Comment by bernulli | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bernulli | Hacker News Reader

The article perfectly reflects my experience teaching STEM in the last semester.

Instructional material that led to rave reviews and amazing student outcomes the years before now results in similar reviews like “lost a lot of respect for the Math department after taking this course.”

The main complaint is "Why won’t anyone teach me XXX": "it seems like the instructor is expecting us to learn the material ourselves".

Sorry to say, but for many STEM topics that's the only way. You need to struggle, do, and solve the problem. And not only there: you won't learn figure skating / cycling / playing an instrument by watching a lecture (or video) on it. You have to actively do it. The instructor can lead you to the water but can't force you to drink. Just staring at the water and complaining does not help.

I wonder what these students will then feel like in their first job. You hire engineers because you have a problem that needs solving. This kind of graduate on the other hand expects that someone solves the problem for them and feeds the solution in small packets.

Also, of course, it's interesting to wonder why this is happening now and if it will go away. The connection to the pandemic seems clear, but how exactly?

> Why won’t anyone teach me XXX

Yep, that's something I heard from my kids while I was trying to help them with their math classes all throughout elementary school - "just teach me it!" If nothing else, learning math helps you get to the point where you can appreciate that there are things that you can't learn from just being told by somebody else who knows the "secret".

Sure, but none of that is an excuse to not provide students with worked problems or solutions for at least some of the problems they are given, after they have worked them.

> The connection to the pandemic seems clear, but how exactly?

Does it? If by clear you mean "relating to the anecdote you shared at the top of your comment", then sure - but that is far from my standard for "clear," at least.

But the material is not the problem. You have the whole world knowledge at your fingers, in books, the internet, etc. Schaum's outline will give you hundreds of worked problems. The problem is that the student sees no possible solution to this if she is not handed the solution by her instructor.

>Does it? If by clear you mean "relating to the anecdote you shared at the top of your comment", then sure - but that is far from my standard for "clear," at least.

It's a temporal correlation that all my colleagues observe as well. Average grades drop by 50% using the identical material that was always successful pre-pandemic.

So you find it more likely that lockdown, restricted gathering in learning groups, Zoom lectures, potential financial hardship had no impact on learning whatsoever? That's not quite up to my standard.

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