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The long term effects may be just as devastating. Consider that as a lecturer every your word will carry a meaning. Even an innocuous remark may turn out to be
by AndreyErmakov 10y ago
The long term effects may be just as devastating.
Consider that as a lecturer every your word will carry a meaning. Even an innocuous remark may turn out to be something that will stick with one of your pupils for years and will lead them to make a sequence of wrong decisions that will eventually ruin their life.
Having access to younger minds and influencing their personal and professional development is not a joke. It's that kind of a job which if not done properly may potentially produce the next tyrant.
- pharrington 10y agoBeing taught the wrong thing for a couple months by a shitty professor when youre a young adult isnt comparable to your parents hitting you as a child. The professor is not your entire world, your brain is much more developed, and youre unlikely to consider all your waking actions in terms of your professional skills.
- AndreyErmakov 10y agoYour comment saddens me and only confirms what I've been suspecting: a lot of people including those working in academia don't take education seriously and do not comprehend the far-reaching repercussions of their actions. Generally speaking, a person only begins to reach psychological maturity at around 30 years of age. Until that time all incoming ideas generally fall on a fertile ground, as the person is not yet capable of telling bad apples from the good ones apart and can't always discard the wrong ideas. Sometimes it's exactly those ideas that take and derail somebody's life, unnoticeably, one step at a time.
- pharrington 10y agoI mean Im just having trouble understanding a substantial link between wrong information learned in an acedemic envirnment (diverse peer group, diverse set of professors, bulk of learning being self directed, having already developed a worldview thats slightly more robust than "mommy knows everything") and trauma. Yes, it has negative economic reprecussions. Sure, in very rare and extreme cases, doing some wrong due to something you learned in college miight lose you a job (I say rare because it should be obvious that most work processes are wrong or out of date and there aint alot of firing done because of it.) But to equate that one source of incorrect knowledge (as opposed to everything else you hear or see which is true somehow?) with your whole fucking world regularly hitting you, telling you youre worthless, being absent in your life, etc, doesnt really gel with my understanding of childhood trauma.
- tonyarkles 10y agoAs a solid example of this... A fellow student was working on a problem that had a key-value mapping, but instead of storing them in a hash table/map/whatever the language wants to call it, he was storing them as pairs in a list and complaining about the performance on a large data set. I asked him why he wasn't just storing it in a hash table instead. His answer: "Because I sometimes need to iterate over it and get both the key and the value" My brain had to sit and parse what he'd said for a few moments, before I realized what the heck he was talking about. In all of the data structure courses, he'd been taught "A hash table hashes the key, and stores the value in the corresponding slot". In that mental model, there's no way to retrieve the key, only to retrieve the value given the key. I explained to him that real-world implementations do do that, but also store the key along-side the value, so that you can still iterate across it. You could see the look of amazement wash over him, and then he frustratingly declared "Why the hell didn't they mention that?!"
- magicalist 10y agoWhat does that have to do with academia? That's just having an overly simplified mental model of something, which all humans do when learning any new thing, whether through a lecture, a random stack overflow question, the compiler manual, or through pure experimentation.
- AndreyErmakov 10y agoAcademia carries with it a larger amount of authority than a random programming forum. Students have the expectation that the academic staff is generally knowledgeable and wise and what they say in all probability is very important, has to be remembered and followed (even if you don't quite understand why yet but perhaps you will in the future).
- type0 10y agoI don't think "Academia" that doesn't teach critical thinking and only practices its authority over students should be called academic institution.
- ssalazar 10y agoIf one thing a STEM professor says can lead to ruining your life, then you probably have a lot worse things going wrong in your life. DISCLAIMER IAMA academic
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]