4 ms·

This is TERRIFYINGLY accurate. """ Here’s what will happen: Like most other humans, your students will be lazy and fallible. So many of them will procrastinat

This is TERRIFYINGLY accurate. """ Here’s what will happen: Like most other humans, your students will be lazy and fallible. So many of them will procrastinate and not do the homework. So they won’t learn anything. So they will get a terrible grade on the final. And then they will blame you for not forcing them to do the homework """ This is almost exactly how adjunct teaching went for me. It was not the experience I had hoped it would be in almost any way.

beebmam 5y ago
Good! Students should be failing out of they're unwilling to work hard
- jjj123 5y ago
  You could call it unwilling to work hard. Or it could be difficulty prioritizing work, or ADHD, or disorganization. Are those traits what we’re testing for, or are we testing for knowledge of the subject?
  - Lascaille 5y ago
    The testing is for a combination of knowledge of the subject and ability to apply it in practice.
  - matthewdgreen 5y ago
    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.
  - r_hoods_ghost 5y ago
    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.
    - caddemon 5y ago
      I see where you are coming from in that there is only so much burden on the teacher that would be reasonable accommodation. However I think it comes across as harsh because many of these students could successfully complete a degree if they received adequate treatment from a healthcare provider.
    - isbvhodnvemrwvn 5y ago
      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.
    - sneak 5y ago
      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.
  - dclowd9901 5y ago
    Not to be insensitive, but ADHD is a learning disability. Are we saying that anyone can be taught anything? That seems unrealistic to me.
  - caddemon 5y ago
    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.
  - matheusmoreira 5y ago
    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.
- savanaly 5y ago
  >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?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- avs733 5y ago
  they are perfectly willing to work hard...the problem is their heuristics of what it means to work hard have been poorly developed.
gonehome 5y ago
I really liked homework suggestions that (critically) included the answer key and walkthrough of solution! Doing problem sets in university without this made it way less valuable because you need the immediate feedback loop to learn and waiting until office hours or recitation takes too long and you forget. Good classes (from grade clarity perspective) were ones where it was clear what would be tested and how to prepare. Then you could leverage the optional homework to focus on areas you didn’t understand yet. There were classes I enjoyed that did this poorly by either forcing homework grading without answer keys (feedback loop too slow, often can’t focus on what you don’t know) - or made it very hard to know what the test format would be like to prepare for. I like learning and enjoyed my CS classes - I also kept a high gpa at a university known to be hard (was also preparing for medschool where gpa is critical in the US), but the stress around grades was miserable. Getting good grades is a skill that’s related to learning, but also its own thing. Sometimes to optimize grades you have to do things that hurt learning (rather than focus on how a compiler works and digging into interesting details here, you must focus your attention on the specific types of puzzles that will be tested). I get why this is done, but I still wish there was a better way to handle this. I think ISAs and job market validation of skills is an improvement (like lambda school) but those students still blame everyone else for their own failures even in that case so it’s a hard problem.
- legobmw99 5y ago
  In CS courses, I always appreciated when we were given access to the grading scripts/unit tests used by course staff. It made that feedback loop immediate, and unless you were intentionally doing something weird you usually knew exactly what grade you were getting for your submission. As a TA, it was funny to see the ways a few students would overfit those tests. In one extreme case I literally saw a student replace a complicated function definition with a if-else chain that just determined which of the 4 test cases it was being run on…
  - bsder 5y ago
    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.
zwkrt 5y ago
There is a breed of very narcissistic person in our culture that will always find a way to blame their inadequacies and their mistakes on those around them. In high school, if you are a teacher you have quite a lot of authority in the classroom and so even if your student is oriented in this way, they will just 'not like that teacher'. Helicopter and apologist parents are increasingly an issue but they aren't directly in the classroom. In college however, students are grappling with their own burgeoning adulthood. They realize a TA is just another student with a few years on them. While the professor might be a bit out of reach, for a narcissistic person, it is easy to justify to themselves that they are actually above the TA in status/rank/morality/righteousness/sociability. Subsequently they can beat down the TA in the way that you mentioned. "All my problems are the result of your failures to address them". "I would have done better but the TA didn't like me." "Oh I hated that class the TA was a total nerd." "No one ever told me I had to do the assignments, I didn't realize I would be tested on this." It doesn't help that people who choose to become a TA are often a 'helpful' kind of person, the exact kind of person that tends to be a little bit susceptible to these kinds of criticisms, even if they are untrue. The only way to move forward as a TA (and as a person) in this environment is to harden yourself in the ways that the article and many other commenters mention. That's my 2c anyhow.
- civilized 5y ago
  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.
  - webmobdev 5y ago
    I didn't get you; steer clear of who - the teacher or the student?
    - titanomachy 5y ago
      probably steer clear of the student who claims they failed because the teacher didn't like them
vwoolf 5y ago
This is also how teaching went for me. I found out why teachers have attendance policies, quizzes, and all the other things that, as a student, seemed inane, if not counterproductive, to me. While those things sometimes are, and can be overly punitive or poorly applied (like anything, much of the apparatus around teaching can be done better or done worse), I now get why instructors do those things.
- caddemon 5y ago
  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.

beebmam 5y ago

Good! Students should be failing out of they're unwilling to work hard

jjj123 5y ago
You could call it unwilling to work hard. Or it could be difficulty prioritizing work, or ADHD, or disorganization. Are those traits what we’re testing for, or are we testing for knowledge of the subject?
- Lascaille 5y ago
  The testing is for a combination of knowledge of the subject and ability to apply it in practice.
- matthewdgreen 5y ago
  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.
- r_hoods_ghost 5y ago
  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.
  - caddemon 5y ago
    I see where you are coming from in that there is only so much burden on the teacher that would be reasonable accommodation. However I think it comes across as harsh because many of these students could successfully complete a degree if they received adequate treatment from a healthcare provider.
  - isbvhodnvemrwvn 5y ago
    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.
  - sneak 5y ago
    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.
- dclowd9901 5y ago
  Not to be insensitive, but ADHD is a learning disability. Are we saying that anyone can be taught anything? That seems unrealistic to me.
- caddemon 5y ago
  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.
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  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.
savanaly 5y ago
>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?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
avs733 5y ago
they are perfectly willing to work hard...the problem is their heuristics of what it means to work hard have been poorly developed.

gonehome 5y ago

I really liked homework suggestions that (critically) included the answer key and walkthrough of solution! Doing problem sets in university without this made it way less valuable because you need the immediate feedback loop to learn and waiting until office hours or recitation takes too long and you forget. Good classes (from grade clarity perspective) were ones where it was clear what would be tested and how to prepare. Then you could leverage the optional homework to focus on areas you didn’t understand yet. There were classes I enjoyed that did this poorly by either forcing homework grading without answer keys (feedback loop too slow, often can’t focus on what you don’t know) - or made it very hard to know what the test format would be like to prepare for. I like learning and enjoyed my CS classes - I also kept a high gpa at a university known to be hard (was also preparing for medschool where gpa is critical in the US), but the stress around grades was miserable. Getting good grades is a skill that’s related to learning, but also its own thing. Sometimes to optimize grades you have to do things that hurt learning (rather than focus on how a compiler works and digging into interesting details here, you must focus your attention on the specific types of puzzles that will be tested). I get why this is done, but I still wish there was a better way to handle this. I think ISAs and job market validation of skills is an improvement (like lambda school) but those students still blame everyone else for their own failures even in that case so it’s a hard problem.

legobmw99 5y ago
In CS courses, I always appreciated when we were given access to the grading scripts/unit tests used by course staff. It made that feedback loop immediate, and unless you were intentionally doing something weird you usually knew exactly what grade you were getting for your submission. As a TA, it was funny to see the ways a few students would overfit those tests. In one extreme case I literally saw a student replace a complicated function definition with a if-else chain that just determined which of the 4 test cases it was being run on…
- bsder 5y ago
  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.

zwkrt 5y ago

There is a breed of very narcissistic person in our culture that will always find a way to blame their inadequacies and their mistakes on those around them. In high school, if you are a teacher you have quite a lot of authority in the classroom and so even if your student is oriented in this way, they will just 'not like that teacher'. Helicopter and apologist parents are increasingly an issue but they aren't directly in the classroom. In college however, students are grappling with their own burgeoning adulthood. They realize a TA is just another student with a few years on them. While the professor might be a bit out of reach, for a narcissistic person, it is easy to justify to themselves that they are actually above the TA in status/rank/morality/righteousness/sociability. Subsequently they can beat down the TA in the way that you mentioned. "All my problems are the result of your failures to address them". "I would have done better but the TA didn't like me." "Oh I hated that class the TA was a total nerd." "No one ever told me I had to do the assignments, I didn't realize I would be tested on this." It doesn't help that people who choose to become a TA are often a 'helpful' kind of person, the exact kind of person that tends to be a little bit susceptible to these kinds of criticisms, even if they are untrue. The only way to move forward as a TA (and as a person) in this environment is to harden yourself in the ways that the article and many other commenters mention. That's my 2c anyhow.

civilized 5y ago
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.
- webmobdev 5y ago
  I didn't get you; steer clear of who - the teacher or the student?
  - titanomachy 5y ago
    probably steer clear of the student who claims they failed because the teacher didn't like them

vwoolf 5y ago

This is also how teaching went for me. I found out why teachers have attendance policies, quizzes, and all the other things that, as a student, seemed inane, if not counterproductive, to me. While those things sometimes are, and can be overly punitive or poorly applied (like anything, much of the apparatus around teaching can be done better or done worse), I now get why instructors do those things.

caddemon 5y ago
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.