Flame Free Confession III: Even More Flame Free (Part 1)

Lots of folk here are mistaking bad/incompetent teaching for tough/high standards in teaching.

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My girlfriend is in law school and currently dealing with a horrible professor. The whole class is struggling bad, he won’t teach. They are given reading material and during the class he asks questions. If he gets to 3 incorrectly answered questions he ends class. Like wtf dude. I’ve never been to college but shouldn’t teachers teach? If all you had to do was read a book his job wouldn’t exist :joy:

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Well, the fluids mechanics guy did not write one damn thing the entire semester. He used a power point that he made a decade previous. He was a bad teacher.

Here is another gem. He told us we didn’t need and he wouldn’t allow us to make cheat sheets. He said he would provide all of the equations we needed on a sheet. Show up to the exam and this jackass has 3 equations on an 8.5x11 sheet of paper in landscape orientation (because they would not fit in portrait), and a note saying all needed equations could be derived from these differential equations or something to that effect.

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He wasn’t ā€˜merely’ a bad teacher–he was a malignant teacher.

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A grad student from the tennis team taught my strength and conditioning class in undergrad. She was far and away my best teacher.

When I taught, we were informed that failing tests meant we, as teachers, FAILED the students. Our job was to make them learn the material, and the test was a reflection of how well WE did in accomplishing that job.

Was a fantastic paradigm shift.

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I took shop class and then in HS I had 3 semesters of welding and 2 of PE.

and I still graduated with a 2.5 gpa.

good times -

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When I did my welding courses at the local CC I did my AWS certs for 7018, Flux core, and their certificate course simultaneously.

Ended up in the welding lab from 9:00 am until 10:30 pm every day for like 6 mos, but completed a 2 year course in that time.

It was pretty fun. Built an extension that fits in the hitch receiver for carrying kayaks for the instructors truck for extra credit.

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@wanna_be are you doing storm down in Texas right now?

No mahm. It wasn’t my crews turn to go out of town :sob:. If this second wave hits and things get worse we might though!

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Even worse is the arbitrary law school curves. My wife’s law school (which is on the low end of the rankings but the closest one to where we live) sets the average for the class at a 2.5. And it doesn’t matter what the test scores are. 95% is the average and you scored that you still only get a C+…

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Yeah, some engineering professors are absolutely awesome and others are complete and utter apathetic jerks when it comes to teaching.
I can’t remember the class but I remember there was a test question that like 95% of the class got wrong because the professor derived the equation needed to solve the problem incorrectly in the notes.
When this was pointed out to him, we were told ā€œit is your job to make sure my derivation is correctā€ā€¦you could feel the WTF in the air.

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I’m at a cabin on a family vacation for the first time in 6 years, and the food has been the highlight (along with the hot tub and fire pit.

I confess I ate 1.5 lbs of grass fed ribeye, and 2 bowls of a potato and onion soup where you cook 6 strips of ultra thick bacon and dump the grease in the soup, and then after the potatoes are fork tender, you take half of the chunks out and blend them with a cup of heavy cream before returning it to the soup. It’s garnished with the crumbled bacon you cooked earlier, diced green onions and Monterey Jack cheese, like a loaded baked potato.

Pictured below, my third helping of steak and second bowl of soup.

Currently dropping a deuce with some serious ring zing, but no regrets.

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I can kinda relate. I’ve never studied anything close to your field, but I have to present simplified versions of this kind of research to clients provided to me by one of my guys who did. Dude has a phd and I don’t so I’m taking his word for it:

99% of people are either stupid or completely lack agency.

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People with severe leisons on their hippocampus (basically no working memory) can apparently form and remember first impressions… WTF…

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That I didn’t know lol.

Most of what I present have to do with marketing research.

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there’s really cool research in the neuroscience of ā€œmid-liminalā€ priming.

the popular perception of subliminal priming is mostly a myth (ie flashing Coke), but midliminal isn’t. People are aware they are being advertised to, but the advertising works even more because there’s the illusion of control of the information/impression

Edit: subliminal priming is still a thing. Gary latham did some really really cool research

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This is a fantastic teaching philosophy. It’s always super easy to assume the students messed up, but there’s been several times that the error was on my end. I always come clean with the students if there’s a typo in my materials, and they are extremely appreciative of my honesty.

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I did a stint at a university supporting a few subjects. I will now confess my sins.

I had an exam changed to include a multiple choice section. 1 mark for a correct answer, 0 for incorrect and -2 for incorrect. Stop guessing and all.

Our assignments all had 10PM deadlines. We set the software to accept submissions sometime between 6AM and 10AM the following morning because we would always experience a dozen or more students running into an internet glitch right at the submission time.

On the day of one exam in one semester, I published a good luck notice to the subject’s news page. It had the exam attached… with the questions missing. So when you opened it, it looked legit until you got to page 3.

Good times heh.

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My psych course had all of its chapter tests on line and a bunch of learning metrics like test time, a curve for how your percentage improved per number of times taken, etc. Neat stuff at the time.

So I hit print page and filled in all of the answers at my leisure, logged back on to enter them and showed the rest of the class how to do the same.

The prof. was actually pretty cool about it and had a good laugh about how all of the work to put this whole text book/online system together just went down the drain.