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Comment by jimmar | Hacker News Reader

Some teachers like to play god in the classroom. Source: I'm a teacher. I try not to play god and impose non-sensical rules, but I could if I wanted to and nobody could do anything about it. Parents could complain, my department head could try to talk sense into me, but if I impose a rule saying that citations must be written in Comic Sans size 11 font with every third word italicized, then I'm within my rights to take points off for deviations from the assignment instructions. Society places a lot of trust in teachers, and there are few checks against bad teachers.

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> citations must be written in Comic Sans size 11 font with every third word italicized

TBH, after having to follow MLA style guides and various other citation styles over my career, I feel like this isn't as out there as you intended! I hated having to put together citations because the rules always seemed entirely arbitrary and never seemed to capture what I thought was relevant info.

Chicago is so much more sane than MLA. I don't know why we insist on making high schoolers use MLA. They'll only need to use it if they become academics in some fields and if they've learned any other citation style they can pick up MLA just fine later.

They also seem to have subtly shifted each time I revisit citation styling rules

As someone who suffered under teachers who like to play god, and thrived under teachers like you, thank you.

> citations must be written in Comic Sans size 11 font with every third word italicized

you would become a legend if you did this :-D

I could see it as a easy example of the "brown M&Ms" theory: https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2012/02/14/146880432/...

Similarly to police unions, teacher unions prevent many of those checks. Public servants do not serve society by having unions.

In my locality, the union is the last line of defense for teachers who don’t want to teach creationism, abstinence, and the like. Local politicians are far easier for a vocal minority to bully.

A lot of organizations actively undermine society by existing, but we generally have to respect freedom of association, even for people we don't like.

Police and teacher unions are terrible not because they are public servants but because our capitalist system provides them with no way to extract additional value.

Teachers don't have qualified immunity or get the privilege of shooting your dog, making it a pretty poor comparison.

Re>> "if I impose a rule saying that citations must be written in Comic Sans size 11 font with every third word italicized." You would not be "playing God"; that would be the opposite. [Que Church Lady] Satan!

Snark aside, thank you for your contributions. Re >> "there are few checks against bad teachers" -- do you think there should be more checks or do you think well intentioned checks could be weaponized against good teachers?

I played God in the opposite direction. That way you teach the lesson without having to ban Wikipedia. (I should state that the purpose of this particular module is to illustrate the dangers of scientific misinformation. And this is only one of the exercises in that module. But all are illustrative in a way that students in the age of social media can readily relate to.)

1st Exercise serves as an intro to the subject

1 - Find articles on Wikipedia, or information on social media sources, with factually incorrect information in them. Science articles are a good source of these. Molecular weights are wrong. Physics formulas off. That sort of thing.

2 - Assign a short essay on a subject that these wikipedia pages claim to expound on.

3 - Kids will ask if they can use Wikipedia. Tell them yes, but emphasize that you wouldn't advise it as a person should be skeptical of anything they read on the internet. Let them know that lot of the information out there is false.

4 - Vast majority of the kids will ignore your advice and the same incorrect information will make an appearance in each of their essays. Grade them normally. So most will earn D or F.

5 - Since everyone did so poorly, agree to drop the D or F grades and just assign another short essay. This one on the use of internet information sources to disseminate misinformation. (In my case, scientific misinformation. But the same exercise works for whatever subject you are teaching.)

Use the entire exercise to inform the discussion of scientific misinformation. (Or, again, misinformation in whatever subject you are teaching.) This discussion is the real launch of the module.

Further exercises in the module go into the dangers of medical misinformation. Importance of factual information in decision making. etc etc. It's the most fun module because by the end, the students don't trust me. (In fact, they trust no one.) It has become a game, and they're all listening extremely carefully to every word I say expecting another gotcha. In a very real way, they've learned to be skeptical even of teachers. They've begun to trust only what they can verify. And you realize your work is done.

Having bad teachers (or dealing with bad/pointless systems generally) can also be instructive. Esp. prior to high school, if I had any control, I'm not sure I'd choose for my kids to not have any bad teachers.

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