Education, all levels

Politics & News
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I’m now 4 weeks into teaching, here are some updated thoughts:

Attendance:
I’m supposed to have a total of 26 students in a hybrid format: 13 attending in person on Monday and zooming in on Wednesday, the other 13 zooming in on Monday and attending in person Wednesday. So far, it’s been about 5-7 students attending in person, and one day was only 2. That’s a little tough to teach to, especially in a room that typically holds 45-50.

I’m surprised/disappointed by this low attendance. (I think part of it is due to the enormously crappy weather we’ve had.) I chose this format because I believed students wanted in person instruction, but revealed preference makes me think this isn’t true. Part of it is a coordination problem - if I’m the only in-person class on a student’s schedule, then I’m the super annoying one that forces them to change out of pajamas. So I think some better planning by the university would have been good here.

Technology:
The technology setup is pretty good. I wear a lapel microphone, and there’s a video camera that captures me. I have a large movable screen next to the podium where I have the class attendees and chat window, so I can see any questions from remote students. I then log in to the zoom meeting separately on my Surface Book as a co-host, share that screen, and annotate my presentations. I then post the annotated pdfs after class. So I think all of that is going about as well as normal, and maybe that explains why people are willing to be remote.

Quizzes and Exams:
This is the part that I was most worried about, but I think it’s going to be fine. I’ve had two quizzes so far, and I’ve given them through our learning management system. Each student logs in and they take the quiz on their computer. I require that they have their webcams on, but I don’t impose any kind of lockdown browser. The quizzes themselves are decent - I can create questions that randomize inputs, meaning that each student gets unique values in their questions. For example, “How would you value a bond where the face value is $X, the stated rate is Y%, payments are made semiannually, and the discount rate is Z%?”.

What’s also nice is that these questions are graded automatically which takes away my biggest headache. I can imagine that I’ll continue to use this online testing even when classes are back to normal, and not need to use a TA or do it myself.

Safety:
As I mentioned before, the buildings are ghost towns - far fewer classes are being held in person than I expected. The university is testing students on a weekly basis (mandatory), and the positivity rate is around 0.5%. I just got an email requesting that I get tested weekly, but they’re not making it mandatory. It’s an easy saliva test and is free, so I don’t mind doing it at all, and I just scheduled an appointment for Monday.

Overall, things seem to be going as well as I could expect, but given low student attendance so far, I feel like I could have gone 100% remote without any harm. And that would have saved an hour commute each teaching day, $10/day in parking, and allowed me to stay in my pajamas.

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Moving this conversation here from the beer thread. One of the things I struggle with is what the PhD program is meant to accomplish. Our job market is pretty good, so that a program like ours might graduate anywhere from 1-3 students each year, and we expect that each graduating student will get a tenure track position. But it’s certainly gotten more competitive in the last 15-20 years, and it’s increasingly common for graduating students to have to take visiting positions or jobs outside of academia. (I don’t think non-academic jobs are as desirable in business disciplines as they are in other disciplines, but I could be enormously biased/blind in my current position.)

So the question is, should we be constraining incoming classes to match that decreased demand? My attitude has been yes - I only want to admit a class of students that we can reasonably say has a good chance of everyone getting a tenure track job upon graduation. But that’s not entirely consistent with the notion of academics - it’s treating the PhD as an occupational training path rather than an educational degree. Should we be willing to admit more students as long as they’re likely to be able to successfully complete the degree, even if that means that some percentage of them probably won’t get jobs? My attitude is no, but I’m not sure that’s the right attitude.

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Depends on the job prospects for the Ph.D. If the only reason to get a doctorate in the field is to become academic faculty, then yeah, you better restrict admissions based on academic job availability. For the biological sciences, I don’t think I’d consider hiring someone for a position like mine or many of my coworkers’ with a mere bachelor’s, but at the same time, the expectation of many if not most biological Ph.D.s is academia. So, I think things could be helped there even with just a better job of advertising that there are more and better jobs in industry. There doesn’t have to be gatekeeping there based on academic jobs precisely because of industry demand, although perhaps there should be a bit more than there is. The far bigger failing of academia there is electing to capitalize on the glut of PhD labor with exploitative jobs.

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A couple of random things for this slow thread:

  • My university has announced that they’ll be conducting at least 75% of courses in person in Fall 2021. I don’t think that’s terribly surprising, given the pace of the vaccine rollout, but I think that statement gives a lot of comfort to students that life is going to look a lot more normal next year. They’ve obviously had a very crappy version of a college experience, and I feel especially bad for current year seniors whose final year has almost certainly been miserable.

  • My own teaching this semester has gone pretty well. I’m in a hybrid class, where the total class is split into two groups: group one attends in-person on Monday and group two attends in-person on Wednesday. Classes are filmed live and recorded, so group one zooms in on Wednesday, while group two zooms in on Monday. When I chose this format in the fall, I did so (versus full remote) based on the assumption that students wanted to be in person. But that hasn’t turned out to be true. Rather than getting the expected 12-13 students showing up in person each day, I’m only getting 2-5 each day.

  • I think there are a couple of reasons for that. First, I don’t require attendance, so it’s always been the case that <80% of students would typically show up in person. But I think the bigger and more unexpected fact is that students wanted a full slate of in-person classes. But most classes are fully remote. So even if they like the idea of in-person classes, my class is actually the pain in the ass if it’s the only in-person class they have. It’s a big coordination problem. That said, even if only 2-5 students are getting value out of being in person, I’m glad I’m doing it. I have a lot more energy actually being in the classroom, which I think makes for a better experience even for the people who are tuned in remotely.

  • My big concern coming into this semester was how to adminster quizzes and exams. That’s gone well. Our Learning Management System (LMS) has a quiz function built in. So I can create different types of questions (true/false, multiple choice, fill in the numerical blank) and have them autograded. That’s been pretty great - grading quizzes and exams is the worst part of teaching, so this is a real improvement that I’ll probably keep using even when things are back to normal. (I’ll just require students to bring laptops to class on every day there’s a quiz or exam.) I also include open-ended questions where students solve more complex problems, and where partial credit plays a big role. For these, I just let the students take a picture of their scratch work and send it to me so I can determine how much partial credit to award. That worked out well on the first exam. In terms of security, they simply log in to zoom meeting and I require them to have their webcams on while they’re taking the quiz/exam. I don’t impose a browser lockdown, and I allow them to use their books, notes, internet, etc. I was initially concerned that this setup would end up with students getting perfect scores. But I think it’s pretty easy to design an exam that isn’t easily googleable. And open book/open notes are only really helpful if you have time to casually browse the material during the test. So as long as you impose a time constraint, it’s not a problem.

I’m a little more than halfway through the semester and I’m looking forward to it being done, but it hasn’t been nearly as bad as I feared.

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Unrelated to teaching, I don’t know that everyone realizes how little teaching matters in terms of compensation, promotion, etc. Every year, I’m evaluated 99% on research, and research is what determines who gets tenure, who gets job offers, etc. (The old “publish or perish” adage is true.)

With that in mind, it’s insane how difficult it can be to publish your research, particularly if your school focuses on high-impact journals. The journals that I get credit for have acceptance rates of <10%, and even if you ultimately get a paper accepted, that process can take years. So if your tenure decision is in, say 2 years, it’s likely that you can’t start a new project with the expectation that it will have been accepted by that decision point. Which is very odd.

I say all of this only because I just saw a super-extreme version of this problem:

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This is very strange looking: The Editorial decision was made in 2020, but the paper was received in 2021? If you look at the actual paper, what you see is this:

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This paper was accepted for publication 23 years after it was first submitted. Shit like this, where you work on a project constantly over the course of many years, can kill a career.

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This actually seems like a yuuge problem. If anything it selects against people who put time and effort into teaching (since they could be spending that effort on more research).

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On one hand, this is true. ~All of the incentive at research institutions is to maximize your research output while barely clearing the minimum teaching requirements. At tenure and promotion meetings, we spend about 90% of the time talking about the candidate’s research, and the remaining 10% on their service and teaching activities. And that’s probably a generous 10%.

In practice, though, I haven’t seen direct evidence that it’s a problem. Most of the people who I think of as good researchers are thoughtful, organized, and good communicators. Those same traits tend to transfer very well to the classroom. And even though we have virtually no incentive to invest in teaching, most people I know place a lot of intrinsic value on being a good teacher. That being said, I’m sure there are lots of examples of the occasional sociopath who acts completely rationally with regard to his/her incentives and just absolutely doesn’t give a shit in the classroom.

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ime college kids these days practically teach themselves.

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Professors that can’t teach worth a shit but require attendance were the worst. In pursuit of my EE degree I probably taught about 75% of the content to myself out of the books. The professors were that bad.

And there was one of those sociopaths. The guy was a die hard capitalist to the core. He believed competition brought out the best in students. But here’s what happened. 60 students in a class. Right off the bat he says he plans on distributing it so that 10% get A’s, 20% B’s, 40% C’s, 20% D’s, and 10% F’s. How much you know is irrelevant, all that matters is beating the other students. Our whole grade was based on 2 tests and a final. Only the first test was before drop day. Out of 60 students I finished in the middle, 30 out of 60. Cool, I can get a C with a chance at a B if I do well later. Not great but I’ll take it. But now the bottom several students drop the class rather than risk failing. Now there’s about 50 students. Curve shifts. Bottom drops again. Curve shifts. Next thing I know I went from a C to an F because 30 kids dropped the class. Fuck that guy.

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Physics professor to class: Ideal test, top student gets 99%, worst gets 0. Half of you will drop out.

Professor to me, teaching accompanying supplementary class: Are you understanding the physics?

Multiple microaggressions/day. Occasional gasps from the class. I think he enjoyed that. Probably not related, but out of the blue he sent me a bonkers sounding email years later. He may have been mentally ill.

Eta I could probably spend all day on physics professor anecdotes. Another was deeply offended when I implied that his lecture notes were not comprehensive. He claimed the textbook was unnecessary.

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My experience has been a bit different.

  1. The people who are the best at researching and obtaining grant funding are not generally the best teachers. I’d say there is a positive correlation, but it is not a strong one.

  2. I think a lot of these people, if they are put into a classroom, have enough professional pride that they will try to do a good job. The problem is that they do their best to avoid teaching or minimize the amount of teaching that they need to do. So, as you say, it’s not that much of a practical problem. Because if you weed out all the people who really want to be teaching, whoever is left will have to do it, and those people will still be quite competent even if they wish they weren’t doing it.

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I’d have stories like these if I actually went to class.

I still have no idea how I graduated from college. Man was that a fucked up time of my life.

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So you don’t have the I forgot go to this math class all semester and now I’m taking the final exam nightmare? I hate that one.

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Always. I usually can’t find the classroom, either. Also forget my locker combination.

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I have a similar one, but not math. Apparently, it’s really common. Lots of people have some version of it.

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True. Even people you wouldn’t expect.

https://twitter.com/seanmcarroll/status/1371664171289350145?s=20

https://twitter.com/mathematicsprof/status/1372033678361169920

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Once I got through undergrad, I put it out of mind.

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So I’ve never had one of those types of dreams because I think I conquered a similar IRL experience. Story-time- laying in my dorm room bed thinking it’s about two hours before my Organic Chem final. I go to double check the building and room because our professor mentioned half the class would be in one lecture hall, the other in a different one. I check and notice the time of the exam was actually 15 minutes ago.

I shoot my roommate’s gf who was also in the class that lives down the hall an AIM message letting her know (pre-iPhone era). I go to her room as she is frantically getting dressed and then we sprint down to the chem building. It’s December, it’s cold, it’s raining, and it’s like 3/4 a mile away.

We get there soaking wet and panting out of breath from running, like 25 minutes late to the exam. The lecture hall has these huge 10ft doors that make a ton of noise when you open them. We open the doors, dripping wet, breathing heavily to incredulous stares from other kids taking the exam as we stroll to the podium. We tell the TAs running the exam we’re here to take it and they just were like “ummm okay, you don’t get any extra time but good luck I guess?”

I ended up with a B+ in the class and I think she got an A- so we avoided a complete failure. No nightmares for me.

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Does making 4 year state colleges free not count as something for the working class?