Comment by MrBuddyCasino
2 days ago
Seems like everyone has such a story about a teacher. „No you can’t read more advanced books because the current ones bore you“ etc etc
What is the matter with these people.
2 days ago
Seems like everyone has such a story about a teacher. „No you can’t read more advanced books because the current ones bore you“ etc etc
What is the matter with these people.
Makes me realize how lucky I was to have teachers who pushed me to actually excel in areas I was gifted in (and also pull me back in areas I was not gifted in :))
When I was in 7th grade I was getting 100% on all my math exams so my teacher had me test into 8th grade math (algebra). Then when I was a sophomore I was supposed to take precalc but my teacher thought I obviously didn't belong there either so she put me in her Calc AB class, which was the highest math class my school offered, but had me self-study for the Calc BC AP test during class time, taking her own time to sit down with me whenever I had questions.
A couple years later I TA'd for her precalc class and I spent most of my time in that class playing with my TI 8x (can't remember the exact model, maybe 84?) and programming very basic games on it. I showed her what I made and she was so impressed she said I should study computer science.
Guess what I did? Not that. I studied something completely different in college but now I've been a programmer for ten years and wonder why I ever doubted her at all.
Just goes to show how much impact a good teacher has on a student's life.
Some teachers, like many of us, have caveman emotions, live under near medieval systems and have access to god-like tech. (My version of a quote I read earlier this year.)
What could go wrong?
rigidity
Personally betting on the "crab bucket" mentality.
It's typical. They're supposed have authority and be better than you. That is the purpose of their position and their identity.
Don't be so quick to judge, because most people, including you would react the same way in similar contexts, for example if you were the top engineer at a company and someone started showing you up and being a hundred times better than you.
Not really? I've worked with people who were super productive with high quality work, and my reaction was to... gravitate toward working more with them. Some people are status driven. Some are not. Some are apparently pathologically status driven such that they'll compete with a literal child.
In any case refusing to nurture such a child (even in effectively passive ways like letting them quietly do something more advanced with no specific instruction) and not being reprimanded for it would reveal that the actual purpose of their position is daycare worker, which should be a bigger strike to the ego.
That’s what all people say. Everyone who is status driven will not admit or even realize they are status driven. But the fact of the matter is… it is human nature to be status driven. Everyone recognizes status symbols and possesses such a drive within them. It is also clinically tied with serotonin levels and observed in cross species behavior. To say you have no drive for status is an either a lie or delusional. The evidence is so ingrained in science.
Now. That being said, the drive can be suppressed. But suppressing the drive doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist and that you don’t feel it. Also many people feel the drive at different levels of intensity that much is true.
Anecdotally your response to me indicates to me that you have not suppressed status seeking drives completely. The key hints are you’re referring to how you’re drawn to people who do high quality work. That is orthogonal to status seeking. Your status and identity is tied to a certain type of work you do and you take pride in. Have you worked with anyone who was so powerful that their work invalidated, crushed and basically humiliated anything you did. And let’s say this person is not malicious. He’s just so much better than you that your work and identity is inconsequential and eclipsed by his work.
If you said that you wouldn’t feel anything in the face of that then I would say that you truly do not seek status. I would also say you’re not human.
That being said a teacher holds his identity as someone who is better than children. He needs to be better than children in order to transfer his betterment (aka knowledge) to children. His role in society and identity rests on that foundation. If children are better then him and know more than him then that is inadvertently an attack on his identity. His reaction is natural and expected. It’s not that he has anything against the child, it’s self protection mechanisms to protect his identity via deluding himself. Very typical.
You see much of the same stuff with LLMs and programmers. A huge portion of HN was in denial for the longest time about the capabilities of LLMs calling these things stochastic parrots and thinking it’s impossible for the AI to take over. HN was just completely wrong about that and they were also wrong about driverless cars. The reason why they were so wrong is not because they’re making a logical and rational prediction… no they are choosing the prediction that most aligns with protecting their identity and skill set as programmers which is in the process of being replaced by agentic ai.
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