This is rough. I was a student who really struggled with some courses during uni. I would estimate that 75% of professors that I visited were incredibly unwelcoming, no matter how much prep I had done before the visit. It really turned me off from asking for help. That said, I do believe that most of my uni professors were not passionate about teaching -- they wanted to do research, and a modicum of teaching was required for their role.
Reflecting on my own experience on both sides, I can tell a generational difference.
As student, research-focused professors and some old timers made you feel unwelcome in office hours, a mixture of “you are wasting my time” and “you should have put more work on this, I’ll just give you some hints so I can send you away quick”. Many had in common being from a generation and country where university access was not so normalized and accessible to all social strata, just graduating came many times with some sense of entitlement.
Some years later and I’m the one assisting students during office hours. I could already sense some generational change, with younger professors and assistants treating students more like equals. They were exceptions of course, we had younger assistants cargo culting the worst attitude parts of old timers (fun enough they were usually from kind of privileged background, families with ties to the field or even de same department). The result was students from other groups kind-of/secretly attending my office hours and the ones from other nice colleagues.
Something I discovered almost by accident when doing training for a larger group of "students" than had PCs available for exercises, was that the concept of "paired exercises" worked very well. So I then started pretty much mandating it for subsequent training where possible.
If a single student has a problem with an exercise they tend to keep quiet. If 2 of them bounce ideas off each other and still have a problem, they are more happy to ask for help. Interactivity and learning significantly increased!
I realised quite quickly this was similar to pair programming which was a pretty new thing at the time.
Paired exercises fairly often end up with faster student doing it all and slower student not knowing what is going on. I was sometimes that slower student and it just meant that I had to redo everything later if I actually wanted to learn.
This dynamic is not impossible to overcome. It's often as simple as reminding students that we are responsible for one another's success by shifting the goal from "finish the exercise" to "ensure we've both learned how to finish the exercise".
"Lone wolves" and "lazy" students, I've found, often warm up when given 1:1 attention of peers.
> It's often as simple as reminding students that we are responsible for one another's success by shifting the goal from "finish the exercise" to "ensure we've both learned how to finish the exercise".
Then it ends up with faster student trying to explain to the slower one and failing. While the slower one still does not really have an option to do it independently and think it through, until they get home. This pair thing is great if you are the faster one or the one with better initial knowledge. It really does not work well if you are the weaker one.
I have been both on occasion, sometimes I was behind and other times advanced. Classes where I worked alone gave me much more then the ones where I was paired with someone better. When I was paired with someone slower, it was good for my ego and I remembered more from trying to explain (if I did that).
> the slower one still does not really have an option to do it independently and think it through
This is a good point, and a constraint of the institution. When I was the slower student, I was blessed with the inordinate chutzpah to shamelessly ask faster students for explanations ad nauseum. I was never concerned with time, deadlines, assignments, nor grades: I was maximizing my understanding at the expense of anyone who would entertain my curiosity.
I took my time in a way that most students, perhaps reasonably, feel they can't afford to. I wish all students felt as entitled to knowledge as I'd been raised to feel—and as my instructors suggested!
As a professional, being the weaker pair has presented fantastic opportunities to observe and learn from senior developers. I pity the remote junior who interfaces with an infinitesimal fraction of the fidelity I've enjoyed.
In short, "never be the best player in the band" remains sound advice for persons of my bent... in accommodating institutions.
> I was blessed with the inordinate chutzpah to shamelessly ask faster students for explanations ad nauseum.
That is NOT thinking it through independently. That is someone explaining it to you again and again. Those two are not the same at all. Thinking it independently means that YOU think about issues and actually personally figure it out them.
> I pity the remote junior who interfaces with an infinitesimal fraction of the fidelity I've enjoyed.
Although offtopic, honestly, the primary reason to pity them is that they are massively micromanaged compared to what we had and get only negative feedback. Modern process is a senior that will tell them everything they had done wrong, then he throws a bunch of personal preferences that pretend are objective wrongs ... and they rarely get positive feedback or thanks.
> When I was the slower student, I was blessed with the inordinate chutzpah to shamelessly ask faster students for explanations ad nauseum.
This assumes that the other person has a "thinking style" that is compatible with yours, and that thus the explanations are helpful for you. For example if the other student is "sufficiently advanced" from you, it can happen that this is not the case.
> This assumes that the other person has a "thinking style" that is compatible with yours
No one has a thinking style compatible with mine. Communication is difficult, but the whole point is to share adopt novel ways of thinking. By the end of the conversation, both participants' "thinking styles" have changed.
Sure, some folks' lexicon and mental models might overlap more, but there's no one (speaking English) from whom I can't learn. Reminds me of that old line "you can't get there from here!" which I always considered funny, but you're saying it's true?
Wish I knew more about these "thinking styles" you're talking about, because I've never met someone I couldn't communicate with (in English).
> Wish I knew more about these "thinking styles" you're talking about, because I've never met someone I couldn't communicate with (in English).
It is plausible that you are sufficiently smart and thus never (or at least rarely) had such problems.
To give an extreme example: when Grigori Perelman published his papers about his proof of the geometrization conjecture, even experts in his area had a lot of difficulties understanding his proof (and thus verifying the correctness of it). Only after multiple groups of mathematicians came up with better understandable versions of the central arguments of his proof, (see https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Geometrization_co... and https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Poincar%C3%A9_con... ), they became convinced of the correctness of Perelman's proof.
This was clearly a particularly marked example, but in a school pupils of very different IQs and thinking styles are present. So I wouldn't say that this problem (pupil not understanding another pupil's solution) is uncommon at schools.
Perelman? I always thought his proof was self-evident.
Kidding!
For papers, yes, there's a lot of difficulty. I'm not sure it's possible to demand sense from a paper in the way that one can from a discursive partner.
As Emmanuel Levinas puts it in his "Toward the Other" (1963):
> This makes no sense. Our text must be understood in another way. I
worked hard at it. I told my troubles to my friends. For [the text] requires
discourse and companionship. Woe to the self-taught!
Admittedly, he immediately follows:
> Of course one must
have good luck and find intelligent interlocutors.
So if I were to accept his authority, I'd have to forfeit my position entirely!
> No one has a thinking style compatible with mine. Communication is difficult, but the whole point is to share adopt novel ways of thinking. By the end of the conversation, both participants' "thinking styles" have changed.
I can either focus on difficult conversation parts or at topic at hand. Cant really do both.
So, this means I will do only the social thing and wont get to be able to focus on what I was supposed to learn in the first place.
The lecture-tutorial pedagogical model used in universities is called scholasticism and dates back to the middle ages. Books were very expensive, so in the lectures, the lecturer would just read out the relevant text for students to copy down, word for word. (In the more prestigious English universities, lecturers are still called 'Readers', and students say that they're 'reading' History or Computer Science rather than 'studying' it.) Once the students had their copies of the text, they would go away and read them, and then go to a tutorial where they would discuss what they'd read. This is where the real learning - and the creation of new knowledge - would happen.
The author mentions 'flipped learning': this is the modern equivalent of scholasticism. Read the text in your own time, and then have an in-person discussion or practical or workshop, depending on the nature of the subject matter.
> In the more prestigious English universities, lecturers are still called 'Readers'
At least in the University of Cambridge, a Reader is a specific academic role that is distinct from a lectureship and typically has very few teaching duties. It's often a stepping stone on the path to professorship. See e.g.
> The intention was to allow senior academics more time for research, lightening their load of routine teaching.
University of York also seems to focus mostly on scholarship over teaching:
> To become a Reader, you must demonstrate substantial intellectual distinction with a sustained contribution in research and scholarship, bestowing considerable external recognition on yourself and the University.
Well, lector literally means "reader" in Latin, and lectio means "a(n act of) reading". It's exactly what it says on the tin.
The thing is, reading the textbook on your own, then discussing the material with the teacher (in a group) is still quite an efficient way to obtain knowledge even though it's not most efficient on an individual level. This knowledge, of course, still needs to be turned into practical skills.
Long time ago when I was a student, some teachers tried what now has fancy name "flipped learning". The usual result was that only few students done the reading and what not before the class. They usually put in only so much effort so that they can get point for participation, but not enough for discussion or workshop to not effectively amount to first encounter with the topic.
That was also my experience with that experiment, as a professor, about a decade ago. Educational ideas always work in the ideal (imagined) environment, but not so well in the (actual) classroom.
> (In the more prestigious English universities, lecturers are still called 'Readers', and students say that they're 'reading' History or Computer Science rather than 'studying' it.)
Both of these are getting pretty outdated. Most of the top English unis have renamed senior lecturers/readers 'associate professors' because the North American naming conventions are becoming standard. I also haven't heard the "I'm reading X" way of putting it in at least a decade. It would be more common to say "I do X".
I have always wanted a tutorial ONLY environment for my future Physics study.
I believe I can grind through the textbooks by myself but I need some tutor, preferably a PHD to answer my batched questions and guide me through exercises I cannot figure out.
Do PHDs of good universities do this kind of things? What hourly rate should I expect?
To grossly oversimplify, this is the teaching model of Oxford and Cambridge. The primary method of instruction is the tutorial/supervision, usualy one tutor to two undergrads.
Yeah I'm trying to figure out a good price for both sides. I'll probably try locals first. We do have a couple of good universities -- definitely not MIT/Berkeley league but I don't need it.
There are one-to-one tutoring services that target university students, and I doubt they'd have any problem with a paying customer who wasn't a student. Some of them offer tutors who have PhDs.
From what I can find on Google, prices range from "affordable for a student" to "affordable for a student with rich parents if they only need a few hours".
This is how typical courses in eg physics are supposed to work. You read the material before a lecture, the lecture gets everyone on the same page and hopefully answers some or all of your questions, then you solidify by a) doing all the exercises and b) attending the tutorial and/or office hours to resolve questions you still have.
I've learned that many students lose interest about 2 slides into a presentation. The solution is simple. Don't use presentations.
Spend your time with the students by talking with them. Use the board for sketches, mathematical development, etc. This forces you to go slowly enough that students can copy your work, which is basically how people learn. Since you will be talking with the students (with the lights turned on!), you can turn around see whether they are "getting" the tricky parts, and you can adjust easily. None of this works when you're sleepwalking through a slide deck.
This method also works for computing work. Students can learn a lot by watching somebody live-code a problem. Showing a slide full of code might be helpful to a few students in the class, but most will just turn off. Students can learn a lot by seeing a professor type code, building ideas from the inside out, and catching errors, etc.
So that's the mechanical part. On the logistic part, here's something else I've learned: almost anything can be squeezed into the last 20 minutes of a class, and almost anything can be stretched out to fill the last 20 minutes. Students and teachers are humans, after all. Your friend can tell you a story during an elevator ride, or stretch it out over a few drinks in the pub. Either works.
I dunno if it's the biggest myth about education, but it's gotta be in the top 3: The myth that you can stand in front of someone, speak some words on some topic, and all humans will automatically absorb the words, retain them, correctly make all relevant logical deductions from these words, retain all of this for the next several decades, and no particular effort need to be put into the specific words used and no examination of the audience need be done because humans do all of this automatically for you, 100% reliably.
I do not know where we get this idea. Literally everyone knows from years of personal experience that it is false. I can hardly think of a claim that each and every one of us has had more thoroughly debunked, in the strongest possible manner.
Yet virtually all of us act as if it is true, and indeed, there's even a contingent of people who will attack you if you claim it isn't true.
Lectures can work if you do as described. There's some other ways to make them work too. But there's an awful lot of just standing in front of a bunch of people, flashing some slides, and reading them off, and then, I guess, expecting some sort of miracle to occur because they darned well ought to know what the result of that approach will be from personal experience.
This is the way I taught my math classes at two different universities while I was in grad school. I even used chalk. As I worked through the proof or problem, writing out everything in full meant we could have an interactive flow where if I lost them they could complain. And they did! I would get comments/questions even if I was writing on the board, with my back turned. I don't recall time management ever being an issue, and my practice was to just work through everything beforehand.
It was one of the most satisfying/gratifying experiences of my entire life.
(Dirty secret: I only deeply learned vector calculus/linear algebra when I taught it.)
On the subject of the article: the author was a senior undergraduate. They taught a single course. If you have taught once, you learned this much too.
Their course met one hour, once a week, in the evening. They lectured. This is an absolutely awful arrangement (and choice) from every viewpoint. Make no sweeping conclusions.
They only scratched the surface of what there is to learn about teaching.
funny to see this surface again! I previously posted this article in December, but it moved with me when I moved domains, so it’s at a different URL this time.
Teaching is very difficult to do well, and if teaching isn't rewarded financially, well... would you want a 'passionate' doctor who was paid $50,000 a year and lived in a rented one-bedroom in the bad part of town treating you for cancer?
There's nothing right or wrong where the teacher or a doctor lives. That's their own decision.
What matters is their performance at work and that there are not only intrinsic motivation but also an extrinsic motivation with monetary incentives to perform well at work.
And that can only be ensured with a free market that allows schools to pay better for the best teachers and also parents to pay more for the best schools.
Thanks, I hadn't crystallised in my head that being a doctor has somehow become a passion industry for many countries (like the UK). It had all the hallmarks of a passion industry but my brain rejected drawing the connection presumably because medicine seem like a typical passion field (like videogames or art are).
My cousin is an oncologist and despite the earnings prospects (or actually lack thereof in my region of the world) at the time, she decided on pursuing a career in medicine before she went to high school because she wanted to save lives.
I envy her drive and I don't think it's in any way related to how much she makes.
Why do people thinking teaching is any harder than any other job that requires a university education? You get trained; you get mentored; you get regular professional improvement. And, the bit about low wages always makes me chuckle. Everyone overlooks the lifetime earnings of a public school teacher: It is usually very good (much better than most boring office jobs), when you include the value of all benefits, including summer holiday and retire/pension.
It's not harder than any other job, but it's harder than many. Teaching, especially in middle and high school, is not as technically difficult as say many developer roles, but it is far more difficult when it comes to organization, emotional resilience, multitasking, and managing people.
It requires you to not only keep 20+ twelve year olds from devolving into chaos, but to also teach them things many of them could care less about. Then, you need take into account the laws surrounding your choices both in and outside the school and your representation in front of administration and parents. In the age of cell phones any slip up will likely end up being online and possibly in the news.
Imagine, as a developer, if you every possible small mistake you made had the potential to find its way to Twitter or Reddit? What if you had to manage 20 different, but similar projects? You had to time your bathroom breaks because you can't go whenever you want. That your lunches were consumed with professional development sessions, emergency parent meetings, kids that need your help, etc... That every few months you had to meet with every single customer to give them an update and hear back how much your work is amazing or sucks? Oh, and you have to do it over a period of 10 hours sitting in a crappy hard plastic chair.
Put aside the fact that you have little agency to affect any real change, are potentially subject to verbal or even physical abuse you can do nothing about. Then there are the shootings...
Teaching is much harder than most jobs where you can stare at a monitor and post throwaways on Hackernews. Technically harder, no, it's not physics (unless you're teaching physics), but it's still a difficult field.
You must be from the US. If the old rule of Internet chat was that someone would (eventually) draw comparison to Adolf Hitler or German National Socialism period, then the new rule on HN is someone will raise the expectation of gun violence in the US.
Because, very sadly, it is now an epidemic in the US that has no workable solution in sight because of intransigence around a 233 year old constitutional amendment in a context of intense, media-led paranoia (perhaps creating a feedback loop). "Bowling for Columbine" is 22 years old now - I don't think there's been substantial progress any of the root causes Moore called out back then.
> Why do people thinking teaching is any harder than any other job that requires a university education?
Because not every job that requires a university education is equally demanding. As you said, some of those office jobs are outright boring. Teaching is far from boring, but it can be incredibly draining as there are a lot of expectations to meet.
> including summer holiday
It is easy to look at this and ignore the fact that in order to teach properly, a teacher's workday isn't 9-5. It is in fact much longer and often work carries over in the weekend because papers need grading, lessons need to be prepared, etc, etc.
There is more to expand on here, but the way you dismissively phrased your comment makes me think you aren't really interested in constructive discussion about the subject.
I've worked as a programmer, care assistant, office clerk and for 6 months as a Maths teacher in a UK Further Education College.
The teaching was incredibly demanding - way ahead of the other jobs. 6 hours a day engaging a class of 18-year-olds. Hours of marking and prep in the evening. Extra teaching at the Easter break. Marking at Christmas. Dealing with student mental health issues, drug issues, fights between gangs.
Had to leave for my own health and 1 other teacher just walked out mid-semester - 2 others were out on long-term sick leave.
Another sign it's a tough profession: there's ~ 2,800 teaching vaccancies in the UK at the moment [1] and schools struggle to recruit.
I've nothing but respect for those teachers that do it year after year.
If the benefits and wages were so much better than "boring office jobs" then why would there be a teacher shortage in the absence of onerous requirements for entry? Why is there a teacher shortage if the pay and benefits are so good?
Though it isn't true in all states, there are onerous requirements for entry in many places. I grew up and went to college in Maryland, and the education program basically takes over your 4-year degree process. Despite enjoying tutoring and student-teaching, I balked for multiple reasons and left the program to get an ordinary BS degree.
Among those reasons were:
- the education department at my college wasted my time one too many times; academic infighting made it unnecessarily difficult to get a good advisor and complete the program
- the expectation for me to pay full-time tuition in my last year even though it would be spent working (without pay)
- seeing my "peers" get Bs and Cs for D- and F-level work in education classes and realizing the standards were way too low
- the excessive dictating of which "electives" I had to take outside of education, which frequently put me in the dump classes where the professors had no respect for the students
- yes, the less-than-stellar pay and benefits (and MD is one of the best states in the country for teacher pay!) and mandatory union membership (pre-SCOTUS ruling against it) that would follow once I jumped through these hoops
- the feeling that, even if I set aside all of these concerns, I would ultimately have no autonomy; I was already seeing that many teachers (including at the college level) just want to coast through their jobs and have not just the curriculum and textbooks but also the assignments, exams, and even daily lectures handed to them by the district, and the same districts not wanting teachers to go off-script for liability reasons too
Obviously, some of these elements were particular to my circumstances and experiences and not required by the state, but the program itself was, and even in better circumstances, it still requires a large commitment of time and money.
> COLL 110 was a standard lectures-and-assignments college class - I lectured during our scheduled meeting time, then students did their projects on their own. Having tried this, I think that this is just not the future of education. This mode of teaching is designed mostly for the lecturer's convenience, but it's a terrible way to foster student understanding.
In this section I wish you would have mentioned the cost of teaching. Lectures might not be the best option for engaging students, but it’s quite effective when considering you can teach hundreds of students with one teacher. If 50% learns, that’s a good outcome.
I believe the fallout from lectures and university in general are just a part of the design. Not all people have the right motivation and opportunity to succeed at the university. One should work out how to maximize opportunities.
I've never been to a university that didn't run tutorials or practicals alongside lectures. Given a flipped classroom doesn't have lectures it can only be cheaper than the standard method, since the tutorials exist in either model.
> I believe the fallout from lectures and university in general are just a part of the design.
Just no. There are so many factors that go into students dropping out, many of which are outside their control (e.g. needing to support parents). There is a lot of research on this.
most important lessons from teaching...22 years now, a thing I didnt plan in my highschool:
* you learn more than your students
* students only effectively learn when they create/solve themselves
* in 2024 there is little reason to use slides, or retell topics widely available on the net
* students are not smarter than students 25 years earlier, but are much better informed.
* people love publishing their results open-source. actually open-source is best taught in academia.
* seniors, including professors you are assisting, very seldom are interested in your performance
* the dean and the faculty is very seldom interested in my actual performance in my custom classes, which are complementary ones (even though are regularly frequented)
* it takes years for teachers to start actually teaching, and not showcasing, retelling or just showing off their superiority
* teaching without specific goal/task to solve is absolutely irrelevant and should not be practiced
* academia needs to be rethought dramatically, this all makes very little sense now in the light of LLMs, Global Libraries and open-source
disclaimer: i have 2500+ teaching hours in the disciplines intro to programming, object oriented programming, data structures and algorithms, advanced ES6, db systems, db&er design, practical perl programming, piratical python programming and last 2 years we been giving a brand new R&D of GIS Systems. technically my role is of a teaching assistant, but I've almost never had the seniors come to review my classes.
The student typically spends most of his/her time with students of the same level of ability or interest. For the student who will someday become a college teacher, this general means able and interested students.
The teacher spends time with and on anyone who signs up. For the intro classes at least this will include a proportion of those who are neither interested nor able.
academia is much much more than teaching also, and my post is about much more than web programming. tbh is not at all about web programming or web-anything.
(update: in fact, in my opinion, after years teaching web technologies, webdev is perhaps the most boring area you may decide to advance into... sorry, fellow webdevs, but i really believe it)
academia is not about programming at all.
but when people start consuming/exchanging academic thoughts via media, which the academia (itself) does not acknowledge, well then academia becomes just a road to universal income, rather than driver of technological advance.
besides, most significant research nowadays is supported/enabled by large corporations, no matter if you or myself likes it. meanwhile academia is ran the way it was ran 200 years ago when it was more a retreat for theosophy and contemplation.
fact is that students don't understand the very fundamental reason to be in academia - to collaborate. you may want to tell me why is that, i have several ideas most of them related to the fact that we all are so alienated with this constant man-machine interface that we forget the pleasure, the joy of exchanging knowledge live, staring at the same blackboard or piece of paper. we are in constant arguing on social media, forums, etc.
and finally - teaching a class to people is only possible in 2024 when you have a reversed classroom, where the teacher is a host/curator/enabler, and the people put their research abilities to work. otherwise ... well you lose them 5th minute into the class, because they all ADHD into X, FB or even HN...
Great article! Definitely agree that engagement raises like crazy when giving something students can do during the lecture.
In my case, it was a Data Science intro course, so having the theory together with Python Notebooks that I shared beforehand was a good way to get them interested throughout the full 3h of each class. As you said, when technical problems arise it's hard to keep an eye everywhere and patch all holes, so creating smaller groups/teams on that case helps, because even if not everyone can play with the code directly, they can follow things closer.
Main point as you said is that a teaching experience is a huge learning experience.
Great article! I taught full-time for a while and progressed to program coordinator and eventually department chair. I hated the bureaucracy and ended up leaving. I hang on as an adjunct and still teach one or two sections a semester. My favorite is an intro to programming class using Python - I love to see the lightbulb come on when it all falls into place. That's usually a couple of students out of 25.
I don't get why students don't come to office hours - hardly anyone ever does. I see it as a critical part of my job as service to the students. Some of them are just flailing, yet they don't reach out.
I miss teaching in person. Since Covid, all my classes have been online. I would follow the lecture material, but would also demonstrate important aspects of each topic as we went through them and encouraged the students to do the same on their laptops.
My biggest challenge are these online learning platforms. We use ZyBooks. There are two components, the "book" part where the student reads and the programming part where they write some code. The second part sucks. It's not real programming; it's a padded cell where the student writes code and provides any input. The output is automatically evaluated pass/fail. The student has no interaction with the operating system or interpreter and in my opinion, it loses something without that context. They could have an extra CR/LF in the output and they'd fail the assignment. In the real world, who cares? The problems are often absurd; asking for things that nobody would ever encounter.
My final rant is student-focused. I get a lot of emails like, "I'm trying this and here's a screenshot of my code and I get this error message and I can't figure it out." Somedays I want so badly to tell them that if they pasted the contents of their email into google instead of sending it as an email, the solution would be one of the first three results!!!
>
I don't get why students don't come to office hours - hardly anyone ever does.
Honest answer from my student time: because as a student you are/were learning and solving exercise sheets nearly all the time. Thus you typically didn't have time to come to the office hours.
Before you are able to ask questions about lecture topics, you better first understand where your understanding problem is and which questions you actually have to ask. This requires quite some time that you typically don't have - because of learning of solving exercise sheets.
Great article, thanks for sharing, as a recovering high school teacher (5 years ago I moved into tech after reaching full burn out in education) I must admit that I fantasised about teaching at the higher education level thinking that a minimal amount of student buy-in was what was needed to have a fulfilling experience teaching. But it's interesting see that in your class, students who wanted to be there still struggle to engage in a meaningful way for the most part.
For me, the most difficult part of teaching was dealing with the broken feedback loops. It’s challenging to gauge your own progress and performance as a teacher and to identify which areas need improvement and what is actually working.
I used to teach at public middle school. The format of "lecture and assignments" is a big reason I couldn't keep doing it. Every trained educator knows it's scientifically the _least_ effective pedagogical method we know, but the school administrators, parents, and the entire system forced us to keep doing it.
After years of learning that lecture is almost completely ineffective, I had to do it anyway because the system is fundamentally broken.
Not only is lecture scientifically ineffective, but students can watch for free on YouTube or Khan academy the best lectures ever given on a subject, at their preferred speed, format, time, and location. Lectures that are animated, drawn, rewindable, and humorous. But I had to give the lecture anyway. Live. The same lecture three times a day to my three different classes. And we were graded by the administrators at how well we performed those lectures. We were even made to write them ourselves.
Imagine being an actor forced to write and perform a play three times a day that no one in the audience wanted to watch, and you knew for a fact was a waste of their time. But your bosses and the audience's parents demand it anyway. It's hard not to grow extremely cynical about the whole affair.
Then there are mandatory state exams which are even more cynical. All our funding came from the results of those, so we were extremely stressed about cramming all year for those. Cheating by teachers was rampant, so the school tried to have us monitor each other, which only worked if you wanted to be hated as a snitch.
If a student was failing, it was my fault. I had to justify any bad grade given to a student. If I did justify it, I was then blamed for their failure. There was no reason at all to give bad grades to students.
--Trauma dumping time--
If you happen to be male, expect students to act extremely inappropriately as a joke. They know you can't really do anything about it, so students will do it to stress you out. This is extremely stressful. I was constantly sexually harassed by older students, and was terrified I would lose my job over it.
My first day at one middle school in Texas I overheard several of the other teachers questioning why was I the only male adult on campus in tones indicating they thought I was a pervert. They could not believe a male would want to teach middle school for any other reason.
It became hard to show up everyday fearing that I would get assaulted by a student and thrown in prison over it. I was extremely careful to always have witnesses around, which wasn't always possible as there was no separate bathrooms for teachers. At one point I seriously considered wearing a bodycam every day just to have my own evidence of innocence.
Then there were the bomb threats, hallway fights, and the fact that quite a few of the male 10th graders were bigger than me and violent. At least once a week there was a hallway fight. At least once a month we had to evacuate for a bomb threat.
So as a teacher, I had to write and perform a play every day that no one wanted to see, that was a waste of everyone's time, to students who thought it would be funny to get me thrown in prison, a few of whom were bigger than me and violent.
The public school system is completely broken. I left it and never looked back. I would never send my kids to a lecture format school system in a million years. I would send them to a democratic free school, Montessori, unschool, or homeschool. But our public schools (and most private schools that rely on lectures) are cynical systems designed to stamp out creativity, critical thinking, logic, emotional intelligence, and empathy. It is designed to make incurious factory workers.
Don't take my word for it, see the words of John Gatto, the famous NY State teacher of the year: https://cantrip.org/gatto.html
He wrote this in 1990! This was long before cell phones, porn addicted students, mass shootings, and drug abuse. When students could still be given bad grades!
I teach, but only a few days per week, and definitely not the same lecture for three different classes.
I love it! It's very interactive, lots of questions, opportunity for me to check if students understand and work out solutions to problems together. A lot of humour and fun as well.
In terms of inappropriate behaviour I've found out that strict discipline, equal treatment and the backing of the school solves all problems. The ones who cannot take the discipline quit fairly early.
I of course realize that it is not possible to compare between countries and levels of education, but it does sound to me that the US system is quite broken. =(
That's really great you've got a good place to teach. I think I would really enjoy such a place.
What age range/subjects are you teaching? Is it a mandatory system or elective?
I have thought a lot recently about going back to teach at a community college or equivalent.
I do teach now a few times a year at a local firefighting academy which helps scratch the itch. The students are only there as volunteers, so they are a lot more engaged. It helps that we can punish them with extra duties and labor if they do anything dangerous or disrespectful.
I sometimes feel like public school would be a lot smoother if we could force students to carry around a 20kg container of foam all day when they misbehave! I think a physical labor punishment like that helps curb behavior with some people in a way that nothing else can.
If you can get the work, corporate training has better students and more money. You only get a few days with the students, however. Otherwise, there are lots of "learn to code" like groups that need mentors.
> "some professors can be downright mean to their students"
> I've had far too many teachers like this. They should be weeded out, fired immediately, and never allowed in the profession again.
These were often the professors from whom good student learned a whole lot.
The best example that I can give is a description that my father gave of one of his (former) professors: "He was an excellent teacher - but only for those students who could handle his teaching style."
> I'm not a hundred percent certain of the exact mechanisms of how, yet. In my experience, I learn the most when I struggle; if a student can shortcut through all the hard parts on, for example, and assignment, they're not going to learn very much. On the flip side, when most students struggle, they just give up. Somehow I need to make assignments which thread the needle between being too hard to solve and too easy to learn anything.
The academic theory is that for each learner, there are three concentric circles - the way I was taught them, they were called the comfort zone, the growth zone, and the danger zone. (https://commonslibrary.org/the-learning-zone-model/ calls them comfort, learning and alarm zones) Learning happens best when you push people beyond their comfort zone, but not into the danger zone (where the amount retained rapidly converges to zero). Of course, this is easier said than done, especially with a class of students with varying abilities, though I like your approach to the problem. It's even harder when you're teaching a 200-student introductory class and there's no way to really set individual assignments.
> [Lecturing] is designed for the lecturer's convenience ...
I personally really liked most of my lectures I sat in as a student - yes there was one guy who just read out from the textbook he'd published, so I skipped those lectures and just read the book. But overall, I liked most of my lectures; I might be the exception to the rule. I think the important thing is to make a lecture interesting with some of the same storytelling ideas that writers and TV/film scriptwriters use, and to throw in jokes and asides every now and then. Be a human being with personality. Worked examples, live-coding, experiments etc. are also useful, depending on the topic. (For more examples and scientific background, see Willingham's book "Why don't students like school?") Of course, that's a lot more work for the lecturer than designing for their own convenience. I've lectured like this myself before and students loved it. I've also heard from students at various places that, now the pandemic has died down mostly, "We're not paying fees just to watch some videos. We can do that on youtube. We want real lectures back."
The most important part, which one of my professors told me in the first week and was some of the best advice I ever got at university, was that you don't actually learn anything in lectures. That's not the point. You learn things by doing the exercises, and by studying in your own time. Lectures are just there to prepare you for the learning, because without the prep you wouldn't know what to do in the exercises.
> If you're on the fence about teaching, you should definitely give it a try, if only because interacting with students is such a rewarding experience.
Never heard of the "learning zones" as a concept but from my own teaching experience after a while I was aware if I made my lecture too accessible and easy to follow through my students got overconfident and didn't fully engage with the problems I gave them as an assignment.
On the other hand if I deliberately left little things out to later test them, they became more engaged because they knew I only gave them the necessary tools but they had to work out the little things by themselves. The students were more on the edge and this resulted in better engagement overall.
It was fascinating to experiment with it because my expectations of hard/intermediate/easy problems were at times wildly off.
And surely, there are adaptations at play here, if one is used to discomfort in order to learn hopefully the danger zone gets smaller with time. Sometimes I feel - especially for younger folks coming fresh from high school - the zone between comfort and danger is pretty small as they got habituated on cramming which is essentially all danger zone.
>The easiest fix is to make office hours available on the same day that assignments are due, so that I can be available when students are working on the assignment.
Probably not a great idea. You're going to be overbooked when all of your students show up last minute.
