before.
I enjoyed all the project work instead and I excelled at that. But that was worth just 1-2 points out of 30. Why was I forced to memorise bullshit I didn't need and that I would have not remembered 3 seconds after the exams in order to get a piece of paper saying I graduated? Isn't being able to do the projects more important than that?
When I hired people with degrees from "good schools" I was always surprised to realise how little were they able to get done on their own. I quickly stopped even checking their qualifications as they're completely worthless for anything related to work.
If I had to reform education I would make it totally based on projects. There would be no grades or titles when you get a job, just an increasingly longer list of projects you worked on.
When I was in school I had to take a Latin class. I didn't want to take it but I picked the best course according to my interest - and unfortunately it had Latin.
I spent those lessons secretly working on my own projects, then I downloaded a bunch of famous texts with their translation and I just wrote a J2ME application to look things up and used it for 5 years (Mobile internet was very expensive back then and searching on the internet would have been way harder).
After I finished my written finals in all the subjects, luckily my score was already high enough not too pass, even if I got zero at the oral exam and I kind of bullshitted my way through that last exam.
Was there any point in trying to force me to learn something? Why do we put people in this situation?
Tangential: The article mentions Chesterton's Fence. I clicked the link to learn what that means and didn't find it (it's just a link to the guy's Wikipedia page). But check out the beautiful signature of this Chesterton fellow!
Chesterton's fence refers to a principle that before changing something, you should first understand why it is the way it is.
> Chesterton’s Fence is a heuristic inspired by a quote from the writer and polymath G. K. Chesterton’s 1929 book, The Thing. It’s best known as being one of John F. Kennedy’s favored sayings, as well as a principle Wikipedia encourages its editors to follow. In the book, Chesterton describes the classic case of the reformer who notices something, such as a fence, and fails to see the reason for its existence. However, before they decide to remove it, they must figure out why it exists in the first place. If they do not do this, they are likely to do more harm than good with its removal. In its most concise version, Chesterton’s Fence states the following:
Do not remove a fence until you know why it was put up in the first place.
>In a recent post, Parrhesia suggested that course grades should be 100% determined by performance on a final exam—an exam that could be taken repeatedly, with the last attempt being the course grade
>[...]I suspect this proposal hasn’t seen much contact with people who’ve actually taught classes
This is how a fair number of classes at my university are graded. Particularly math classes are structured so that you could literally ignore the class for 3 months and then just show up and take the exam and that decides 100% of the grade. Some homework is available for bonus points, but it only contributes to going from a failing grade to passing. While retaking the exam to get a higher grade isn't technically part of the system they will let you do it if there is space.
Re-do the exam when it is next offered. The most common math exams (e.g calculus, linear algebra) run 4 times a year so there are quite a lot of opportunities.
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.
I'm currently on a goal and motivation research reading interest, so I think I can add value to this.
School pedagogical approaches are weird and appears broadly to be testing a student's ability to endure forcing themselves to learn material they may not find interesting. Obviously, this divides the student population and people with better executive functioning, or stricter parents, float to the top. It's what we've done for so long, we're anchored around the concept. From a motivational standpoint, for many students this can kill curiosity and desire for learning.
Goal attainment research consensus clearly demonstrates specific and sufficiently difficult tasks lead to better performance. It's even more ideal when the individual sets the goal or at the very least is involved in developing the organizational goal. This goes against the grain in schools. Sometimes teachers are incredibly vague, others specific. And, unless the student is in a highly individualized learning environment, like working on a capstone project, they do not play a role in course goal setting.
You start to see the potential problems when research demonstrates, the highest individual performance occurs when individuals are provided a specific and sufficiently difficult goal with a learning oriented approach and decreased emphasis on performance (tests and grades). On the other hand, when an individual already possesses skills and knowledge for assigned goals, then a performance approach, not a learning approach, yields an overall higher performance rating. Also, by far, the worst goal orientation, among the aforementioned, is performance avoidance, that is performing to avoid negative consequences.
Students are in school, they're in the process of obtaining skills and knowledge for a career they may not even have solidified yet. Students are largely falling into the performance avoidance category, then the performance approach category, and, finally, for the luckier few, the learning approach category. Add in the teacher quality variable, whether they assign specific or vague and easy or sufficiently difficult assignments, and you start to see how this creates problems for students and for society.
I speak from experience. I failed miserably during school, even dropping out of high school, for a variety of reasons outside of my control and am extremely fortunate to be where I am today.
> But some are an assault on reason, with every word of the assignment creatively misinterpreted. It was never stated which temperature circuit to build or how to prove it works or what level of explanation was necessary. And who’s to say what “build” means?
OK? So your students tried to do something and failed creatively. Sounds good. Reward them for their efforts, ask them to try again if you feel that they still need to get something out of the assignment.
> But some don’t, and they keep complaining and asking for regrades, and if those aren’t accepted they (or their parents) contact the principal/chair/dean/ombudsperson, who are required to have an investigation.
OK.
> hat gets misinterpreted too, so more details are added, and by the time the teacher retires you have a monstrosity that’s universally despised but almost impossible to complain about.
So your bad solution is good because it started off bad and ended worse. OK.
> Well, enjoy re-grading every single assignment from every student near a boundary,
Round up by default? If someone has an 89, just give them the 90. Honestly, who cares if a few students come up to you and want regrades, I imagine it takes all of 30 seconds to cross out the old grade and add the new one. How onerous...
> As far as I can tell, most follow the incentives and make little effort to stop cheating.
Cool. Most of the time cheating entails something like access to notes on a test that is artificially made more difficult by requiring memorization. That's why open note tests are far better.
> But some teachers are principled
Bummer. They don't sound principled so much as they sound unimaginative.
> Say you suspect students are copying from each other on an exam. You can silently prepare multiple versions of the exam with “micro differences” in questions.
Sounds dumb, I don't like the idea of trying to "trap" kids. I cheated exactly once on a test and got away with it - why? Because I was unhappy in school and I went home and spent my time distracting myself rather than preparing for it. Me cheating one time had literally no negative impact on my life, you trapping me and once again teaching me that education goes hand in hand with punishment would have done years of damage.
> They realized that they could skip learning the material, and instead complete the project by running an evolutionary algorithm with my father’s grading as a reward function.
Creative. Without knowing more about the assignment it's hard to judge, but I'm wary of any assignment that you can just brute force like that.
> your students will be lazy and fallible.
I had to undo years of being told I was "smart but lazy". Teachers need to erase that word from their vocabulary.
> So they won’t learn anything.
That's OK, most people don't learn much from school.
> And then they will blame you for not forcing them to do the homework.
a) OK
b) I mean, maybe the parents would? I frankly don't believe that any student will blame a teacher for not forcing them to do homework.
> Surely what matters is if a student understands things, not if they ask questions in class?
Good question. What exactly is the point? To me, education serves a few functions.
1. Babysitting kids so that parents can work
2. Providing young people with a safe place for them to explore their emerging identities, interests, and view of the world
3. Stoking an interest in learning and providing the tools and resources to build a baseline knowledge for future education
So, is understanding really the goal? I don't see understanding as being particularly critical to the education system.
> Participation credit helps to internalize positive externalities.
100% agreed.
My transcript is an odd mix of grades - even within a single class, within a single semester I could go from an A or B to a D or F, or coast by on a C. What I value most is that during that time I dat...
>Round up by default? If someone has an 89, just give them the 90. Honestly, who cares if a few students come up to you and want regrades, I imagine it takes all of 30 seconds to cross out the old grade and add the new one. How onerous...
Ahh, here speaks someone who's never taught a class :) If word gets out that you round 89 up to 90, then next you'll be dealing with all the people who got 88.5. At some point you have to have a grade boundary. It may just as well be at 90 as at 89 or 88.5.
>Me cheating one time had literally no negative impact on my life
As the article explains, cheating has negative effects on everyone else. Of course cheating can be good from the cheater's point of view – that's why people cheat!
> If word gets out that you round 89 up to 90, then next you'll be dealing with all the people who got 88.5.
Why would word get out if you just grade that way? No one would know you were rounding up...
> As the article explains, cheating has negative effects on everyone else. Of course cheating can be good from the cheater's point of view – that's why people cheat!
I think you've completely missed my point. Cheating had no negative impact - on anyone, at all. Getting caught cheating would have huge negative impact.
>Why would word get out if you just grade that way?
Students compare grades and talk to each other. It's also not uncommon for students to ask about your policy on rounding in the first class, when you're going through the syllabus.
>Cheating had no negative impact - on anyone, at all.
I'm afraid your cheating did have a negative impact on others, albeit a small one. For example, suppose that the class you took was graded on a curve. Then by adding a false datapoint, you may have pushed up the cut off point for the higher grades. More generally, the larger the number of cheaters, the less meaningful grades become for everyone. Every fake A grade contributes to the devaluation of real A grades.
>Getting caught cheating would have huge negative impact.
You'd be surprised. As the article explains, punishing cheaters isn't really in anyone's narrow interests. It's sadly rather easy to get away with cheating at university, even if you do get caught.
>That works for multiple choice. Given the ".5" I'm assuming partial credit is discretionary. So you can just discretionarily choose to give +.5.
Yep, and then you'll deal with the students who want to know why their friends got the discretionary +.5 and they didn't! And you'll be in a difficult position, because arbitrarily adding points to some answers and not others does seem pretty unfair on the face of it. (Remember that the students who weren't sitting on a grade boundary will be comparing their scores with the students who were, so they'll see if you added +0.5 points to question 1 for Jack on 89.5 but not for Jane on 85.)
By the way, "partial credit" in this context means "credit for a partially correct answer", not "non-integer credit". You can perfectly well have a scoring system where a single correct answer is worth 0.5 points, as test points are a completely arbitrary unit :)
> My point isn't "cheating good".
It's not clear to me what your point is regarding cheating. You seem to not like the idea of people being punished for cheating. But as cheating is easy to do, it would run rampant without at least a tangible possibility of punishment. So I don't really understand how you (i) think that cheating is bad, (ii) recognize that it happens frequently, and yet (iii) don't think that cheaters should be punished.
Naturally. If you give people stupid chores they will almost universally try to find a way to avoid them.
> don't think that cheaters should be punished.
Even if I bought into everything else ie: that testing is good and cheating is bad, I would still not punish cheaters. As I said, I cheated that one time because I had other issues that made school difficult. Punishing would have done nothing except add additional stress, making me retreat further from my education. But of course, as I just said, I don't buy into all of that other stuff, so it's not only an ineffective and cruel way to approach education, but it serves no purpose.
> It's not clear to me what your point is regarding cheating.
My point is that most tests are stupid, and a lot of what "cheating" is is just making them less stupid. For example, I remember students would hide their notes during a test so that they could reference them. That's just good sense - in what real world situation do you need to have instant recall for arbitrary information? It teaches kids to memorize shit, which is damaging.
Two students checking each others answers? Sounds a lot like any normal adult problem solving.
So you can try to "tweak" the system until cheating is impossible or so scary that people will rarely try, or you can "give up" and let people cheat... or you can take a step back and realize that you've made up a problem with no solution.
As I said, school should focus on the three things I mentioned. Nonsensical testing strategies and finding ways to trick kids for doing what is, frankly, the sane thing to do, is purely damaging.
If you were smarter you would recognize that in many cases there are substantial financial rewards for good grades. And many classes are curved. It's not just wrong its evil to screw other pre meds for example by cheating. Of course you are obviously right its good to work together on problems, but what does that have to do with exams? Obviously in hard classes everyone could in fact would "work together" with the top students.
My college classes gave a 5% weight to homework, 45% to the midterm and 50% to the final. Since I was a good test taker I could skip almost all the homework and still get an A or an A- if I didn’t do as well on one of the exams. It also didn’t help that the professors gave extremely hard exams to small classes: I distinctly remember getting a B+ on an exam where I got 1 out of 6 questions right because everyone else got half a question right. I still don’t really know quantum mechanics basics but my grades say otherwise.
Yep, this is it. Ever wondered why syllabi and problem statements are so long, convoluted, and oddly specific? It all boils down to "Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, it's going in the syllabus." [0]
Edit: I did not come up with [0], but I also don't remember where I saw it.
That relationship of a teacher being an obstacle to a grade that signals institutional approval, it is totally broken. This is gamefied "education," where the course material and even the instructors recognition doesn't persuasively have intrinsic value.
I'm dealing with something now outside academia, where there is absurd bureaucracy, and I'm sidestepping and shortcutting it because I see the mission outcome as separate from the prescribed process, and the trickling and breadcrumbing of details is an abuse of my time, so I sympathize with the student perspective - but in an educational setting, the prescribed process is essentially a sacrificial cost that enables you to "become," a person who has mastered it, as it makes the skill the effect of a skill, and not just the affect of the outcome. Education is necessarily transformative, otherwise it's just rote training.
Example would be, I take music lessons, I'm difficult to teach because I really like Bach and Chopin and I can play some simple preludes by ear, but my sight reading is maybe at a gr. 2 level, which is just enough to get the pieces under my fingers with a hill climbing struggle, but makes me useless as an actual musician, and probably very irritating to musicians whose performances are the effect of their years of real skills, and not the affect of hackery or savantism that an unskilled observer can't easily distinguish. Even if we played the same piece, comparing them to me would be insulting and debasing to them because it's like saying a recording of something is the same as a performance of it, so it's very diminishing.
In the case of the temperature monitoring circuit in the article, the process is designed to facilitate a mental transformation of exercising elementary skills, and being educated means being able to commit to that process of being molded by the experience. The details are to force commitment to the process and filter out those who aren't. Unfortuately, credentialism incentivises this affect of skills and drives enrollment, so if you are doing a job oriented degree, you're basically trained and not really educated through a process of becoming.
It would almost make sense to offer students a deal, where they can choose a training track that leads to a 52% / C- grade and do the minimum, which takes them out of the way of the TAs, they don't participate in discussions, and they can coast and draft others, maybe date each other and say they went there, but they can't impose costs, where others can elect to aim higher and choose the education track with an understanding of what that means.
> But some are an assault on reason, with every word of the assignment creatively misinterpreted. It was never stated which temperature circuit to build or how to prove it works or what level of explanation was necessary. And who’s to say what “build” means?
You have to think like a software engineer. Test first: write the requirements fro the perspective of a test which fails if the requirements are not met.
Rather than dictating irrelevant details of the apparatus that is to be made during the assignment, describe a procedure by which it can be verified to meet the requirements.
"Build a temperature monitor circuit.": what is it monitoring: the temperature of what? Where is that taken? What is the output? Decimal temperature in Celsius to the tenth of a degree? In what range? Or else is there just a control output: is there a hysteresis to turn something on and off like a thermostat? Etc.
"Test it to prove it works." That's a poor way of giving requirements. You need specific test cases. You may have to have specialized equipment on hand that the students can use, like a controlled source of reference temperature.
Absolutely. In my experience teaching in college, this is the correct approach.
A very useful thing to have, both for teachers and students, is a "rubric": a succinct description of how the work will be evaluated, and the importance (weight) of each feature.
Yes! And then the rubric should actually define the pieces of the assignment you care about them getting right. I have this debate a lot when we’re designing assignments for an intro to Python class (which, sadly, we have to do very regularly because of sites like Chegg…). Figure out what it is you want the student to get out of the assignment (e.g., manipulating dictionaries or sorting values) and evaluate their results based on whether they did that thing. If they did the thing but missed some nitinoid details they don’t get a perfect grade, but they should get a solid, passing grade for it.
It's a silly exaggerated example. Point still stands, at least from my experience. Even with a rubric, people still (intentionally or unintentionally) find ways to do things that circumvent the learning goals/outcomes of the assignment
If the real objective is learning goals/outcome rather than (or in addition to) a working temperature circuit, then that objective has to be somehow encoded into the requirements. Or else, sometimes all the stated requirements will be met without that unstated one being hit.
This is difficult because, for instance, the possibility of cheating means that the person who says they performed the assignment might have contracted it off to someone else and learned nothing.
Someone who already has all the required knowledge can also just spin out the assignment without learning anything.
Basically, learning is a state change in the pupil; if you want to validate that some state change occurred, you have to have a way of measuring the state before and after and calculating a difference.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 256 ms ] thread""" 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.
Are those traits what we’re testing for, or are we testing for knowledge of the subject?
The most creative students I've met have been the ones that didn't accumulate credentials, and often suffered because of (possibly undiagnosed) ADHD. They did well when they found their passion, either because they found it later in life or because they really, really cared about it. Our system doesn't do as well with these people, but they can usually make their way through.
Unfortunately there's a downside to this: all the creativity in the world isn't going to help you if you can't execute. A brilliant idea only takes you so far. And gaining sufficient background to have brilliant ideas is often an even more demanding task, which passion alone doesn't suffice for. I don't exactly know what to do about all this. What I do know is that a system that bases future success on how well individuals do at age 16 is fundamentally, profoundly stupid... And I wish I had a better one.
Source: extreme ADD sufferer who has "wasted" tons of time swimming upstream to learn to do things easy for some others but insanely difficult for me, simply because I wanted to.
This may be more relevant to "twice exceptional" students that can still pick up on the material without following the whole class. There is certainly heterogeneity and I don't mean to speak for all ADHD students in what they would prefer. I just think it is funny your comment could be read as supporting either side of the debate without the parent context. And given the parent context I have to say I disagree.
Now whether the hand holding of attendance policies and weekly assignments and the like is better for the class on the whole I can't comment on. It's not an easy tradeoff and I don't think the decision should be made primarily based on how people with ADHD perform, unless you are teaching a class where it is disproportionately represented.
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…
Practically everyone who "played fair" got the same grade for both. Occasionally, I would add a test that tripped everybody up and I'd have to go see what happened. Anybody who overfitted, however, got crushed.
My favorite assignment was always the next to last project (before end of semester deadlines start getting crushing). I created only a single unit test to verify the test suite runner was functional, and the students had to submit the rest of the pre-deadline unit tests. And I would switch in my full suite at the deadline. I told people that anybody who passed that suite would get bonus points that everybody was always bugging me for.
It was always absolute chaos. I only ever had one student pass the switched in suite (he got some nice bonus points out of that--didn't need them, of course). I would then reopen the project for a week (I planned for it) to let everybody else clean up their work and resubmit.
You could see and feel the difference in the students after that assignment. The fact that testing was an integral part of programming and that testing was, in and of itself, a difficult problem was a revelation--and not a particularly welcome one.
It is possible that the problem is poorly written (I'm just a TA, I didn't write it, and it looks pretty clear to me), or it is possible that I'm just really gullible and they aren't actually asking in good faith (I'm a trusting person, but I've been doing this kind of work for a while and so I've seen most of the dishonest questions, this doesn't look like one to me). I dunno, I think I'll just chalk it up to the long tail of weirdness that can occur when dealing with a bunch of students.
This is hard to understand and adapt to and stresses out students that have been trained (for years) to learn the expected script.
You eventually get to this level in math, but only way later in post graduate work (unless you’re exceptional).
I think there’s likely a benefit in explicitly tackling this directly for young/new students, it might help them see the bigger picture. At least the earnest ones struggling to do well anyway.
It is such an immense amount of labor. Now i know why people regurgitate the same content everywhere or dont bother
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.
Perhaps that why some groups of people tend to gravitate to STEM, where teacher bias is less likely to have an impact.
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.
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.
We should restructure our whole Western (and Eastern, for all I know) education system on the lines of Ivan Illich's book Deschooling Society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deschooling_Society which (simplified) suggests that everyone gets an educational grant that they can spend about which and who they study with they can freely choose. But it is not going to happen, and we will stay with the whole grading and testing bullshit.
But that's what they do now! I can't see any alternative to that, but people could be given an increased range of learning possibilities.
Given any system, why would people not attempt to defeat it? And if they can defeat it, perhaps the system is wrong?
"Wrong" in your comment is underspecified. It depends what you mean by the word.
If you replace a high school with letting the students do whatever interests them, a small fraction might study something, and the majority will spend the time watching tiktok, playing league or legends / fortnite, listening to music, etc. maybe you think that letting kids do whatever they want for “education” like this is better, but IMO this proposal is much worse than the current system of directing students to spend time on things that are moderately useful to society and determined to be valuable to intellectual development
But things are changing, and the pandemic is speeding that process. A decade ago James Paul Gee outlined where we want to go, and I think it will largely come to fruition before the end of this decade: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNfPdaKYOPI
Personally, when grading I keep a file of all my feedback so I can easily copy-paste it into their feedback files (since everything is digital nowadays). For a given assignment, usually only a handful of mistakes are made (repeated by each student). If anything, having the file makes my grading more consistent -- same points for the same error.
I'm under the impression that this is a not-unpopular system, but try as I might, I cannot get anyone else to adopt it.
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?
I recall a few unique problem sets from Graduate QM such as
- Derive from first principles the color of the sky.
- Prove that charge must be Quantized if there is one magnetic mono-pole in the universe.
The exam questions were far simpler than the theory questions asked in the problem sets. The work for the first question easily totals > 20 hours of pen and paper time.
I guess grad students generally take less coursework than undergrads, but how could a professor expect students to have 20+ hours on hand to solve a single question, given other demands on a student's time?
A problem like the above would be given as a single problem for students to solve over 2 weeks.
That's what motivated me to switch away from a physics major.
On the contrary, memorization is the way most people I know got through most of their math classes, at least through calculus and linear algebra. You memorize the steps by rote repetition without really learning why they work, then the test is mostly an exercise in guessing which steps and formulas you should apply to the given problem.
You used math as an example of a subject where tests are used to check understanding. I disagree, because most people that I know who did well in math did so by being good human computers, not by understanding anything.
I expect that doesn't continue to be true at the grad level, but most people don't get that far.
In chemical engineering the final boss is the process design class, a project where you are asked to produce a chemical substance with desired properties at scale without losing money. Almost everything you learned during the program has to be used to pull it off. Programming, numerical methods, CAD, Transport phenomena, kinetics, physical chemistry, thermodynamics. It really is the best all around test for a chemical engineer.
While this is feasible for the senior year, I am not sure if you can convert for example calculus 1 into a semester long project.
On the other hand we live in a world where access to derivative rules is trivial. I'd imagine in 1800 mathematicians would assume that you would need to have multiplication tables to be productive and not reduced to pen and paper their entire career.
I wonder if there is an opportunity to push more challenging material into the earlier classes and make them more project like.
I feel a deep sadness reading this. Is your computer science curriculum more accurately described as a software engineering curriculum?
Memorization should be virtually irrelevant on most computer science exams. Proofs should be core to computer science exams; the ability to reason is the most fundamental skill to all scientists, especially for fields which are tightly coupled to mathematics.
Given that most CS students want to go into software engineering, it would surprise me if this isn't the case for most CS curriculums. In my experience CS students don't generally want to be scientists, so most CS classes are more application-oriented than proof-oriented.
Schools are starting to provide separate software engineering programs, but we're not all the way there yet.
I always find it funny when people say that tests are just about "regurgitating" information. It's such a cliché that just gets regurgitated in every argument over testing, as though it's visceral imagery actually gives it any real weight.
Tests can assess whether the student learnt the material covered in class. They can also test problem solving abilities.
Assignments test conscientiousness, and the ability to make good design trade-offs when working with a single customer who is buying 100 different custom products and doesn't really care about any of them.
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 majored in Law but took a couple CS courses on the side so I saw the contrast between traditions in different departments. CS courses had a constant stream of non-trivial graded homework. Even if I knew the materials it took me quite some time to complete them. Law courses usually one essay that counts for ~15-25% (or less frequently, a mid-term test), and the rest is the final exam.
Obviously, both methods work (I guess). But if you're already in an environment where courses give out lots of graded assignments, your concerns definitely make sense.
There are many other options for evaluating the students, but not many to force them to learn something.
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.
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.
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.
Yes; I've been on both sides. I've written assignments that I thought were clear and unambiguous, only to find that a significant number of students misunderstood what I meant. They weren't intentionally trying to make the problems easier, they just weren't sure what I wanted. (And, of course, who is going to interpret an ambiguous problem so as to make more work for themselves? A few students will do it both ways -- the easier interpretation and the harder one -- but most won't.)
And on the other side, I've taken continuing education classes taught by other teachers where the instructions were confusing, ambiguous, or sometimes just plain impossible to follow ("You'll find the answers to this quiz in the article you just read." but the article was revised and now uses different terminology from the quiz.)
I did.
In fact I always tried to find a unique or novel solution to my problem sets, ambiguous or not. (If the problem set contained a hint I tried mightily to not use the hint, I'd always try to replace a proof by contradiction with a constructive proof etc...)
My marks suffered for it. I even almost failed a first year exam cos I didn't want to perform a grody 4x4 matrix multiplication. Later the prof said: "Your exam was crap, but you came up with a better answer for problem four than I'd thought of."
It's still one of my most cherished memories from undergrad.
I always hated the: "Will this be on the test" type of attitude. Are you there to learn and break new ground or to just get marks? I had crappy marks but my work spoke for itself.
Students should put more effort into creating their own body of work. If they spent half the energy they put into finding tricks and gaming the system, they'd be much better off for it.
That was my breaking point. Others it's losing a scholarship; others, getting a B.
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.
If for example, Harvard and Yale's law schools stopped rampant cheating. Maybe so many of their graduates wouldn't go on to routinely lie to the public?
I don't teach because it's some sort of penance that I need to pay. I teach because I like it and I want to help build smart humans. Not contribute to our society degenerating.
So instead you force all your students to do busy work, like signing a statement accepting no grade if they use the wrong size bread board or photographing the breadboard next to a compass to prove it's the alignment?
To me this sounds like lazy teachers punishing students rather than working to solve the problem.
Because your job is to educate them. They also complain about the task which in effect waste your time or give you trouble.
"Creatively misinterpreting" instructions means to me that the students are intentionally doing this (to get away with doing less work, or whatever). I think marking them down and moving on is educating them: it very quickly tells them that sticking to the letter of the law but ignoring the spirit is not ok, and will not be tolerated. It's pretty good preparation for being in the real world, too.
Regardless, giving ridiculously over-specified assignments will not be good preparation for the real world, where many (most?) things are under-specified and ambiguous. Adults need to learn how to read between the lines, interpret things properly, be comfortable asking follow-up questions for things that are not clear, and just figure things out when such clarity doesn't exist.
> They also complain about the task which in effect waste your time or give you trouble.
That sounds annoying, but to me it feels like over-specifying tasks in this way is the opposite of education. And it feels like the time dealing with the misinterpreters wouldn't be wasted; it would be spent actively teaching students that the world is not black and white, there's often no instruction manual, and that getting out of doing work through "creative misinterpretation" will not get you far.
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.
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".
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.
Though as I said, some things are good to have in writing, if it's an exception that happens with some frequency or some corner case that's not as rare as thought
I kinda think you are arguing against your point, here. IMO these sorts of sales people are a result of over-specifying homework questions to this degree, because they haven't been shut down or washed out at the stage where you find out they can't deal with a reasonable (or even too-low) level of detail.
But the problems you talk about in your first paragraph are real problems, and the solution is that the entirety of the school's administration needs to take a zero-tolerance approach with this sort of behavior. Rules-lawyering should be shut down at every step of the way. Yes, that might result in some actual lawsuits, which will suck up time and money, but I think that's just the price of educating people. And might still end up being less trouble overall.
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.
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.
It might mean more teaching to the test, though.
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 ;-)
I agree with this. Students cannot afford to get questions wrong and learn from their mistakes. A bad grade can alter a person's future, there's too much at risk.
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.
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.
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
And the worst corner cases of externalities can be mostly offset with proper regulation, even if we struggle to do it.
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.
Anyway, I appreciate the article as someone who will soon try my hand at teaching. I will have a lot to learn.
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.”
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".
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.
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.
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.
I don't know, this kind of feels like the adult version of ice cream for breakfast.
Maybe what you're describing is the difference between dreaming something and actually doing it. There's nothing forcing any of us to watch a ton of streaming video other than our own choices, although it's hard to decide to go out and do something different once you're in that habit.
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 think the same kind of quote would absolutely apply in exactly the same way to temperament though. The 14 year old thought his dad was a jerk who mellowed out by the time he was 21, the reality again being that the biggest change was actually the child's temperament.
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
Kids are perhaps often intuitively good at evaluating the severity of unintended consequences.
Adults are much better at being aware of deliberate efforts to take advantage of developmental stages and tendencies.
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).
https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/
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.
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’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.
― Mark Twain
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.
[1]: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/heuristics-that-almost...
“If they were right, I’d agree, But it’s them they know, not me.”
Yes.
> (preferences).
No. The parent is supposed to use their best judgment about what is best for the kid given the kid's reasonable long-term preferences [1]--not the parent's preferences. Or, to put it another way, what is best for the actual kid, not what would be best for the parents if they were in the kid's position. The two are often very different.
[1] I say "reasonable long-term preferences" to make it clear that I am not saying parents should indulge a kid's preferences for sugary foods instead of nutritious ones, lots of TV instead of a better mix of intellectual activities, and no exercise. I'm talking about cases where the adult the kid will grow up to be will genuinely say they are different from the parents in this respect and wish their preferences as a kid had been respected.
> Or, to put it another way, what is best for the actual kid, not what would be best for the parents if they were in the kid's position.
Most parents act in the best interest of a kid, not themselves. The outcome varies because parents model of the world usually flawed in many ways and they actually make bad decision thinking they have made good ones. E.g. my friend is obsessed with pre-school development. This is likely because she perceive herself as not smart and wants her son to be smart. She force her son to exercise, he can read and do some math at the age of 3. Long term this is bad for the kid. Unfortunately she cannot realize this. Doing so would require a level of knowledge and self-awareness she does not have. I her eyes she makes perfect decisions.
Why? I was exercising, reading, and doing some (very simple) math at age 3, and I turned out ok.
Up to mid 20's, yes.
> stupid parents are rare
Not even uncommon.
Are you by any chance over 25 but under 40? :)
I think it’s inarguable that experience is valuable, and age correlates very well with experience up to that mid-20s point, but around that point people start to settle into a groove and the extra n years experience is actually just the same year’s experience repeated n times.
Put the average child in the position of the average parent and you will see the difference.
I think that's true in general, but when it comes to making decisions about the child I think that has to be weighted against another heuristic that's often but not always true: that people know what's best for themselves better than other people do. I think people often wrongly neglect that principle when it comes to children assuming that they don't know what they're talking about without taking the time to listen and understand their point.
Pre-teens don't have practical adult skills and have poor or non-existent emotional regulation. Teens have some adult skills, are learning or experimenting with others, and have patchy self-regulation.
So it makes perfect sense not to allow kids to do things that are dangerous to others, and to limit what teens can do with strong guide rails.
But when it comes to world view and insight, teens can certainly be wiser than their parents. They may not know what to do with their insight, but they're not wrong - just inexperienced.
Meanwhile many adults are hopelessly naive and may be actively self-harming, especially politically and culturally. And when adults have addiction and/or Cluster B issues, even fairly young kids are more likely to be reliable and responsible.
taking insights from teenagers...really? Do you know what kind of "insights" I had in my teenage years? They are downright cringe.
How did you arrive at this conclusion?
The more I observe the more I understand good parents are exceedingly rare. The vast majority of parents fuck up one way or another. Which shouldn't necessarily be surprising, parenting is very hard!
But I'm not comparing adults with other adults. I'm comparing adults with children. I would be surprised to find a child that was smarter than their parents; it happens, but it's rare.
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
I know that my children will wish I did things differently. Whether that is location, discipline, activities, internet access etc etc. I know they will wish I made more reasoned choices in the moment. That I was never tired, distracted, frustrated. That I let them spend their time as they wished not as I feel is best for them.
Parenting is a parade of tough choices using vague heuristics and life experience. Being well intentioned is a bloody good start.
As a child though, many decisions my parents made were with the view of demonizing outside groups and "protecting" their kids from any contrarian viewpoints. Catching up socially took years, and there are some extreme harms that I still deal with to this day. My goal is to make sure my kids have a well-rounded social life, a consideration for others, and an understanding of a gamut of ideas.
This sadly depends a lot on the community. Being well-intentioned but misinformed in fundamental ways can cause a lot of harm.
Being well intentioned and caring is the bare expected minimum. Why do we need to repeat this?
You are welcome to throw stones if it makes you feel better, but try not to get hit when one flies back through your window in a few years.
No shit sherlock. Here are some more hot takes for you:
Armed with this incredible wisdom you can go off and spend more time thinking how stupid and bad other people are at parenting. Have fun!Sorry this conversation frustrates you. Guess you're still dealing with toddlers which is not something I had considered until now. I thought we were talking about much, much older children. Teens even.
It never adds anything meaningful to a discussion. Most often, it’s used by someone with little or no experience with a role or responsibility judging someone who is trying to carry out that role, however imperfectly.
Surely it is easier in hindsight. Nevertheless, there’s this golden rule of “parents should always be forgiven” when if fact it should be “children should not be forced to keep their connection to parents if they don’t want to”.
You, as a parent, are not giving them the “chance to live”, you are bringing them to a world where they probably want to be happy, and if you failed to make them happy they should not be forced to keep you in their life because “a parent gave them the privilege of living”.
Yes parenting is hard. Yes I understand parents make unoptimal decisions all the time. That’s their problem.
Some parents are just really really inadequate or abusive as parents.
Put the average child in the position of the average parent and you will see the difference.
Think of how abusive the average parent is, then imagine them trying to parent with 10-20 years less development.
That said, all parents make bad decisions to the detriment of their children. The severity and frequency is what constitutes abuse vs mistakes.
I'm just that in general, the heuristic is accurate that parents have better decision making than their children. The very real counter examples (eg abuse) don't negate the trend.
Some behaviour is just plain borked, but other behaviour is just more nuanced.
An example, some kids are extroverted, others intro. What works for one, may not be the same for another.
You may need to constantly work with an extrovert, so they are eventually, as an adult, be in control of their own exuberance. And with an introvert, work with them, trying to help them expand thier ability to interact.
An ability for both to live in a shared society.
But imagine a parent who was an extrovert, was constantly upset at, as a child, being told to calm down, or stop asking 1000 questions per second. Or even, just "give another a moment to talk".
So they, with an extrovert, do not do such things. And the extrovert does not learn control, and dicipline, and to give others some space sometimes, and becomes less capable of interacting with others as an adult.
Of course, this is a poor example, and poorly phrased, but I hope my point comes across.
We should focus more strongly on what is correct for the child, not how a parent may have misapplied childhood lessons to ourselves. For those lessons may be right for your child, even if not for oneself.
They didn't even want to inquire and then decide what was best for their children. Too many parents are given a pass because some sort of "sacred virtue" is assigned to parenting and any mistake that does not include beating their children is somehow forgiven or given a pass.
The "they did the best they could" is a cop-out: did they do the best they could given their laziness, poor impulse control, vision that doesn't go beyond the fence of their backyard?
For example, I was an excellent student, the best in the school, in terms of awards and recognition. Not Einstein, mind you, but someone they should have identified as very talented from a scholastic/intellectual standpoint. My parents never saw this in me, for some reason, because now, I would immediately identify as very talented someone who did as well as I did. My parents never hit me or told me I was stupid or anything like that. They simply acknowledged that I was a good student and that was it. If they had said, this woman is talented, we need to support her, find her mentors, send her to the best universities, I have little doubt that I would have been very successful.
I was successful anyway, after traveling a winding and long road, but my path to professional and financial success could have been (these are my a priori odds) much easier and faster.
Now, you might say, if they had acted differently, maybe you wouldn't be here, etc., which is a very defeatist way of thinking. Their process was wrong and for no other reason than their "intellectual laziness".
I thought the conventional wisdom was that Einstein wasn't academically accomplished until his great works were published.
A lot of your story reminds me of my own but I've reached a different conclusion. Specifically I suspect I would have been accepted into certain magnet schools (pre college) with the sourcing and simple suggestion of taking practice tests. If I had a kid that I suspected would be capable of excelling in that kind of environment that is exactly what I would do to help improve the odds of said kid achieving that goal.
But I don't resent my parents for not bothering to help in this way. I'm honestly not sure why but I suspect it has to do with an unspoken and mutual lack of respect for "academics". The system is so easily gamed, and a gameable system is a flawed one.
Can this not be said for any action, any thought, including, if we are talking about parenting, beating the kids up? "It is the way I was brought up, my father always told me, a few slaps and they'll learn!". "I was feeling so alone and I could not control myself when they were crying, I am so sorry I decided to use the stove gas to put them to sleep, that's what my grandmother used to do!".
My belief is that that kind of "therapist's speech", which as becoming more popular as therapy became the fashionable path for people wanting to make changes in their lives, of "you did your best", "those were the tools that you had available at the time", has caused many to avoid their responsibilities by paying therapists (people who got "second hand smoke" did not even had to pay) like times back they used priest to carry the same function and getting the same result: absolution and comfort.
>and have been intentional about not falling into the same behaviors with my kids.
This is usually the problem. You are intentional on NOT falling into THE SAME behaviors, and probably will overreact on the opposite behaviors that is as abusive as the original.
Just because something is bad does not mean that the radically opposite is good.
It is not a good idea focusing on what not to do instead of on what to do.
E.g I have seen parents that were too constrained as kids removing all limits for their children. The kids getting into bad friendships and destroying their lives as a result of the neglect from their parents.
Or someone educated as a Catholic with sexual restrictions promote sexual promiscuity on their children, with very bad outcomes.
I find that whenever you make a decision, you are really sampling from what you’ve already seen.
If haven’t seen a lot, your decision making is really constrained. If you’ve only seen bad decisions, you will make a lot of the same ones. You won’t even know that they’re bad.
The hardest part of life really is figuring out what you don’t know yet. And it’s really, really hard.
My grandfather, partly from trauma and partly from what I believe is hereditary mental illness, swung back the other way, peacing out instead of parenting, leaving my father to get into a lot of trouble as a kid, and witness some different traumatic things.
My father swung back towards being unable to control his anger, and with frequent mood swings between depression and rage. Although, aside from spanking he didn't beat his kids, just pets and walls.
I'm the first generation that has been working towards treating my hereditary mental issues - taking mental health meds, going to counseling. I'm hopeful that I can break the cycle, but enough of a realist to realize I am lacking on a lot of parenting things that I need to learn from outside sources instead.
e.g. If gen 1 only used witty condescending remarks to teach their children that they're dumb, then 2nd gen can realize that this severely damages their kids' self-esteem. If gen 2 recobers from that abuse they may choose the path of taking their kids serioisly even with their shortcomings. The 3rd gen might take some kind of offense in that but there is less of a reason to grow in resentment towards gen 2 while they raise gen 3.
Some don't. It may be that the parents overcorrect and never teach their kids right/wrong, or it could just be the kid being a problem, or any number of other issues.
Times change. Subsistence farming doesn't cut it anymore. The lessons learned from that generation are something we have to grow out of.
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.
This quote also leaves out the second part of their conversation -- the speech's emotional climax -- where Disney tells Travers she needs to forgive herself. This doesn't apply to me. I have nothing to forgive myself for.
https://www.gse.harvard.edu/news/uk/21/04/effect-spanking-br...
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.
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.
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'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 :-)
By getting into massive amounts of debt
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.
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 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.)
Or “stop it,” out of frustration.
Family members have babysat my kids, and this is a mistake I see all the time. If you tell kids not to do something, always tell them why. And be honest about it. It’s kids’ job to learn about the world, and it’s your job as a parent to teach them about it.
"You can't stay up until midnight because I said so."
Few parents would argue that not letting them stay up until midnight is a dumb rule. But the example certainly has a bad explanation.
The problem with this entire thread is that without concrete examples everyone is imagining their own which, not coincidentally, happen to match their already existing world view.
Here’s the thing, though: it’s true that going to bed early is a good rule, and it’s also true that parents feel entitled; that their rules apply to their kids but not them. That’s one reason kids hate their parents - they often deserve it!
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).
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.
> 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 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.
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.
It feels there is very little experimentation in the space, mostly trying to mimic a classroom in digital
"Teaching in public schools suffers from the same problems as cooking in public cafeterias - and generally produces similarly mediocre results."
I don't buy into the sentiment that public education is a mistake, or even that it's outputs are generally mediocre. I do, however, think that the insight that public education is more akin to an industrial process than an interpersonal relationship holds some water.
So my question to educators here would be: Do you ever feel like you’re forced to teach topics you know won’t benefit students?
My problems are mostly reality/logistical constraints. There is always more I could do, more I could give, more I could help every single student, but I would have to learn to freeze time or never sleep.
It’s unhealthy and irrational, but I feel shame for not giving more when I know what a kid needs but I circumstantially lack the capacity to give it to them.
Normally, professors teach things they have some expertise in, and they're biased to think that this is useful to students.
Besides, it's often very debatable whether something is useful or not. For instance, I used to teach things such as theory of computation, automata theory, and similar so-called theoretical classes. You could debate ad nauseam whether this benefits students or not. Some would argue it's useless and students should do more javascript labs, other think that these are the foundations of our field, unlike the latest JS framework which will be obsolete in 2 years.
Some of my colleagues go to great length to convince students that the class they teach is useful, but I'm not convinced this is necessary. I've noticed that students are happy as long as they think they learn something from the class, and that the class is neither too hard or too easy. They don't question the utility of the class if the teacher manages to make the topic fun. For instance, labs, exercices, exams, should be of gradual difficulty, so each student feels they can make progress. This is challenging to achieve when the class audience is heterogenous.
So rather then the choice of topic, what had happened to me was that I disagreed with the way the topic was taught. In my university, sometimes we would work in team with little saying on the class syllabus, labs, exams... This can be frustrating and I'd just leave the team.
Conversely, in my current role as a backend/systems/researchy person, a JS class would broaden my horizons a bit like a literature class might, but I think both would be equally useful to my current job.
Going farther back, I’ve seen a handful of instances where someone was looking for help trying to solve a graph problem, until it was pointed out that it could be reduced to an NP-complete problem. Unfortunately I can’t recall the details.
On the other hand, I teach another course that couldn't be more different. On the first day I give students every question to all the tests and tell them to start studying. If they can answer every question, they know plenty. I almost always give the same test, so different cohorts could (and, I'm quite confident, do) cheat by tracking which questions will be asked. I warn them against this, but ultimately I don't care because the final exam is not generated or graded by me, so it will be their predictable downfall if they go down the road of cheating.
You could reasonably say I neglect the second course; I do, for good reasons that mostly have to do with what I said about the first set of courses. I also the systems that provide education and training to my students relating to both courses, which further justifies my allocation of attention.
Compsci is perfect for this, because students can fix their bug quickly and resubmit their whole assignment. For math, I guess you'd want to avoid having them repeat problems they already got correct. But for other subjects that don't really have a place for "random input", I guess this doesn't work?
Also the assignments were written to the autograder. So instead of saying “write a method that does X” it would say “write a method named NAME that takes in XYZ parameters and outputs exactly in QRS format”.
After having taken so many open-ended assignment classes that really hurt my brain.
> write a method named NAME that takes in XYZ parameters and outputs exactly in QRS format
Yeah I hate that too. Personally I went with "your program should read JSON from stdin and write JSON to stdout". For students who had never seen JSON before, that was definitely some extra friction. But the upside is that it's something they're going to see a lot of in the real world.
That's a pretty realistic requirement, though, isn't it? If you're writing a class that's supposed to interoperate with other systems, it's not like you can just name things whatever you feel like. They have to fit the expected interface.
I guess the context here is mainly a university? Or is it senior high?
Anyway, I spent around three years in college and the value-add for me wasn’t the grades I got. The value I got out of it was the foundation that I laid and the inspiration I got. I got in touch with materials/domains that I might never have encountered otherwise. And to me that’s truly a gift that keeps on giving.
Unless you have a power to remove cheaters, you will have to throw rules at them. At expense of everyone else.
I still hold the line, but do suffer sometimes.
People will find ways to optimise for the metric.
If you give bonuses based on number of commits created or number of tickets closed you'll end up with a lot of useless commits and tickets.
If the only thing that matters in order to pass a course is to do an exam, people will optimise for that. If someone doesn't like the subject or doesn't like the teacher or doesn't like being taught (especially disagreeable boys), they will happily skip the subject and just try to get a passing score.
In university I was already working as a professional developer and I attended only a few classes I cared about and hacked my way out of exams with a mix of cheating and cramming the night before.
I enjoyed all the project work instead and I excelled at that. But that was worth just 1-2 points out of 30. Why was I forced to memorise bullshit I didn't need and that I would have not remembered 3 seconds after the exams in order to get a piece of paper saying I graduated? Isn't being able to do the projects more important than that?
When I hired people with degrees from "good schools" I was always surprised to realise how little were they able to get done on their own. I quickly stopped even checking their qualifications as they're completely worthless for anything related to work.
If I had to reform education I would make it totally based on projects. There would be no grades or titles when you get a job, just an increasingly longer list of projects you worked on.
When I was in school I had to take a Latin class. I didn't want to take it but I picked the best course according to my interest - and unfortunately it had Latin.
I spent those lessons secretly working on my own projects, then I downloaded a bunch of famous texts with their translation and I just wrote a J2ME application to look things up and used it for 5 years (Mobile internet was very expensive back then and searching on the internet would have been way harder).
After I finished my written finals in all the subjects, luckily my score was already high enough not too pass, even if I got zero at the oral exam and I kind of bullshitted my way through that last exam.
Was there any point in trying to force me to learn something? Why do we put people in this situation?
And you'll obtain the good obeying sheeps. You would miss all the competent rebels, those who think outside the scope.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#/media/File...
> Chesterton’s Fence is a heuristic inspired by a quote from the writer and polymath G. K. Chesterton’s 1929 book, The Thing. It’s best known as being one of John F. Kennedy’s favored sayings, as well as a principle Wikipedia encourages its editors to follow. In the book, Chesterton describes the classic case of the reformer who notices something, such as a fence, and fails to see the reason for its existence. However, before they decide to remove it, they must figure out why it exists in the first place. If they do not do this, they are likely to do more harm than good with its removal. In its most concise version, Chesterton’s Fence states the following: Do not remove a fence until you know why it was put up in the first place.
[0] https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/
>[...]I suspect this proposal hasn’t seen much contact with people who’ve actually taught classes
This is how a fair number of classes at my university are graded. Particularly math classes are structured so that you could literally ignore the class for 3 months and then just show up and take the exam and that decides 100% of the grade. Some homework is available for bonus points, but it only contributes to going from a failing grade to passing. While retaking the exam to get a higher grade isn't technically part of the system they will let you do it if there is space.
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.
School pedagogical approaches are weird and appears broadly to be testing a student's ability to endure forcing themselves to learn material they may not find interesting. Obviously, this divides the student population and people with better executive functioning, or stricter parents, float to the top. It's what we've done for so long, we're anchored around the concept. From a motivational standpoint, for many students this can kill curiosity and desire for learning.
Goal attainment research consensus clearly demonstrates specific and sufficiently difficult tasks lead to better performance. It's even more ideal when the individual sets the goal or at the very least is involved in developing the organizational goal. This goes against the grain in schools. Sometimes teachers are incredibly vague, others specific. And, unless the student is in a highly individualized learning environment, like working on a capstone project, they do not play a role in course goal setting.
You start to see the potential problems when research demonstrates, the highest individual performance occurs when individuals are provided a specific and sufficiently difficult goal with a learning oriented approach and decreased emphasis on performance (tests and grades). On the other hand, when an individual already possesses skills and knowledge for assigned goals, then a performance approach, not a learning approach, yields an overall higher performance rating. Also, by far, the worst goal orientation, among the aforementioned, is performance avoidance, that is performing to avoid negative consequences.
Students are in school, they're in the process of obtaining skills and knowledge for a career they may not even have solidified yet. Students are largely falling into the performance avoidance category, then the performance approach category, and, finally, for the luckier few, the learning approach category. Add in the teacher quality variable, whether they assign specific or vague and easy or sufficiently difficult assignments, and you start to see how this creates problems for students and for society.
I speak from experience. I failed miserably during school, even dropping out of high school, for a variety of reasons outside of my control and am extremely fortunate to be where I am today.
OK? So your students tried to do something and failed creatively. Sounds good. Reward them for their efforts, ask them to try again if you feel that they still need to get something out of the assignment.
> But some don’t, and they keep complaining and asking for regrades, and if those aren’t accepted they (or their parents) contact the principal/chair/dean/ombudsperson, who are required to have an investigation.
OK.
> hat gets misinterpreted too, so more details are added, and by the time the teacher retires you have a monstrosity that’s universally despised but almost impossible to complain about.
So your bad solution is good because it started off bad and ended worse. OK.
> Well, enjoy re-grading every single assignment from every student near a boundary,
Round up by default? If someone has an 89, just give them the 90. Honestly, who cares if a few students come up to you and want regrades, I imagine it takes all of 30 seconds to cross out the old grade and add the new one. How onerous...
> As far as I can tell, most follow the incentives and make little effort to stop cheating.
Cool. Most of the time cheating entails something like access to notes on a test that is artificially made more difficult by requiring memorization. That's why open note tests are far better.
> But some teachers are principled
Bummer. They don't sound principled so much as they sound unimaginative.
> Say you suspect students are copying from each other on an exam. You can silently prepare multiple versions of the exam with “micro differences” in questions.
Sounds dumb, I don't like the idea of trying to "trap" kids. I cheated exactly once on a test and got away with it - why? Because I was unhappy in school and I went home and spent my time distracting myself rather than preparing for it. Me cheating one time had literally no negative impact on my life, you trapping me and once again teaching me that education goes hand in hand with punishment would have done years of damage.
> They realized that they could skip learning the material, and instead complete the project by running an evolutionary algorithm with my father’s grading as a reward function.
Creative. Without knowing more about the assignment it's hard to judge, but I'm wary of any assignment that you can just brute force like that.
> your students will be lazy and fallible.
I had to undo years of being told I was "smart but lazy". Teachers need to erase that word from their vocabulary.
> So they won’t learn anything. That's OK, most people don't learn much from school.
> And then they will blame you for not forcing them to do the homework.
a) OK
b) I mean, maybe the parents would? I frankly don't believe that any student will blame a teacher for not forcing them to do homework.
> Surely what matters is if a student understands things, not if they ask questions in class?
Good question. What exactly is the point? To me, education serves a few functions.
1. Babysitting kids so that parents can work
2. Providing young people with a safe place for them to explore their emerging identities, interests, and view of the world
3. Stoking an interest in learning and providing the tools and resources to build a baseline knowledge for future education
So, is understanding really the goal? I don't see understanding as being particularly critical to the education system.
> Participation credit helps to internalize positive externalities.
100% agreed.
My transcript is an odd mix of grades - even within a single class, within a single semester I could go from an A or B to a D or F, or coast by on a C. What I value most is that during that time I dat...
Ahh, here speaks someone who's never taught a class :) If word gets out that you round 89 up to 90, then next you'll be dealing with all the people who got 88.5. At some point you have to have a grade boundary. It may just as well be at 90 as at 89 or 88.5.
>Me cheating one time had literally no negative impact on my life
As the article explains, cheating has negative effects on everyone else. Of course cheating can be good from the cheater's point of view – that's why people cheat!
Why would word get out if you just grade that way? No one would know you were rounding up...
> As the article explains, cheating has negative effects on everyone else. Of course cheating can be good from the cheater's point of view – that's why people cheat!
I think you've completely missed my point. Cheating had no negative impact - on anyone, at all. Getting caught cheating would have huge negative impact.
Students compare grades and talk to each other. It's also not uncommon for students to ask about your policy on rounding in the first class, when you're going through the syllabus.
>Cheating had no negative impact - on anyone, at all.
I'm afraid your cheating did have a negative impact on others, albeit a small one. For example, suppose that the class you took was graded on a curve. Then by adding a false datapoint, you may have pushed up the cut off point for the higher grades. More generally, the larger the number of cheaters, the less meaningful grades become for everyone. Every fake A grade contributes to the devaluation of real A grades.
>Getting caught cheating would have huge negative impact.
You'd be surprised. As the article explains, punishing cheaters isn't really in anyone's narrow interests. It's sadly rather easy to get away with cheating at university, even if you do get caught.
That works for multiple choice. Given the ".5" I'm assuming partial credit is discretionary. So you can just discretionarily choose to give +.5.
> For example, suppose that the class you took was graded on a curve.
It wasn't. Also I'm pretty sure I still failed the test because cheating is hard, I couldn't really read much of what the person in front of me wrote.
> You'd be surprised.
I would be, yeah. My school took that very seriously.
> t's sadly rather easy to get away with cheating at university, even if you do get caught.
Yeah, my CS degree had a hilarious amount of cheating going on.
My point isn't "cheating good".
Yep, and then you'll deal with the students who want to know why their friends got the discretionary +.5 and they didn't! And you'll be in a difficult position, because arbitrarily adding points to some answers and not others does seem pretty unfair on the face of it. (Remember that the students who weren't sitting on a grade boundary will be comparing their scores with the students who were, so they'll see if you added +0.5 points to question 1 for Jack on 89.5 but not for Jane on 85.)
By the way, "partial credit" in this context means "credit for a partially correct answer", not "non-integer credit". You can perfectly well have a scoring system where a single correct answer is worth 0.5 points, as test points are a completely arbitrary unit :)
> My point isn't "cheating good".
It's not clear to me what your point is regarding cheating. You seem to not like the idea of people being punished for cheating. But as cheating is easy to do, it would run rampant without at least a tangible possibility of punishment. So I don't really understand how you (i) think that cheating is bad, (ii) recognize that it happens frequently, and yet (iii) don't think that cheaters should be punished.
I don't think that cheating is bad.
> recognize that it happens frequently,
Naturally. If you give people stupid chores they will almost universally try to find a way to avoid them.
> don't think that cheaters should be punished.
Even if I bought into everything else ie: that testing is good and cheating is bad, I would still not punish cheaters. As I said, I cheated that one time because I had other issues that made school difficult. Punishing would have done nothing except add additional stress, making me retreat further from my education. But of course, as I just said, I don't buy into all of that other stuff, so it's not only an ineffective and cruel way to approach education, but it serves no purpose.
> It's not clear to me what your point is regarding cheating.
My point is that most tests are stupid, and a lot of what "cheating" is is just making them less stupid. For example, I remember students would hide their notes during a test so that they could reference them. That's just good sense - in what real world situation do you need to have instant recall for arbitrary information? It teaches kids to memorize shit, which is damaging.
Two students checking each others answers? Sounds a lot like any normal adult problem solving.
So you can try to "tweak" the system until cheating is impossible or so scary that people will rarely try, or you can "give up" and let people cheat... or you can take a step back and realize that you've made up a problem with no solution.
As I said, school should focus on the three things I mentioned. Nonsensical testing strategies and finding ways to trick kids for doing what is, frankly, the sane thing to do, is purely damaging.
Yes, well, I'm managing to scrape by somehow despite that.
> Of course you are obviously right its good to work together on problems, but what does that have to do with exams?
Yes, that's... the point. Exams are idiotic.
Edit: I did not come up with [0], but I also don't remember where I saw it.
I'm dealing with something now outside academia, where there is absurd bureaucracy, and I'm sidestepping and shortcutting it because I see the mission outcome as separate from the prescribed process, and the trickling and breadcrumbing of details is an abuse of my time, so I sympathize with the student perspective - but in an educational setting, the prescribed process is essentially a sacrificial cost that enables you to "become," a person who has mastered it, as it makes the skill the effect of a skill, and not just the affect of the outcome. Education is necessarily transformative, otherwise it's just rote training.
Example would be, I take music lessons, I'm difficult to teach because I really like Bach and Chopin and I can play some simple preludes by ear, but my sight reading is maybe at a gr. 2 level, which is just enough to get the pieces under my fingers with a hill climbing struggle, but makes me useless as an actual musician, and probably very irritating to musicians whose performances are the effect of their years of real skills, and not the affect of hackery or savantism that an unskilled observer can't easily distinguish. Even if we played the same piece, comparing them to me would be insulting and debasing to them because it's like saying a recording of something is the same as a performance of it, so it's very diminishing.
In the case of the temperature monitoring circuit in the article, the process is designed to facilitate a mental transformation of exercising elementary skills, and being educated means being able to commit to that process of being molded by the experience. The details are to force commitment to the process and filter out those who aren't. Unfortuately, credentialism incentivises this affect of skills and drives enrollment, so if you are doing a job oriented degree, you're basically trained and not really educated through a process of becoming.
It would almost make sense to offer students a deal, where they can choose a training track that leads to a 52% / C- grade and do the minimum, which takes them out of the way of the TAs, they don't participate in discussions, and they can coast and draft others, maybe date each other and say they went there, but they can't impose costs, where others can elect to aim higher and choose the education track with an understanding of what that means.
You have to think like a software engineer. Test first: write the requirements fro the perspective of a test which fails if the requirements are not met.
Rather than dictating irrelevant details of the apparatus that is to be made during the assignment, describe a procedure by which it can be verified to meet the requirements.
"Build a temperature monitor circuit.": what is it monitoring: the temperature of what? Where is that taken? What is the output? Decimal temperature in Celsius to the tenth of a degree? In what range? Or else is there just a control output: is there a hysteresis to turn something on and off like a thermostat? Etc.
"Test it to prove it works." That's a poor way of giving requirements. You need specific test cases. You may have to have specialized equipment on hand that the students can use, like a controlled source of reference temperature.
A very useful thing to have, both for teachers and students, is a "rubric": a succinct description of how the work will be evaluated, and the importance (weight) of each feature.
This is difficult because, for instance, the possibility of cheating means that the person who says they performed the assignment might have contracted it off to someone else and learned nothing.
Someone who already has all the required knowledge can also just spin out the assignment without learning anything.
Basically, learning is a state change in the pupil; if you want to validate that some state change occurred, you have to have a way of measuring the state before and after and calculating a difference.