Comment by ineedasername
19 days ago
> I am frequently asked for my PowerPoint slides, which basically function for me as lecture notes. It is unimaginable to me that I would have ever asked one of my professors for their own lecture notes. No, you can’t have my slides.
To me this indicates that, all else aside and even granting for the sake of argument they’re correct in all other aspects, they simply aren’t a good teacher, not providing a basic and easy to share resource. Even during my time in University a couple decades ago I never encountered a professor who had slide available in an easily shareable format yet would refuse to make them available. They’re your own notes on digesting, synthesizing, and analyzing the material? Well that’s exactly the sort of thing that is both useful and essentially your job to impart in a fashion that allows students to learn. Whatever the deficiencies of students today, you’re not doing your job if you decide to stand on principle for your own conception of how a student should learn instead of figuring out what will be effective.
This alone makes the author’s other observations suspect, perhaps not it kind but at least degree, since it’s clear that one of their core gripes is that students simply don’t learn the way they want students to learn, and they aren’t willing to meet students where they’re at to do the job they’re paid for. This isn’t “get off my lawn,” this is a landscaper saying “I’m gonna cut your lawn the way i want to cut it.”
Most of my teachers either didn't use slides, or explicitly published their lecture notes. Seems weird to have made slides and then not want to share them.
While I agree with this particular point, it's weird not to share the slides, everything else rings true for me. I graduated college about a year ago, and so much of this I just took for granted. The class would just get smaller as the semester went on and more people 'disappeared'. In a lecture hall of 200 people, do you really think that my classmates weren't on their phones constantly?
Empirically, literacy rates are dropping. The anecdotes match the data. Why are you trying to negate this article?
This phrase in my comment: perhaps not it kind but at least degree
That not negation of the article and is instead questioning the extent to which their observations are accurate vs caricatures influenced by an outlook on their customers that is already, in software terms, “user hostile”.
The last time I taught in college was about 8 years ago at a school with a similar demographic fit, and I can recognize a fair bit of what the author say but not at all to this degree. I still work in the industry and there’s a post-Covid shift that I think strongly explains a sharp downshift in students feeling attendance is important, but I think that aught to resonate with the HN crowd with respect to a now-common feeling that dogmatic adherence to mandatory full work-from-office isn’t necessary or worker friendly. Consider all the more how that feeling would take hold for young students that spent significant formative years just prior to college being fully or highly remote.
On literacy, that’s an area I have some analytical experience in. As far as I have seen, at least a fair bit of this perception is from the fact that students view homework etc as low-stakes writing but higher stakes get more attention and the end product reflects more ability than might otherwise be shown. Also, the professor in this article may simply not be adept at getting the best results from a group of students that sense the dislike aimed their way. However my analysis side also predates ChatGPT.