Post #21,532
12/14/01 4:21:29 PM
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When you get stuck...
...seek help early.
Negative slack accumulates. The best way to head it off is at the beginning. I'd have had a heart-to-heart with the student telling her that the lesson she should take from the class is the one she's coming to you with: the time to bring up problems and issues is at the beginning of a project, so that you can rejigger your plan or actions. The end of class (or day before project deadline) is far too late for that.
--
Karsten M. Self [link|mailto:kmself@ix.netcom.com|kmself@ix.netcom.com]
What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?
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Post #21,544
12/14/01 5:45:48 PM
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I think she's her own worst enemy
She seems very inflexible in her thinking. The ironic thing is, she's quite intelligent and if she had spent as much time working on the material as she did complaining about it, she could've breezed through the course.
Tom Sinclair
Speaker-to-Suits
Getting an education was a bit like a communicable sexual disease. It made
you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and then you had the urge to pass it on.
-- (Terry Pratchett, Hogfather)
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Post #21,551
12/14/01 6:52:22 PM
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Is it typical youth response?
"That old fart can't possibly know what he's talking about, and he's sooooo unfair not to have noticed me having problems."
"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it."
-- Donald Knuth
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Post #21,582
12/15/01 9:03:52 AM
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Well...
There's a certain amount of the would-be martyr in most people of that age (18-25 or thereabouts) but I've found it doesn't show up in the classroom that often.
My personal philosophy (and one that's shared by the school, thank goodness) is one of 'tough love'. That is, I'll bend over backwards and do whatever I can to get a student through their class (and ulimately their program) if they show a willingness to make even a token effort. However, a student is ultimately responsible for their own education and therefore freedom to succeed also means freedom to fail.
Fortunately most students I've met are concerned with doing well in class and for the classes I teach that means understanding the material and doing the work. In my classes, you get the grade you earned.
Tom Sinclair
Speaker-to-Suits
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Post #21,614
12/15/01 11:56:05 PM
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Exactly. I only got to do this once...
I absolutely agree that CS, like math, is cumulative. Make a habit of always reviewing fundamentals, and the rest falls in place. Furthermore questions on current material usually arise from problems in fundamentals. Partial understandings look at the time like they work, but it is not until they are pushed later that you can really see what you are missing... A story I may have told before. Just once have I had the guts and opportunity to teach kids like I think they should be taught. Suffice it to say that fellow grad students and faculty thought the final was insanely hard. They aced it. From several accounts they didn't study for it either - those who tried quickly realized that they knew it cold. 6 months later they said it stuck. So it seemed to work. But they hated me for it. Hmm...there may be a moral here. Some of the key points?
- Cumulative daily homework. The homework is in thirds. 1/3 easy questions from today. 1/3 medium questions from the last week. 1/3 hard questions from any topic so far covered. Hard questions are tailored towards points I think there is some weakness.
- Homework is not accepted late. No ands, ifs, or buts. A fixed number of homeworks are not counted in the grade, and that rather generous number was picked to cover all of the routine sickness, lateness, needed to study for a test, etc that comes up in a term.
- 15 minute question and answer session to start each class. The ground rules are that someone will ask questions and someone will answer. You don't want that someone to be me. :-) Questions that came up did, of course, influence the homework session.
- Lots of class interaction. I tried to ask each person a question at least every other class. (Class size 15.) Questions were not unreasonable. They were things like, "What should I do next?" before a routine step. (I was making sure they were following, not trying to stump them.)
If I had to do it again, what would I change? Probably the amount of class interaction. But stressing that the material was always cumulative was good. The homework policy worked great. (Several friends have borrowed that with some success.) The opportunity (and incentive!) to fill in holes in past knowledge served an important need. But asking them to stay awake made them work harder than they wanted to. OTOH the class interaction was probably the key to having them learn the material so completely... Cheers, Ben
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Post #21,626
12/16/01 10:09:50 AM
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::chuckle::
Everything I know I either (a) learned from teachers I hated or (b) dug out on my own, cursing all the while because I wanted to do something else and needed that to get on with it.
Conclusion: If the students love the teacher, the teacher isn't teaching.
Regards,
Ric
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Post #21,629
12/16/01 10:26:44 AM
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Hmmm...
>Conclusion: If the students love the teacher, the teacher isn't teaching.
Well, *I* feel better now....
Tom Sinclair
Speaker-to-Suits
Just because it's not nice doesn't mean it's not miraculous.
-- (Terry Pratchett, Interesting Times)
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Post #21,632
12/16/01 10:36:13 AM
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Watch it. That law isn't commutative :-)
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Post #21,710
12/17/01 11:45:57 AM
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Not necessarily true.
My mother was a Spanish teacher in the middle school that a lot of my classmates in high school came from. She was probably the favorite teacher that a lot of them had - and they were all so fluent in Spanish by the time they got to high school, that they were able to skip right on to the AP Spanish class instead of taking Spanish I over again, like all the other students who had studied Spanish before.
"He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." - Friedrich Nietzsche
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Post #21,727
12/17/01 1:22:28 PM
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Depends on the student
My favorite teacher in high school was the English teacher I argued with all year. No animosity, just disagreeing on interpretations. The thing I liked was that she actually allowed a student to challenge her in class and deal with the criticism. Got good grades and aced the AP exam. I still think she was wrong, BTW.
We have to fight the terrorists as if there were no rules and preserve our open society as if there were no terrorists. -- [link|http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/05/opinion/BIO-FRIEDMAN.html|Thomas Friedman]
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Post #21,729
12/17/01 1:25:01 PM
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That depends
If the students don't want to learn but they learn anyways, they won't like the teacher.
If they want to learn, they will.
That said, I don't know how to get someone else to want to learn. It has never been a problem for me, so I don't know how to address it in someone else.
Cheers,
Ben
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