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Comment by miles | Hacker News Reader

From the earlier Reason article[0]:

"In one of his organic chemistry classes in the spring 2022 there were, among other troubling indicators, a very high rate of student withdrawals, a student petition signed by 82 students, course evaluations scores that were by far the worst not only among members of the Chemistry Department but among all the University's undergraduate science courses, and multiple student complaints about his dismissiveness, unresponsiveness, condescension, and opacity about grading."

[0] https://reason.com/2022/10/03/maitland-jones-jr-organic-chem...

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I'm not sure if that quote really captures the issue. I read NYT article about this a few days ago (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/03/us/nyu-organic-chemistry-...), and its seems one major aspect is a culture clash between expectations of "gen Z" students and expectations of students/professors in prior generations. The gist I got is that the "gen z" students expect the "system" to adapt to address their struggles, and when they fail they tend to blame that "system" or other factors outside their control. Focusing on the student evaluation results presumes the students' attitude is the correct one, when it may very well be unreasonable.

Ummm, yeah sounds about right!

Most of the time, systems fail, not people. People are extremely responsive and committed to their environments. Bad environments yield bad outcomes. If gen z has stopped blaming themselves for things outside their control, then they may be the wisest generation.

> systems fail, not people

Perhaps the system failed this person by letting too many students attend his class who lacked the requisite intellectual ability or work ethic.

Or the system failed by hiring him in the first place for a job he was unsuited for? Yes, I agree this was a systems issue that paired the wrong students with the wrong teacher. Maybe he should have been teaching an upper level course where the students could benefit from extra rigor or maybe he should have been release from teaching responsibility as a talented researcher.

> “They weren’t coming to class, that’s for sure, because I can count the house,” Dr. Jones said in an interview. “They weren’t watching the videos, and they weren’t able to answer the questions.”

> “I think this petition was written more out of unhappiness with exam scores than an actual feeling of being treated unfairly,” wrote Mr. Benslimane, now a Ph.D. student at Harvard. “I have noticed that many of the students who consistently complained about the class did not use the resources we afforded to them.”

sounds like the students had things within their control they could have done, like attend classes or watch lectures.

You’re assuming those videos and classes were worth watching.

Like the students, I haven't attended the classes or watched the videos so I would have no reason to think that they aren't worth watching. I'd guess it'd probably be worth a shot if you were struggling with the material and wanted a good grade though.

I believe every single shit teacher I’ve ever met used that excuse.

> I believe every single shit teacher I’ve ever met used that excuse.

What does that add to the discussion? I had a shit teacher once, so every time a student accuses a teacher of being shit, they're correct? There also exist students who make up dishonest excuses for their poor performance, too. We're talking about a specific situation, not vague generalities. At best we can consider the questions raised, because we aren't going to be able to successfully litigate which side is right and which is wrong.

It provides a counterpoint to the teacher's claims that you're repeated above. Think about it - why would this particular group of students, as opposed to other groups, with other teachers, decide not to learn?

Also, it's not "once". One the best things I've learned early in school was learning to recognise bad teachers and how to deal with them. There are _plenty_ of them everywhere.

> Think about it - why would this particular group of students, as opposed to other groups, with other teachers, decide not to learn?

That's where your logic breaks down. You're falling into the streetlight fallacy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect). These people are in the news, but the news doesn't report everything. You can't infer this isn't happening elsewhere from this kind of media coverage.

> If gen z has stopped blaming themselves for things outside their control

The prevailing attitude I see in America these days is that people do not have agency. Their position in life is due to a combination of luck, privilege, oppression, somebody else, and government programs.

The system being an incompetent teacher... yes he should adapt, there are people who can teach organic chemistry better.

Why are the "Gen Z" students clashing with this one specific professor, if it's a generational thing?

Most professors have adapted and give students what they want?

We're to think every other professor has lowered standards so far that the only one refusing to do so is routinely handing out tests that garner 30% class averages?

It doesn't have to go as far as literally everybody else. It just has to be common enough that it's frustrating for the students when a professor does not behave this way.

> We're to think every other professor has lowered standards so far that the only one refusing to do so is routinely handing out tests that garner 30% class averages?

The only one who got into the news.

So most of the experts in the field think that a change in teaching methods is the optimal strategy? Maybe there's a good reason for that.

> Why are the "Gen Z" students clashing with this one specific professor, if it's a generational thing?

1. A lot of professors may take the easy way out, and lower their standards as demanded by their students. Especially those in contract positions like this.

2. This professor seems to actually be very highly esteemed (he literally wrote the widely-used textbook), and is only in this adjunct role because he's retired. Therefore he has a lot more power to get his side of the story out and the personal stakes are a lot lower for him.

If the system's default is to expect the combination of an intelligent student, three hours of instruction, and ~12 hours of hard work a week to produce a C grade or lower in a three-credit course, then the system's broken. Probably the instruction part of it, possibly the grading part.

If the material is difficult, it's the professor's job to teach it in a way that can be understood. If that can't be done in the credit-hours allotted to the class, the class should be worth more credit hours.

There's also a difference in co-ordination capacity and social dynamics more generally. In this case, there'll be some channel or chat group where the petition and complaints were arranged. It's pretty safe to say not only that the professor won't be on that channel but that students who aren't on it or aren't allowed to be on it will suffer some fairly significant social penalties.

> There's also a difference in co-ordination capacity and social dynamics more generally. In this case, there'll be some channel or chat group where the petition and complaints were arranged.

And cheating too (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/03/us/nyu-organic-chemistry-...):

> Many students were having other problems. Kent Kirshenbaum, another chemistry professor at N.Y.U., said he discovered cheating during online tests.

> When he pushed students’ grades down, noting the egregious misconduct, he said they protested that “they were not given grades that would allow them to get into medical school.”

> By spring 2022, the university was returning with fewer Covid restrictions, but the anxiety continued and students seemed disengaged.

There was a really interesting article I read a several months back about a professor who actually got invalided to his class's group chat. The students forgot he was a member, and he watched a lot of them cheat through half the semester. Then he dropped the hammer once he'd gotten it all documented. I think there was a tech-angle to it, and a lot of it was about how she did the data analysis on the chat history.

Edit: here's the article I was referring to: https://web.archive.org/web/20220529004005/https://crumplab.... (the original was taken down due to the attention it got, thank you Internet Archive!).

Dude's 84 years old. Far, far more likely he is (now) just a shitty teacher. Teaching is really hard and really demanding, and that's before you're a guy in your 8th decade facing a 60-year culture gap with your students. Folks need to know when to retire, sounds like this guy missed the memo.

> Dude's 84 years old. Far, far more likely he is (now) just a shitty teacher. Teaching is really hard and really demanding, and that's before you're a guy in your 8th decade facing a 60-year culture gap with your students. Folks need to know when to retire, sounds like this guy missed the memo.

He's old, therefore he must be doing a shitty job? Seriously? You're being ridiculously ageist.

Nah. He's 84 years old and got fired for being a shitty teacher. It's more likely that he's a shitty teacher than an entire generation of people are suddenly fundamentally different from all humans before them, as you claimed.

> Nah. He's 84 years old and got fired for being a shitty teacher. It's more likely that he's a shitty teacher than an entire generation of people are suddenly fundamentally different from all humans before them, as you claimed.

Come on. Having different expectations is not being "fundamentally different from all humans before them." It's actually pretty normal, as far as "generations" go.

And if there's anything recent history should have taught you, is that "getting fired" for reason X, doesn't necessarily mean that reason X is actually true. It's not uncommon for a fired person to have been on the receiving end of unfair evaluation criteria, a bad manager, various kinds of prejudice, etc.

Two things:

1) Humans decline mentally & physically as they age. Sucks, but it's true. This guy in his 30s was maybe a great teacher. That was in the 1970s. It's 2022. While I can't be certain, it's very likely he's not running on all cylinders. As mentioned, teaching is a really hard and demanding job. Statistically, it's very likely that he's just not up to the task anymore. People get old. Sorry.

2) Looking at it from a distance, if a group of students think your teaching style sucks so much that they put together a petition to get you to change it, that's just fundamentally a failure of your teaching style. He might want different students, but tough, these are the ones he's got. If he can't hack it with them then by definition he is a shitty teacher.

Combine the two and you get a pretty clear picture. Guy's not up to the job and the school and students will be better without him.

> Humans decline mentally & physically as they age. Sucks, but it's true. This guy in his 30s was maybe a great teacher. That was in the 1970s. It's 2022.

Sorry dude. In some ways that's true, in other ways that's not. IIRC, certain kinds of "mental agility" decrease as one ages, but that can be compensated for by increased experience and knowledge. Your comment also reads like classic techie ageism.

How much has undergrad organic chemistry changed since the 70s? My guess: not much. If the guy still knows his stuff (and he almost certainly does, given he wrote a widely used textbook), and he could teach well in the past, he can almost certainly teach it effectively now. IMHO, that can be hard to grasp for tech people, because so much of our knowledge is obsoleted quickly by various kinds of churn. I'm getting zero indication that the issue was that he was befuddled or anything like that.

> Looking at it from a distance, if a group of students think your teaching style sucks so much that they put together a petition to get you to change it, that's just fundamentally a failure of your teaching style. He might want different students, but tough, these are the ones he's got. If he can't hack it with them then by definition he is a shitty teacher.

That's bad reasoning, on the order of "he must be guilty, otherwise they wouldn't have arrested him." By your logic, it would be his failure as a teacher if he failed to teach a class of literal illiterates Organic Chemistry.

did you read the comment you wrote above? The one where you said that because they’re young they must be in the wrong? You’re the same tablespoon who wrote this comment, right? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33112591

> did you read the comment you wrote above? The one where you said that because they’re young they must be in the wrong? You’re the same tablespoon who wrote this comment, right? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33112591

You need to work on your reading comprehension. I never said the students were wrong, I said we shouldn't presume they're correct and therefore take their opinion as the whole story.

It would be ageist to say any old guy must be past it, but not ageist to say its a relevant consideration. I knew a few professors who were outstanding figures at their peak, but who continued teaching into their 80s. It was obvious to everyone around them that they needed to retire years before they actually did.

> "gen z" students expect the "system" to adapt to address their struggles

I hope Gen Z soldiers don't have this attitude.

[Mortar round blows off leg of Gen Z platoon grunt.]

"OMG! Mortar rounds are SO UNFAIR!" Let's sign a change.org petition demanding mortar rounds only emit harmless pink smoke. If we end up with pink smoke in our foxhole we can demand more time to dig a deeper, better concealed foxhole.

They could also be the type of people that get chemical/bioweapons/newer weapons banned from international war, as other pink smoke mortar loving people have done in the past.

Noble thought but unlikely. With the end of WWII and the formation of the UN it was hoped that the development of newer and more terrifying weapons would stop but it was a false and unrealistic hope. I'm of the Woodstock generation and we thought the world was in for a much better age but tragically that never eventuated, wars never stopped and they're now escalating again in serious ways.

One hardly needs to study history to realize that it's mainly the study of wars, weaponry and people killing each other. It's taught us that civilization has always cycled between a state of fragile peace that's constantly within a hair's trigger from ending and actual war itself and descent into barbarism—and the longer the cycles of peace last the more sensitive the hair-trigger becomes.

Few would be happier than me to see this or the next generation succeeding as you suggest, but on the evidence I'd reckon the odds of success are extremely slim—so slim in fact that I'd put substantial money on it. As success would mean a complete turnaround in what's happened throughout all of human history—and as the unprovoked war in Ukraine has shown, we are not yet even on the starting block!

I'd also suggest that come any serious global conflict, treaties outlawing chemical and bioweapons etc. will be violated on a whim and the evidence is that it's already happened in comparatively small conflicts—not to mention Putin's sabre-rattling threat of not ruling out the nuclear option (and he's done so in what is still just a local conflict, albeit a serious one). What would be worse, the nuclear option or the other big two?

(As I write this my conviction is being further strengthened—I've just watched back-to-back television footage of the latest bombing of an apartment building in Ukraine where people were killed and the killing of dozens of innocent children in Thailand by of all people a parent!)

One of the reasons chemical weapons were banned was because they were ineffective, and had the unfortunate tendency to blow the wrong way over the lines.

Bioweapons are also just as likely to kill your own side.

I've heard secondhand from people who took his class while at Princeton, decades ago, that his courses even then were notoriously and anomalously hard in comparison to organic chemistry courses at other Ivy League universities, and in comparison to other courses within the department. They're alarmed that this has become a "culture war" issue.

If there is a culture clash, it is that the "gen Z" students finally organized and collected evidence to back their claims that his teaching was having negative effects beyond those originally intended by the institution, and were not afraid to take it to the institution. That's a good thing, in my book.

Yes you fully picked up the gist of that article and have adopted its stance as your own. The article had a POV to push and you ate it up.

> “they were not given grades that would allow them to get into medical school.”

Herein lies the culture clash.

NYU is a ferociously expensive school, and both the students and the parents expect to be catered to for that amount of money--plain and simple.

A concrete example -- by more than one account, he had a standard practice of publicly naming and shaming the student with the lowest score on each exam. That's got no legitimate pedagogical purpose. Ideally, there'd be a way short of firing to deal with it -- but he'd have to go along with that.

Yeah, it looks like this was a combination of students not doing to work/putting in the time, and a teacher who got too old and bitter to treat students with respect. It's also likely that previous generations were less thin skinned, but really nobody needs a sarcastic and condescending teacher shaming them in class over their grades and even previous generations would have done better without it.

one person's "thin skin" is another's "courage to stand up for themselves".

It's hard to tell the real story from the various articles. Organic chemistry does tend to be a difficult class for various reasons--and not just because of weeding out pre-meds. And it's easy to see that layered with a semi-retired professor who is very set in his ways who, just because he has been a well-respected researcher doesn't mean he's the best person to teach a large lecture course in a difficult subject.

It weeded me out of pre-med and I never even spoke to the professor. It was like a 500 student class, there was no time. I didn't think it was taught very well. But I also thought it was taught in a normal fashion for the class/topic. It just required much more self-driven appetite for the material and self-study than I had ever experienced and more than I cared to give at the time. I suspect that's the case here as well and the "kids these days" felt the need to protest it instead of roll up their sleeves and do the work, or accept that they don't really have what is required to make it in med school level of rigor and commitment.

Going from public high school into a high pressure university can be quite a shock (it was to me). Before firing a prof, I'd have consulted the majority of his students who did not sign the petition.

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