kitchen table math, the sequel: hell is other people

Tuesday, January 22, 2008

hell is other people


“Throughout human history, you see that the worst problems for people almost always come from other people, and it’s the same for the monkeys. You can put them anywhere, but their main problem is always going to be other rhesus monkeys.”

from the Times

2 comments:

le radical galoisien said...

I have two teachers this year that epitomise the best and worst kinds of lab teachers.

The irony is that the "bad" teacher is actually more knowledgeable than the "good" teacher -- it's just that the the former teacher's pedagogy sucks. Hard.

The bad lab teacher (who is an okay teacher overall) teaches rigidly from the textbook, does them only because they are "required" AP Labs, and will ask us to modify data, have us borrow other groups' data, or even give us data to fill in when we get weird anomalies. Dropping extreme data points is okay in moderation, but at some point, you begin to subconsciously doubt the integrity of the rest of your data. Often the Lab is supposed to teach a concept that is already well-understood theoretically, and there is often not a lot to be gained practically. In a cell-phase identification lab for example, if an appropriate phase could not be located under the microscope, we were asked to draw from the textbook. What was the point of using the microscope then?

The "good" lab teacher has his own set of "required" AP labs to teach too, but he tailors all of them to suit his classes. I cannot remember a lab of his where I thought, "pointless, why are we doing this?" He writes his own lab notes, and tosses out the textbook questions that follow after a lab in favour of more thought-provoking questions. Again, it is kind of ironic considering that the first teacher had often very elegant lab setups, but the questions were often juvenile and failed to exploit the opportunity to get students to think about why the lab was set up in that particular manner.

What I particularly dislike is when lab teachers go over theory so fast (do A, B, C, D, E, then take measurements F while G is incubating in the presence of H while comparing it to the measurements of I while J is incubating in the presence of K as a control, something that was anticipated by C.) so I'm left staring at my lab notes wondering what step B is for when everyone is doing D.

Catherine Johnson said...

so I'm left staring at my lab notes wondering what step B is for when everyone is doing D

grrrrr....