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Comment by foobarbazqux | Hacker News Reader

He's really quite shameless and condescending about singling her out for praise and elevating her above all of the other students:

> Melanie Nailed It

> (diagrams showing wrong answers of other students)

> (diagram labeled with "Lewitt" and "Melanie")

> If I were Pace Gallery, I know whom I would hire.

> each of the corners of Lewitt’s quadrilateral was reliably located by about a quarter of the students

> marvelous pseudocode system

> As far as I’m concerned, Melanie has earned the right to title her pseudocode as she did [SOLLEWITTFUCKYOU]. This document is really a gem

> (entire homework answer)

ick ick ick. It's like when a teacher photocopies your essay and hands it out to everybody else in the class as an example of stellar writing, except now it's on the internet.

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What pedagogical purpose does this serve? I'm a fan of tough love from teachers. I'd rather get a low grade and learn a great deal than a high grade and learn nothing. For some instructors, part of that is being willing to say the equivalent of "this is complete shit" when your work is, in fact good, but not up to standards.

But the best ones do it in private, or in written feedback, or generally to everyone as a motivational tactic. All of that I'm willing to tolerate, and I've seen some (not many) user acerbic brutal feedback to achieve results out of me I'd never find possible.

But never have I seen a teacher signal out particular students, compare their work openly, while holding up other particular students as examples of what not to do.

Is that good or bad? The principle of rewarding individual excellence is good, and the attitude could even be forgiven in certain circumstances.

But there's a way to do that without being a dick. And if you're going to be a dick, you better b the extremely rare person that knows how to be a dick properly and effectively, usually with an undercurrent of good humor and in the pursuit of ultra-high standards.

Keep in mind: This class is part of a conservatory-style BFA program. These students are already, or will soon be, custom to public critiques. And learning how to accept public criticism, positive and negative, is explicitly a goal of many such programs.

My two cents: While I would have hated such a thing in an engineering class, I really appreciated public discussion and criticism of my work in the arts. I found that such transparency, even when painful, was hugely valuable to me as I grew as an artist.

Yes, that's a good point. I've certainly never examined the problem through the lens of a BFA conservatory-style program. If a necessary part of the skill-set a student wishes to learn is the ability to accept and process public criticism, it certainly makes sense to emulate that in the classroom.

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