Should students profit off my classes?
professorbainbridge.com
professorbainbridge.com
(More broadly I think most conceptions of education where "Hide the knowledge from the students" is an acceptable operating principle are probably borked. Exceptions to be awarded if you're teaching nuclear engineering or Charms and skipping ahead a few chapters can result in the lab vanishing in a fireball.)
There is, for example, a well-trodden path in elementary schools of assigning "busywork", which is essentially a classroom management technique whereby you purposely assign work which has zero or negative marginal educational value such that your faster students do not run out of things to do before the class period ends, so that you can focus your efforts on slower students or class discipline problems. I remember a few incidents where I was chastened for dealing with busywork too efficiently. (e.g. "Draw 10 flags of the world." "Can we pick the countries?" "Sure." "Libya, Japan, Ireland, France, Italy, umm, can I use an encyclopedia for a moment?" "Why those countr... PATRICK." "Yes ma'am?" "That's CHEATING. All the other students will do lots more work." "Happy to suggest better flags for them too, ma'am.")
It's one reason I'm pro electronic teaching aids like Khan Academy - more suitable learning, at the kids level and less "human downtime".
Unfortunately, it's extremely rare for a teacher to use this argument for the right reason; much more often they're doing exactly what you describe.
1) There are good teachers and there are bad teachers. Please don't tar all teachers with the same brush. (I know you said "tend" not "all" but every other part of this post implied a broad brush.)
2) Sometimes we really do need to teach process. If I wait until the programs are complicated and the algorithms can't be held in your head to teach test cases and documentation and encapsulation for the first time, then they're hard. If I step my students through the design process on something simple like is_equal_to or even get_x, then they can start to build good habits so they're ready when they need them. "But I can just write this method and know it's correct just by looking at it." "Well, I should hope so. Fortunately, that's not the point here."
This is a sore point with me; I'm in a minor conflict with one of my 7th grader's over an assignment he aced in which he's being dinged for (bogus) process faults.
What's worse is, my 7th grader has generally excellent teachers. I don't buy that this is a "good teacher / bad teacher" issue. I think it's a methodological flaw common to all standard secondary schooling programs.
I do, thanks.
> Don't set up a project with a clear objective, force students to rigidly follow exactly the steps
I really do not understand what you're saying here. You want me to teach the process but then not evaluate whether students can do the process?
> you yourself took to get to that objective, and assume the process transfers to the students through osmosis.
With your "you yourself" comment you sound like you're objecting to the very idea of teaching process; and why are you assuming that I'm attempting some sort of osmotic transfer?
What we're going to do is, here's a project rubric. It breaks the research paper into a series of steps. You make little cards for sources. You organize the cards to "brainstorm". Your turn your brainstorm into an outline. And so on. You're going to follow all these steps, and most of our class time will be spent with you working on these steps and then me, the teacher, evaluating your progress on the steps.
In the end, your grade will be 50% based on the outcome of the paper, and 50% based on your timely adherence to the rubric.
What's wrong with this teaching method?
It prioritizes the "research process" in the assessment, but does not actually explain what the research process is or why it works that way. It presumes that standing up in class spending 5-10 minutes saying "here's why we make little cards, so we can brainstorm" provides adequate context so that combined going through and following the steps, students are learning a research process. That it allows for no other alternatives to the process of organizing a paper is of secondary concern; the primary concern is, it doesn't sell the process, it simply mandates and then grades on it.
An alternative method to teach the research process: have the students pick a research topic and then write a paper on it without following a formal process. Evaluate the papers; they're poorly organized, they don't make coherent points, they lack sourcing, their sources are inadequate, &c. Now do another paper, focusing on how the research process is a corrective for the flaws in the first paper.
This seems strictly better than "You didn't turn in a printed outline in the correct format before handing in a fully cited first and then final draft of the research paper. 50 points on the paper. 10 points on the process. C- for you."
This example extends to every other process-focused assignment I've seen my kid deal with in school: "here's an ambitious outcome, here's a rigidly specified process, and here's a grading system that assesses each individually". This is a great scheme for teaching smart kids why not to take "process" seriously.
I am 1000% sure you do things better than this. This is a message board. Everyone is always the exception to the rule.
The process is so deeply flawed here is one example. I have my sources, my note cards, and my outline. Each note card had on the front of it a single sentence and on the back of it the source written perfectly according to some standard (I lost many of my points because I would forget a period or comma). Each note card then had to be perfectly ordered (and wrapped with a rubber band and with each paragraph having a paper clip on it) and have the corresponding number written on the back and then circled.
If I wanted to change the 2nd sentence in my paper, I would have to completely renumber all the note cards.
If I wanted to change a word in my paper I had to cross out the word on the note card with ONE line through it and then rewrite it on the notecard and then change it on the computer.
If I wanted to change the structure of my paper, I had to go back and rewrite the outline. I've always considered the outline the "black dot" of a painting. It's hard to start painting on a blank canvas, but as soon as you put a black dot on it you have something to fix, build off of, whatever. The outline puts the first 2 -3 paragraphs on the paper and the rest of the time you ignore it.
Retyping this and thinking about it has made me literally feel physically sick.
I took a user interface design course a few years ago in college (good college, good lecturer, good students), and was frustrated by exactly the same problem.
The focus of the course was learning process rather than making things, but we only were able to touch each particular process step (paper prototyping, user testing, formal usability study, &c.) one time, for a week or two of an assignment about it, and so there was no great way to judge improved understanding after having done the exercise, or experiment with different methods to see what their faults were.
Because most of the actual effort in the course went into writing about what we had done, instead of doing it, I feel like we learned quite a bit more about (a) describing our group’s working habits and parroting back the theoretical benefits of particular processes than we did about either (b) performing those processes or (c) the actual project we were trying to build.
The only way to really make these meta-analyses of process and structure valuable is, as you say, to take them on after having tried doing the thing a few times. You can’t make a map in your head of ideas you’ve never experienced by just copying other maps. It’s like trying to design an API without knowing what the use cases are, or trying to pick a data structure before you have idea what the data looks like.
* * *
This type of instruction is far too common; pedagogical exercises are decontextualized and the means become the ends. Instead of learning languages by reading and speaking, with explanations of grammar and bilingual dictionaries as reinforcement and an ultimate goal of conversation/writing fluency, language classes help students to perfect their ability to learn and perform grammar drills. Instead of trying to write and discuss stories, using writing as a tool for clarifying thought and sharing ideas, English classes spend all their effort and attention on teaching narrow rather uninspiring process and rigid form. Instead of finding math and physics problems in the context of figuring out how something works, we put the problems in their own little boxes and pretend they’re discrete entities, and students are expected to just grok the patterns without having done the kinds of doodling and exploration that ever actually reveal their structure.
Unfortunately, without much smaller student:teacher ratios, it’s really hard for teachers to act as guides and mentors rather than lecturers.
I personally think that bingo is a worthless activity but I don't thrust this opinion on other teachers. Personalities come into play with teaching. I could never make a bingo activity work in my class because it is antithetical to my personality. But some people do make it work. And with 30 people in a class is it reasonable to believe that all 30 will enjoy the activity or find merit in it?
I sometimes hide knowledge from my students because I want them to see it for themselves. Do you know how hard it is to get someone to understand that -4^2 is -16 and not 16? I can say this fact ad nauseam and it just doesn't click until a person sees it. They have to be guided into understanding this. Me telling them it is so and explaining it doesn't work.
At any rate it seems you have a bias against teachers. Have you taught much? When was the last time you were in a classroom?
order of operations is a useless source of confusion -- we should just use parens always and avoid ambiguity. #toomuchcprogramminglately
You could argue from consistency that the standard convention is more aesthetically appealing, though. I tried writing this in a HN post but it boiled my brain so I sketched it on the back of an envelope instead.
http://images2.bingocardcreator.com/blog-images/hn/arithmeti...
Basically, assume high school algebra works the way you think it works. If we treat unary negation like it magically grabs the nearest integer prior to the exponent happening, things we assume are equal in high school algebra start to break catastrophically. You'd have to invent a new and perhaps uglier way to do algebra which would lose properties like "moving terms around the same side of an equation on paper for clarity is allowed because it doesn't change what they sum to."
Anyhow, if this ever comes up in my household, I'm going with "Yeah, that one's weird. Your dad didn't like it either, but convention is that -2^2 is -4. That's totally separate from math, it's just how we choose to represent math in squiggles, and this collection of squiggles is supposed to be read as -1 * (2^2) instead of (-1 * 2)^2 . Why did we pick that math-to-squiggles mapping? Long story and kind of boring, but it's sort of important that everyone read the squiggles the same way, for the same reason that we don't get into an argument over which side of a road should be called 'left' and then smash our cars into each other. Either way would have been a perfectly good 'left' because left is ultimately just squiggles, but now we're stuck with one of the squiggles."
In my ideal world, -EXPR would be a parse error, and it would only be valid to write -LITERAL * expr. (-1 * a.) So, you could have -4^2 is 16 because the - would not associate to the nearest constant, but rather be part of the 4-value.
The reason for this is that -a^2 is super confusing, and I believe it should be treated as invalid. I do not think that promoting the order of precedence of unary - is the best solution because it leads to the common confusion of thinking "well, a is already negative, so there is nothing to do". if instead this was explicitly -1 * a ^ 2, then you can always "plug and chug" with simpler rules.
Essentially, the confusion is because unary negation is the only operation that is confuse-able with the value definition.
Final qualm against unary negation: what does --4 evaluate to in ruby? 3? No. 4.
If I had my way, then --4 would clearly be invalid because the inner -4 could not receive the unary negation.
In more programming stuff, I think that mixed-type operations should be illegal (no implicit casts!) adding an int64 to an int32 and storing the result in an int32 should be a compiler error!
1 - 4^2
The answer is -15.
So what is
0 - 4^2
Most will say -16.
To be consistent we must agree that -4^2 is -16 since it is the same thing as 0 - 4^2.
It takes a while for students to understand this. I still get calculus students who mess it up.
Do you really want to play the "you're only allowed to have opinions on pedagogy if you're a real teacher" game?
I'm not playing
"you're only allowed to have opinions on pedagogy if you're a real teacher" game
as you put it. Anyone is allowed to have opinions about anything. Some opinions have more merit than others. Some people have worthy opinions on topics that they don't have direct involved with.
I've met lots of people with strong opinions on teaching. I've found that what superficially seems obvious to non-teachers often times miserably fails when you've got a class of 30 students with varying abilities and interest in learning. Anecdotally I'd say a majority of opinions from non-teachers about what would be great in the classroom only holds true if the classroom contains people desiring to learn.
Well, I asked about your experience in the classroom because I wanted to know if the thoughts and ideas you've expressed about what is not useful in the classroom is based on your teaching experiences on your student experiences.
I used to have strong feelings about k-12 teaching. Two years ago I was in a project that paired a college teacher with an 8th grade teacher at a local school. It took one day in the 8th grade class to realize that I don't know squat about k-12 teaching.
Your turn. Do your opinions come from actual experience or do you have a bias against elementary schoolteachers?
I have no experience in k-12 teaching other than the project I was on two years ago. The project I mentioned in my previous post. I definitely have a negative bias toward what is done in k-12 but my experience two years ago made it clear that my views on what should be done to fix k-12 education were not based on sound evidence.
I do have 17 years of teaching experience in higher education.
I once co-taught a class with a colleague. She taught the first 8 weeks. I taught the second 8 weeks. It was calculus II. Students getting Cs and Ds under her did quite well with me and vice versa for the A/B students. Personality plays such a great role in the whole issue that I've begun to think that there is no way to fix education. I think it is a hugely complicated issue and that positive results are local to a classroom and the personality of the students/teacher.
If you disagree with a thought someone expresses on HN, address a comment to the thought. Redirecting the discussion towards the motives of the commenters isn't simply uncivil; it's boring. No. Worse. Hygroscopically boring. It sucks all the juice out of the whole thread.
I am partly irritated by this because I know Patrick does not have a vendetta against teachers. I am partly irritated because I know the "bias" Patrick is displaying here is a hacker trope: if you interviewed 100 hackers, 95 of them would say the same thing about secondary education. But I'm mostly irritated because it's a clear example of a superficial argument. "Hacker vs. teachers". Who could possibly care? He's not biased against teaching... but if he was, so what? In what sense would the thread possibly be different?
It's too bad you don't see something interesting in this. I do and hence made the comment I made. I strongly disagree with your view that my post was inappropriate or should not have been made. I'm not planning to change.
Back? Did you notice, on the website, the near total absence of advocacy for using bingo cards in lesson plans? Or even how classroom bingo works? Patrick sells BCC passively. His entire marketing system presumes a continuous feed of people who already wanted bingo cards.
The pain point he solves isn't "how to automate classrooms with bingo cards".
It's "how to automate the bingo cards for your classroom bingo day".
There's exactly one argument you can make about Patrick's business that would even be germane to your argument: that classroom bingo is so radioactively evil that simply enabling teachers to do it is harmful. I don't think you believe that. Instead: you didn't like something someone said on a message board, so you went looking for reasons to discredit them. In this case, you failed.
You should have more confidence in your own opinions. You have actual K-12 educational experience; it should be easy for you to use actual logic to refute things people say about it.
1. Man criticizes worthless activities in the classroom. 2. Man creates product to help teachers with their bingo day. 3. Bingo day can be considered to be a worthless classroom activity (I'm such a person. I'd never use bingo in the classroom.) 4. I point out an apparent disparity.
It's ironic that a person who decries worthless classroom activities creates a product to make it easier for people to engage in a worthless activity. I made this clear in my previous post.
What I wrote is quite logical and reasonable. Your second to last paragraph contains assumptions not supported by the evidence.
I would say it is worthless only if you do not value the students' enjoyment. Teachers usually turn to bingo to help keep students engaged, which is the opposite of what Patrick seemed to be referring to as "busy-work." Accusing somebody of hypocrisy because he violates your standards is not remotely fair or reasonable.
I didn't accuse Patrick of hypocrisy. I accused him of irony. Big difference.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/01/what-mak...
For whatever the data point is worth to you, I don't think you have a strongly-held opinion about bingo in classrooms. I think you have strongly-held opinions about anyone who criticizes standard K-12 education orthodoxy.
>> Have you taught much? When was the last time you were in a classroom?
I don't believe that having been a teacher is a requirement in order to have come to valid conclusions.
Are you sure that what works for you scales well? I don't remember much of day to day activities in elementary school. I did go to elementary school. But I don't think my opinions on elementary school teaching necessarily are accurate even when applied only to myself as a youngster.
One doesn't have to be a teacher to come to valid conclusions. I think though that most conclusions that don't include an acknowledgement of the importance of the teacher's personality coupled with students' personalities is most likely not valid.
>> One doesn't have to be a teacher to come to valid conclusions.
>> Have you taught much? When was the last time you were in a classroom?
Promoting one arbitrary choice over all others as if it is natural, obvious and correct is clearly the source of difficulties explaining to students. When I have taught this topic, I cover precedence rules as being arbitrary and show a chart of the rule system in play for western math textbooks. This clears up confusion, or rather prevents it from occurring in the first place.
Not in my experience and I venture to guess that you haven't taught developmental learners. Obviously one discusses the order of operations and the fact that the order is arbitrary. This does not prevent confusion from occurring in developmental learners.
I did preface my response to you with, "not in my experience". It is not a valid conclusion to say that my remarks have been belittling. Based on what you wrote above it looks like my guess that you haven't had much experience with developmental learners appears to be correct. I stated my experience was different than yours. What is there to be upset about?
Somewhat off-topic: The peer-instruction (PI) movement just launched an online community [1]. This semester I've started using a variation on PI in the law-school course I teach (advanced contract drafting and -review). It seems to be working well, and the students really like it.
"The PI technique relies on the power of the 'flipped classroom.' Information transfer (i.e., a teacher transferring knowledge to students) takes place in advance, typically through online lectures. In short, students study before rather than after class. ¶ As a result, the classroom becomes a place for active learning, questions, and discussion. Instructors spend their time addressing students' difficulties rather than lecturing. ¶ While originally developed for Mazur's introductory physics courses, PI is now used across multiple disciplines, from the sciences to the humanities."
Of course, this all presupposes that the students will actually do the reading in advance, which is not always a given with 3Ls ....
[1] http://www.seas.harvard.edu/news-events/press-releases/peer-...
I wrote a bash script to do it for me and came to class with every possible answer printed out. I was disqualified for 'cheating'.
Really great... instead of focusing on enabling students and focusing on teaching them the really important fundamentals and making sure they understood those through exams, let's just frakk with them in a really petty way (likely by musing over petty small technicalities) and put them in their place, helpless little pups that they are!
Your job as a prof should be teaching them and exams are a part of that - at the same time exams are typically focused on the 2 or 3 major subjects or points that were taught. And they should be, because ultimately as a benevolent and good prof, you want your students to learn the matter and get a good understanding but you cannot or should not expect them to memorize every little detail you ever taught just because your subject is clearly oh-so-important! A good prof has such a concept that spans from his classes, textbooks to the exams.
Putting in questions just to frakk with students because you don't like them sharing notes for whatever reason doesn't fit there - because I strongly doubt good notes would miss major points but rather twist a few tiny facts.
> This sounds like a great way to sort the students..
I knew this sentiment would come up and I cannot tell you how deeply I loathe it. Yes, in elementary school this approach is probably a good idea... force students to sit through each class, make them take notes, then check their homework and give them little shiny golden stars to make them happy and then make them write an exam on it. But we are talking university here, this isn't kindergarten - you should be educating and empowering growing adults, you want them to become individuals and that can only mean dropping the retarded elementary-school gold-star mentality because those aren't the people who will accomplish great things later on if you never taught them or gave them any chance to become independent.
The exam should check if I have a good understanding of the subject, it should definitely NOT check how I obtained that knowledge. But if I am a lazy and bad prof, I just dish out multi-choice tests and probably you can pass those easier by just regurgitating some facts you learned by heart from copied notes the night before. But this laziness shouldn't be encouraged by trying to limit notes to counter "learning by heart without understanding" because it is just a consequence of being a bad and lazy prof who writes horrible exams that can be passed like that, brute-force style.
Stop patronizing students, your job is to prepare them for a career and the gold-star mentality won't get you very far in the real world... whoever your customers are, they care about you getting the job done and not much else.
Setting people up to fail can be a valuable learning experience. The problem is not the teacher, it's our society's attitude towards failure.
Yeah, you can make notes yourself and memorise them, and even that will probably teach you more than getting notes from someone else and memorising those. But it doesn't change the fact that it would be better if exams could only be passed by learning and understanding the subject material, not by memorising facts.
I place zero value in the transcription of notes. The act of writing is a useful tool for memorization and even deeper understanding, but it's just that - a tool. Everyone learns differently. The test is meant to grade one's understanding of the material. How you obtained that understanding isn't relevant.
Nitpicky detail are what that area of law is all about! A newly minted securities lawyer will spend his first few years proofing corporate filings (e.g. an offering document) for the tiniest of mistakes, some of which could cost the client millions of dollars if not found.
While it might not be the greatest tactic for professors in general, it is a great idea for this particular professor.
Most of these sites let you name your own price. Set the price insanely low and donate the proceeds to the university or a charity.
A student is as much entitled to their interpretation of education (His or her her notes) as the prof is entitled to force students to purchase their lab manuals and textbooks.
Saying you own a set of notes is saying you own knowledge.
No one owns knowledge in education. They teach it. Study it. Learn it. Share it. Write about it.
This isn't a question of economics, or IP. It's the principle. As a professor, few are teaching anything new, or novel, or something they invented.
Many are teaching concepts that have been around for many years. Most profs hate teaching because it cuts into their time to do what they're best at (and don't get to teach enough about) -- their research.
I certainly hope this doesn't become something more universities waste their time on, because this is ludicrous.
(edit: typo)
Students are paying a lot of money for education these days. Is it to much to ask that professors provide fresh and original content as opposed to printing off the same powerpoint presentation or case study for five straight years?
It's simple, make your class exciting and captivating and students will retain more while enjoying it. Those are my personal experiences and opinions of course :)
Good professors spend years refining their lectures and they change things year to year, but many of those changes are evolutionary, rather than revolutionary.
Reducing all education to a simple transaction where money is traded for knowledge is overly simplistic and invites poor conculusions. Even if it were that simple, there is an inherent and significant asymmetry of information that stands in the way of an efficient market.
Further, for some professors, at least, money isn't the only reward they get from teaching. They may like interacting with students, they may feel their own understanding of the subject is improved by teaching it to others, and the dynamic of the classroom provides valuable insight that helps them improve how they teach the next batch of students.
The professor may feel, and have evidence to back it up, that students who don't come to lectures, on average, learn the material less well than those who do. There could be a lot of reasons for this, but at least some of them likely relate to the classroom experience, the enthusiasm of the professor, his or her ability to read the room and dwell a little longer on a point that half the students may be baffled by. Their lectures could have a lot of deliberate redundancy about key concepts that isn't captured in notes.
You can argue that the student should be free to choose whether or not to avail themselves of these advantages, but your comment and so many other comments in threads like these, suggest that many students don't even realize what they might be missing.
I'm utterly convinced that our education system, from kindergarden through graduate school and beyond is ripe for significant changes, but I'm mindful of what can be lost in major disruptions, particularly if people are ignorant of the value of the things they are sweeping aside.
As I said, and you conversely reiterated, if the professor makes class exciting, captivating and relevant, students will enjoy coming to class more times than not.
These professors aren't the ones having to worry about students notes being redistributed.
I do agree that our education is ripe for significant change as well... on all fronts.
"Particularly if people are ignorant of the value of the things they are sweeping aside." ??? Just as many other industries are being reshaped due to technology and innovation, the same goes for education. Grade "A" content and self learning material are more accessible now than ever. A teacher is no longer necessary to learn.
> Zounds, Herr Professor Doktor, you seem to be setting a new level of pettiness and arrogance. You don't seem to object to your getting a doubtless hefty paycheck resting on huge tuition rates, nor do I recall any quibbles from you to the costs of textbooks. Gods forbid that any student earn a few bucks from his diligent note-taking!
What I do with MY notes should be nothing but MY business, as simple as that. We are talking university here, people. Students should be MORE than old enough to be able to decide for themselves which way of learning works best for them. I do not need some facetious, bored prof patronizing me on how I want to study and ultimately pass the exams.
> campuses are taking new steps to limit what students can do with their class notes
And this is completely beyond me as well. Even if I could obtain exact 1:1 replicas of all slides used in each lecture plus thorough notes, I still do not get a degree from whatever university they came from and keep in mind that a lot of the HUGE names are releasing course material for free anyway.
This whole thing just seems really petty. And don't forget, some students learn a lot better by listening, others learn better by writing it down and others learn best researching on their own and taking thorough, well-structured notes can be a difficult job if you want to follow class and discussions equally well at the same time. Why shouldn't you allow both of those learning types to benefit? Don't we want our students to actually become team-players and independent, autonomous?
> And then I'll write exam questions testing on those very same mistakes. If we all did that, the market would dry up pretty quick.
...he actually DOES oppose it obviously and wants to stop it.
One of my professors this semester refuses to provide his slides on Blackboard. When someone asked him why, he said he didn't want people stealing them and handing them out to people who did not come to class. Basically, if you want the slides, you have to be in class for that day and take notes. He proceeded to make the person feel bad for wanting to take the teacher's "hard work".
What he didn't mention is that McGraw-Hill provides them on their website for every student enrolled anyway, and "his" slides came on a DVD from the teacher's edition of the textbook.
I disagree with this assertion that his paycheck is particularly hefty. Professor Bainbridge earned $263k in 2008 (I can't seem to get sites with newer data to work)[1]. Could a highly trained lawyer focusing on the public corporation law be earning more or less than that on the job market? I don't disagree that he's quite well off, but if money was his primary focus, he could be in a much, much better financial position.
[1] http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2009/06/05/...
You youngsters have it too easy...