Gilbert Strang would do a version of this too: appearing to work through problems on the fly and asking the audience for help, when of course he had come up with the problems himself and made them readily solvable to illustrate the concept he was teaching.
You can see instances of this in his last lecture in 2023.
Early on in high school we had one of the sports coaches substitute for a science teacher for a few months. The sub gave us a bad formula, and I spent a while on getting her to correct it. She pushed back, so I even wrote a very small paper showing how the formula she gave us didn't make sense because the value would have to have certain upper bounds, the formula would have to have a certain "shape" to it, etc. It was somewhat rewarding to care about the concept enough to do this, but it made the sub cry, and several of my classmates were angry and annoyed at me.
I think this article, even if it was true, downplays the social penalty that the kids who speak up might pay.
A professor I had in college had an anecdote about how his first publication was an open problem he accidentally solved in the process of doing his homework and he only found out long after when the professor cited it as [him] (unpublished).
He also seemed to, precisely once every semester, assign a problem among the homework problems that was, as written, an open problem in the field, only to, a couple days before the deadline, send out a clarification apologizing.
Having been around there a couple years, I always suspected that these two things were not unrelated.
The issue is that, at least for me, I'm madly trying to capture in my notes whatever it is the teacher was presenting. Then, on "step 15" we get the "Oh, did anyone notice this on Step 3?" and then they'd erase the board and we'd start again.
I never felt it was an interesting technique, especially early on, when, again, at least for me, I'm just trying to absorb everything. I don't know enough to separate the wheat from the chaff, and still barely understand what I'm doing. Many times one can succeed by blindly following a process without understanding, and over time that understanding arrives, aided by repetition and application of the examples.
Folks learn differently with different ways. This was not an effective teaching technique for me.
> The issue is that, at least for me, I'm madly trying to capture in my notes whatever it is the teacher was presenting.
I've observed this relation for myself, but the causality in my experience has clearly been reversed: it's not really possible for me to pay much attention to what is being taught when I'm working so hard just to write it down. Taking sparse, partial notes— or no notes at all— always left me way more room to think about the material.
This kind of approach works a lot better when you have a competent textbook that you can actually take home, which is only occasionally the case for high schoolers and almost never the case for elementary schoolers. When you have a decent textbook you can always make 'slow notes' from that at your leisure, if you really need them, and you can also do the readings before class so that all you need from the lecture is to fill in gaps.
But either way, trying to copy down the whole board is almost always the wrong way to take notes unless you are typing and can do so much more quickly than the board changes, IME. It's just way too much overhead and doesn't leave enough room for substantive engagement.
Try taking organic chemistry. The professor would show up early and fill three blackboards with synthesis reactions. It was then a race to keep up for the next 50 minutes.
For organic chemistry yes. There is a ton of information you need to be familiar with before you can begin to apply it. The corresponding lab course was just as challenging.
A lot of courses involve as much memorization as they do only because they are taught without or prior to the foundations or tools that are used to solve common problems in them. For instance, in the cases of 'algebra-based' (i.e., no calculus prerequisite) physics classes and statistics classes, virtually all of the formulas that students are required to memorize just 'fall out' of the calculus if you learn that first. The same kind of thing is often true in math classes for engineering and science majors, where students are taught to memorize and apply a number of rules, as opposed to math classes for math majors, where students are provided the tools needed to prove those rules and walked through one or more proofs of them. That makes not only makes it possible to 'rediscover' or retrace a half-remembered rule even during a test, but also generally makes the rules much more memorable. Conversely, students who take the 'non-specialist' versions of those courses often encounter a kind of desiccated curriculum that, stripped of any articulation of the logical interrelations between its terms, demands treatment of those terms as 'brute facts' which must be memorized-- giving them a false impression of the subject itself as one that inherently requires or involves a high degree of rote memorization.
Assuming that there is no such sequencing issue involved for organic chemistry as it's commonly taught, and that a large number of 'brute facts' are an inherent feature of the subject matter, how is frantic, mechanical transcription a good use of in-class time in which students have access to a subject-matter expert? Transcription doesn't require the presence or time of an expert. Wouldn't it be better for students to perform such transcription outside of class, especially in advance of the lecture, and/or to receive paper copies of the contents of the board printed with double line spacing and wide margins at the beginning of class? In that case, both class time and students' notes could be better focused on questions, mistakes, and generally material of more substance than memorization.
Is there an assumption (or maybe an understanding informed by experience) that students just won't do such transcription (and thus not memorize the facts they need to) if they're not prompted to do so in class?
I wonder if this is due to an extension of early childhood teaching techniques that has been extended to later years?
In current child development theories and books, it is taught that young children lack in "precausal thinking"/"transductive reasoning". Where a child does not understand things like "put on your jacket, it is cold outside" or "bring an umbrella, it will rain later".
It is said it is better to teach them "backwards" - let them feel that it is cold outside (problem) then tell them to put on a jacket (solution). But this type of reasoning reverses as we grow and develop.
For this to be a valid pedagogical technique it has to be applied properly for the intended student. As described in the linked article for middle elementary aged students it seems effective. I can easily imagine my own middle elementary aged child responding well to it.
Your experience however seems to be either in secondary or collegiate classrooms and I can easily see where this approach there would often be problematic. That said if an instructor is trying to get students to engage in critical thinking about why something works then an intentional mistake could be educational. You can copy code from stack overflow all day long but it’s going to work a lot better if you can actually analyze it and understand what’s happening.
Ideally, you should only work at learning something if you don't know it. Repetition wastes a lot of time to get that guarantee, but it would be much more efficient to just recognize where you're weak and work at that. It's a rather lazy meta-learning strategy to just throw spaghetti at the wall until everything sticks.
I think it's fine if someone chooses to learn this way, but it's unfair to expect all the other students to waste their time---I really hated when math teachers assigned 30 problems of homework, because I didn't need 30 of the same problem to know how to solve it, and almost no one does. Really, you only need repetition for a small percent of the content, it's just what "clicks" for each person is different.
I appreciated what my high school chemistry teacher did instead: all problem sets were optional, but there were recommended problems. Then, we had tests every two weeks which we were allowed to retake, but only once we solved the problems. That way, we quickly see if we're missing any knowledge and are forced to learn it for a good grade.
My realization on this: teachers were a really bad fit for me. Having a human trying to make it palatable to me in real time in their own words was just not great. At some point I stopped listening in class nor taking notes and just read the manual and other related books on my own, at my own pace (often during class), and it worked a hundred times better.
There's still the issue of having to be in the classroom, which meant doing that whole learning process ahead of time to be able to defocus and still somewhat react to questions and activities going on in the classroom.
If you're just writing down what the teacher wrote to memorize later, you're not learning the math properly. You should be deriving the solution at least one step ahead of the teacher. Occasionally, there will be a clever insight where you might have to wait for the teacher to tell you that step, but those should be the minority. Once you get the insight, you should be jumping ahead again.
It's the same in work meetings. If you're blindly absorbing what the presenter is saying, you're not a helpful participant. You should be deriving your own solutions and questioning differences between your solution and the presenter's when they arise. Sometimes, companies pay for improv classes for their employees to help them anticipate and react in meetings, but if you're already practiced in classroom learning, that's redundant.
> I don't know enough to separate the wheat from the chaff, and still barely understand what I'm doing. Many times one can succeed by blindly following a process without understanding, and over time that understanding arrives, aided by repetition and application of the examples.
>
> Folks learn differently with different ways. This was not an effective teaching technique for me.
I think that's kind of the point. Everyone can learn using the method you describe (it's mainly how I go about it), but everyone can also learn the "proper" way. It just requires more commitment and belief in yourself upfront.
Agreed - I had a teacher that would do this in high school physics from time to time and I found it be a distraction more than anything - I'm trying to follow what's on the board and then I have to throw that away and start trying to figure it out from the top.
This is only slightly related, but if you don't understand, what value do your notes actually have? Or is this an environment with no lecture recordings, digital presentations or notes shared with the class..? I ask out of a genuine curiosity, since I know many people benefit from live note taking. I can only imagine notes being useful if they constituted a synthesis of the teacher's guidance.
I had the same curiosity. Every time I've tried meticulous note taking it turned in to this thing where now I've given myself permission to do something mechanical now and put off the hard thinking until later. And then when I tried to do it later, the moment for asking for clarification had passed.
If I recall correctly, Sal Khan from Khan Academy fame has suggested homework and school work should be flipped—video lessons at home and student and teacher interaction on the math problems at school. This has some of that flavor.
This is how my calculus class worked out a few years ago.
It was a purely online course, and the instructor was at a campus I never visited. (We were surprised to learn that we'd need to commute there for the final exam, but I worked out an alternate plan.)
The course materials were all Pearson-provided and hosted on Canvas, so there were video lectures, and the quizzes and tests were automated. Our instructor was just there to keep the backend together, and provide a credentialed face.
I, however, struggled mightily, and so I found the tutoring center, and it was fantastic. It was bustling in the daytime; it had computers we could log into or desks without them. Then the tutors circulated, and we could plug through coursework and raise a flag when we had questions.
It was one instance of a vast support network that is too often left untapped by students, who just aren't aware of what's available, or don't care and resort to cheating, or have a study group where they all sort of muddle through.
Kids won't do that. And there's a lot of classes there.
Though indo agree with his sentiment. Most college lectures are useless and easily replaced with a video. I found my best math professor had us do homework and then the beginning of every class I'd going over it and working out all our mistakes. I felt that he could teach calculus to a monkey he was so effective.
While this approach can engage some students, it risks confusing others and potentially eroding trust. A balanced method might involve planned "mistakes" alongside clear, accurate instruction.
> It’s about finding someone who’s not ashamed to fail in front of you—and then figuring out the answers together.
Students aren't going to lose trust in their teacher over mistakes. Establishing core concepts while tripping over details breeds humility for correction when real mistakes are made by the teacher and helps show students that it's okay to make mistakes. This brings more attention to the value of double-checking one's work and the opportunities for correction give purpose to their learning.
Depends on how many mistakes they make each lecture. I had one math teacher in high school that our whole class basically gave up on because he was useless. The only way for us to actually get at the material was read the textbook outside of class and explain it to each other.
Only if you let the mistake go unmentioned. I do a version of this where I glibly include a mistake, like:
// Examples of dereference operator.
int i, *ip = ..., **ipp = ...;
i = *ip; // Assuming ip has been correctly initialized.
i = **ipp; // Likewise.
// The address-of operator is the opposite.
ip = &i;
ipp = &&i;
I actually talk through the last line. Almost no one ever questions it. I then ask students to look at that last line again, and ask them if an address has an address, and if so, what does that mean, could it ever be useful?
If this is the lesson where you're introducing pointers to students, you're probably doing them a disservice. Reminds me of my engineering professors who were bored with the material, so they dove straight into difficult problems.
A bit tangential but, when a teacher asks if anyone knows x, he/she doesn't want the nerd wiseguy who actually knows to answer, he wants someone who is unsure to answer so that everyone can participate in the learning experience.
When a teacher does that every class, multiple times a class, it becomes agonizingly boring for the students who actually understand what is going on. The long silences while no one is willing to raise their hand are painful and irritating. That kind of thing is exactly what pushes the 'nerd' to act the part of the 'wiseguy', sighing as he raises his hand, blurting an answer out out-of-turn, etc. It's also a good way to encourage your smartest students to completely disengage and sleep through class.
The more the class consists of exercises like this, the more it feels like a waste of the more advanced students' time and the greater the sense of distance it creates between the more advanced students and the ones who are slower or more behind.
You'd be better off just putting the more middling, slower or less consistent students in the hotseat than asking if 'anyone' knows the answer, and then whenever their answer has a problem asking if anyone can rephrase or reframe the thing just taught in a way that makes more sense to the unsure student, then ask the student who answered earlier if they're satisfied with that answer or if it's not quite rock solid for them. That way, the more advanced students can at least still participate in moving the discussion forward in a non-antagonistic way (if you are ruthless about prohibiting mockery of incorrect or partial answers).
Same thing if you ask questions that have multiple somewhat obvious answers but only accept one oral answer per student (maybe take additional written answers for credit as homework or a bonus or just some kind of feedback, to make it easier to adhere to that rule). Then your more eager students are more opening up the floor for more reluctant students than just preempting them.
There is a written version of this called "cloze sentences".
One of my teachers would distribute cloze notes before each lecture. Then it was up to follow along, and fill in the blanks. Or, jump ahead if we felt confident, without the classroom atmosphere of "let's see who knows this first!"
She also used humorous props and catch-phrases. Introduce the prop, explain its meaning, return to the prop and repeat the catch phrase, and pretty soon, the whole class is chanting along with it.
It was an adult class, an introduction to a complex and philosophical topic, and we ran through it in a few weeks. She did not omit Powerpoints with animations.
That sounds like a really, really fun class with an enthusiastic teacher. I'd never heard of that kind of thing. Thanks not just for the story but also sharing the name of the technique! It definitely sounds like it allows flexible pacing in the same class that could help a teacher to accommodate different students well.
When the nerd wiseguy answers anyway, he/she doesn't actually want to disrupt the teacher's flow, he/she finds the ten seconds of complete silence awkward and wants to move on to the next thing.
Seriously, it was so annoying to have to participate in the charade. I put a paperback in my pencil case, but some teachers took it personally if I read during class, and it's absolute torture to have to listen to a disengaged group stumble through an answer to a question like this with your full attention on the front of the class. As an adult nobody tries to teach you using question and answer for anything that requires more time than a first aid certificate because they know damn well that you'll leave and/or pull out your phone.
A professor once taught me: If you want your presentation to be remembered, don't make it too perfect. Add some (obvious) errors, mispellings etc. to keep the audience awake.
It reminds me of another anecdote, regarding a university professor who told his students that he would deliberately include one falsehood in each lecture, and the students were charged with listening carefully and identifying the 'mistake' in each class.
For the very last class in the course, the professor trolled his students by not including any mistake.
Gilbert Strang would do a version of this too: appearing to work through problems on the fly and asking the audience for help, when of course he had come up with the problems himself and made them readily solvable to illustrate the concept he was teaching.
You can see instances of this in his last lecture in 2023.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUUte2o2Sn8
Linear Algebra was the math subject I was strongest in during college and I give all credit to Gilbert Strang. He was the best to ever do it.
Early on in high school we had one of the sports coaches substitute for a science teacher for a few months. The sub gave us a bad formula, and I spent a while on getting her to correct it. She pushed back, so I even wrote a very small paper showing how the formula she gave us didn't make sense because the value would have to have certain upper bounds, the formula would have to have a certain "shape" to it, etc. It was somewhat rewarding to care about the concept enough to do this, but it made the sub cry, and several of my classmates were angry and annoyed at me.
I think this article, even if it was true, downplays the social penalty that the kids who speak up might pay.
A professor I had in college had an anecdote about how his first publication was an open problem he accidentally solved in the process of doing his homework and he only found out long after when the professor cited it as [him] (unpublished).
He also seemed to, precisely once every semester, assign a problem among the homework problems that was, as written, an open problem in the field, only to, a couple days before the deadline, send out a clarification apologizing.
Having been around there a couple years, I always suspected that these two things were not unrelated.
This is very 1990s chain-email glurge story.
> glurge
That's a new word (for me). Always glad to see some new vocabulary, thanks.
I would consider it like a parable. (Without animals) Discussing it is stil interesting though.
That said, the age of the students seems extremely relevant.
[flagged]
You are an AI bot.
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28647203>
[flagged]
I had a teacher that routinely did this.
I hated it.
The issue is that, at least for me, I'm madly trying to capture in my notes whatever it is the teacher was presenting. Then, on "step 15" we get the "Oh, did anyone notice this on Step 3?" and then they'd erase the board and we'd start again.
I never felt it was an interesting technique, especially early on, when, again, at least for me, I'm just trying to absorb everything. I don't know enough to separate the wheat from the chaff, and still barely understand what I'm doing. Many times one can succeed by blindly following a process without understanding, and over time that understanding arrives, aided by repetition and application of the examples.
Folks learn differently with different ways. This was not an effective teaching technique for me.
> I had a teacher that routinely did this.
> I hated it.
> The issue is that, at least for me, I'm madly trying to capture in my notes whatever it is the teacher was presenting.
I've observed this relation for myself, but the causality in my experience has clearly been reversed: it's not really possible for me to pay much attention to what is being taught when I'm working so hard just to write it down. Taking sparse, partial notes— or no notes at all— always left me way more room to think about the material.
This kind of approach works a lot better when you have a competent textbook that you can actually take home, which is only occasionally the case for high schoolers and almost never the case for elementary schoolers. When you have a decent textbook you can always make 'slow notes' from that at your leisure, if you really need them, and you can also do the readings before class so that all you need from the lecture is to fill in gaps.
But either way, trying to copy down the whole board is almost always the wrong way to take notes unless you are typing and can do so much more quickly than the board changes, IME. It's just way too much overhead and doesn't leave enough room for substantive engagement.
Try taking organic chemistry. The professor would show up early and fill three blackboards with synthesis reactions. It was then a race to keep up for the next 50 minutes.
In your opinion, was that an effective approach to teaching, either in general or with respect to the specific material? Sounds very strange to me.
For organic chemistry yes. There is a ton of information you need to be familiar with before you can begin to apply it. The corresponding lab course was just as challenging.
A lot of courses involve as much memorization as they do only because they are taught without or prior to the foundations or tools that are used to solve common problems in them. For instance, in the cases of 'algebra-based' (i.e., no calculus prerequisite) physics classes and statistics classes, virtually all of the formulas that students are required to memorize just 'fall out' of the calculus if you learn that first. The same kind of thing is often true in math classes for engineering and science majors, where students are taught to memorize and apply a number of rules, as opposed to math classes for math majors, where students are provided the tools needed to prove those rules and walked through one or more proofs of them. That makes not only makes it possible to 'rediscover' or retrace a half-remembered rule even during a test, but also generally makes the rules much more memorable. Conversely, students who take the 'non-specialist' versions of those courses often encounter a kind of desiccated curriculum that, stripped of any articulation of the logical interrelations between its terms, demands treatment of those terms as 'brute facts' which must be memorized-- giving them a false impression of the subject itself as one that inherently requires or involves a high degree of rote memorization.
Assuming that there is no such sequencing issue involved for organic chemistry as it's commonly taught, and that a large number of 'brute facts' are an inherent feature of the subject matter, how is frantic, mechanical transcription a good use of in-class time in which students have access to a subject-matter expert? Transcription doesn't require the presence or time of an expert. Wouldn't it be better for students to perform such transcription outside of class, especially in advance of the lecture, and/or to receive paper copies of the contents of the board printed with double line spacing and wide margins at the beginning of class? In that case, both class time and students' notes could be better focused on questions, mistakes, and generally material of more substance than memorization.
Is there an assumption (or maybe an understanding informed by experience) that students just won't do such transcription (and thus not memorize the facts they need to) if they're not prompted to do so in class?
I wonder if this is due to an extension of early childhood teaching techniques that has been extended to later years?
In current child development theories and books, it is taught that young children lack in "precausal thinking"/"transductive reasoning". Where a child does not understand things like "put on your jacket, it is cold outside" or "bring an umbrella, it will rain later".
It is said it is better to teach them "backwards" - let them feel that it is cold outside (problem) then tell them to put on a jacket (solution). But this type of reasoning reverses as we grow and develop.
Photograph the board?
Definitely a better move nowadays! Wasn't an option for me before college, though.
For this to be a valid pedagogical technique it has to be applied properly for the intended student. As described in the linked article for middle elementary aged students it seems effective. I can easily imagine my own middle elementary aged child responding well to it.
Your experience however seems to be either in secondary or collegiate classrooms and I can easily see where this approach there would often be problematic. That said if an instructor is trying to get students to engage in critical thinking about why something works then an intentional mistake could be educational. You can copy code from stack overflow all day long but it’s going to work a lot better if you can actually analyze it and understand what’s happening.
Ideally, you should only work at learning something if you don't know it. Repetition wastes a lot of time to get that guarantee, but it would be much more efficient to just recognize where you're weak and work at that. It's a rather lazy meta-learning strategy to just throw spaghetti at the wall until everything sticks.
I think it's fine if someone chooses to learn this way, but it's unfair to expect all the other students to waste their time---I really hated when math teachers assigned 30 problems of homework, because I didn't need 30 of the same problem to know how to solve it, and almost no one does. Really, you only need repetition for a small percent of the content, it's just what "clicks" for each person is different.
I appreciated what my high school chemistry teacher did instead: all problem sets were optional, but there were recommended problems. Then, we had tests every two weeks which we were allowed to retake, but only once we solved the problems. That way, we quickly see if we're missing any knowledge and are forced to learn it for a good grade.
I think it works well for the early grades with simple problems like 5x5=24 to get young kids interested or your vs you’re
But anything beyond that anything multi step is just not useful - you talk about taking notes young kids are not taking notes
> I'm just trying to absorb everything
My realization on this: teachers were a really bad fit for me. Having a human trying to make it palatable to me in real time in their own words was just not great. At some point I stopped listening in class nor taking notes and just read the manual and other related books on my own, at my own pace (often during class), and it worked a hundred times better.
There's still the issue of having to be in the classroom, which meant doing that whole learning process ahead of time to be able to defocus and still somewhat react to questions and activities going on in the classroom.
If you're just writing down what the teacher wrote to memorize later, you're not learning the math properly. You should be deriving the solution at least one step ahead of the teacher. Occasionally, there will be a clever insight where you might have to wait for the teacher to tell you that step, but those should be the minority. Once you get the insight, you should be jumping ahead again.
It's the same in work meetings. If you're blindly absorbing what the presenter is saying, you're not a helpful participant. You should be deriving your own solutions and questioning differences between your solution and the presenter's when they arise. Sometimes, companies pay for improv classes for their employees to help them anticipate and react in meetings, but if you're already practiced in classroom learning, that's redundant.
> I don't know enough to separate the wheat from the chaff, and still barely understand what I'm doing. Many times one can succeed by blindly following a process without understanding, and over time that understanding arrives, aided by repetition and application of the examples. > > Folks learn differently with different ways. This was not an effective teaching technique for me.
I think that's kind of the point. Everyone can learn using the method you describe (it's mainly how I go about it), but everyone can also learn the "proper" way. It just requires more commitment and belief in yourself upfront.
Agreed - I had a teacher that would do this in high school physics from time to time and I found it be a distraction more than anything - I'm trying to follow what's on the board and then I have to throw that away and start trying to figure it out from the top.
This is only slightly related, but if you don't understand, what value do your notes actually have? Or is this an environment with no lecture recordings, digital presentations or notes shared with the class..? I ask out of a genuine curiosity, since I know many people benefit from live note taking. I can only imagine notes being useful if they constituted a synthesis of the teacher's guidance.
I had the same curiosity. Every time I've tried meticulous note taking it turned in to this thing where now I've given myself permission to do something mechanical now and put off the hard thinking until later. And then when I tried to do it later, the moment for asking for clarification had passed.
Office hours are useful to ask for clarification, but the mere act of writing it down by hand helps commit it to memory.
I think it works significantly better in a class of third graders. Among other differences, they usually aren't taking notes yet.
This is an engagement boosting technique that is popular on social media too, a.k.a. comment baiting. It was commonly used in 2003 on TikTok.
The only winning move … is not to play. Strange game.
I started to question you on the year there… you got me
[dead]
If I recall correctly, Sal Khan from Khan Academy fame has suggested homework and school work should be flipped—video lessons at home and student and teacher interaction on the math problems at school. This has some of that flavor.
This is how my calculus class worked out a few years ago.
It was a purely online course, and the instructor was at a campus I never visited. (We were surprised to learn that we'd need to commute there for the final exam, but I worked out an alternate plan.)
The course materials were all Pearson-provided and hosted on Canvas, so there were video lectures, and the quizzes and tests were automated. Our instructor was just there to keep the backend together, and provide a credentialed face.
I, however, struggled mightily, and so I found the tutoring center, and it was fantastic. It was bustling in the daytime; it had computers we could log into or desks without them. Then the tutors circulated, and we could plug through coursework and raise a flag when we had questions.
It was one instance of a vast support network that is too often left untapped by students, who just aren't aware of what's available, or don't care and resort to cheating, or have a study group where they all sort of muddle through.
Practical problem...
Kids won't do that. And there's a lot of classes there.
Though indo agree with his sentiment. Most college lectures are useless and easily replaced with a video. I found my best math professor had us do homework and then the beginning of every class I'd going over it and working out all our mistakes. I felt that he could teach calculus to a monkey he was so effective.
I had a teacher that did this circa 2013 before it was en vogue.
There’s some nuance in getting the right balance of interaction but it definitely works.
While this approach can engage some students, it risks confusing others and potentially eroding trust. A balanced method might involve planned "mistakes" alongside clear, accurate instruction.
To be clear, this appears to be a work of fiction?
Are people taking this to be a real life account, and if so whats the basis for that. I'm not seeing anything on this blog to indicate otherwise.
That’s my read on it. Far too tidy, pitched to make you feel just so. If it’s real, so many details are missing that it may as well not be.
Do this too often and you risk losing the trust of your students, however.
> It’s about finding someone who’s not ashamed to fail in front of you—and then figuring out the answers together.
Students aren't going to lose trust in their teacher over mistakes. Establishing core concepts while tripping over details breeds humility for correction when real mistakes are made by the teacher and helps show students that it's okay to make mistakes. This brings more attention to the value of double-checking one's work and the opportunities for correction give purpose to their learning.
Depends on how many mistakes they make each lecture. I had one math teacher in high school that our whole class basically gave up on because he was useless. The only way for us to actually get at the material was read the textbook outside of class and explain it to each other.
Only if you let the mistake go unmentioned. I do a version of this where I glibly include a mistake, like:
I actually talk through the last line. Almost no one ever questions it. I then ask students to look at that last line again, and ask them if an address has an address, and if so, what does that mean, could it ever be useful?I see what the mistake is! You are using some sort of gibberish instead of using JavaScript and naming your variables with clear and verbose intent.
If this is the lesson where you're introducing pointers to students, you're probably doing them a disservice. Reminds me of my engineering professors who were bored with the material, so they dove straight into difficult problems.
I’d be worried administration thought I had dementia and would be removed.
I read somewhere about a teacher who told his students at the start of each lecture that ONE thing would be wrong.
It seem like Cunningham's Law https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law also works in real life.
I immediately thought of this substitute teacher who was mispronouncing all of the students names during row call: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DoNLC1UALSI
A bit tangential but, when a teacher asks if anyone knows x, he/she doesn't want the nerd wiseguy who actually knows to answer, he wants someone who is unsure to answer so that everyone can participate in the learning experience.
When a teacher does that every class, multiple times a class, it becomes agonizingly boring for the students who actually understand what is going on. The long silences while no one is willing to raise their hand are painful and irritating. That kind of thing is exactly what pushes the 'nerd' to act the part of the 'wiseguy', sighing as he raises his hand, blurting an answer out out-of-turn, etc. It's also a good way to encourage your smartest students to completely disengage and sleep through class.
The more the class consists of exercises like this, the more it feels like a waste of the more advanced students' time and the greater the sense of distance it creates between the more advanced students and the ones who are slower or more behind.
You'd be better off just putting the more middling, slower or less consistent students in the hotseat than asking if 'anyone' knows the answer, and then whenever their answer has a problem asking if anyone can rephrase or reframe the thing just taught in a way that makes more sense to the unsure student, then ask the student who answered earlier if they're satisfied with that answer or if it's not quite rock solid for them. That way, the more advanced students can at least still participate in moving the discussion forward in a non-antagonistic way (if you are ruthless about prohibiting mockery of incorrect or partial answers).
Same thing if you ask questions that have multiple somewhat obvious answers but only accept one oral answer per student (maybe take additional written answers for credit as homework or a bonus or just some kind of feedback, to make it easier to adhere to that rule). Then your more eager students are more opening up the floor for more reluctant students than just preempting them.
There is a written version of this called "cloze sentences".
One of my teachers would distribute cloze notes before each lecture. Then it was up to follow along, and fill in the blanks. Or, jump ahead if we felt confident, without the classroom atmosphere of "let's see who knows this first!"
She also used humorous props and catch-phrases. Introduce the prop, explain its meaning, return to the prop and repeat the catch phrase, and pretty soon, the whole class is chanting along with it.
It was an adult class, an introduction to a complex and philosophical topic, and we ran through it in a few weeks. She did not omit Powerpoints with animations.
That sounds like a really, really fun class with an enthusiastic teacher. I'd never heard of that kind of thing. Thanks not just for the story but also sharing the name of the technique! It definitely sounds like it allows flexible pacing in the same class that could help a teacher to accommodate different students well.
When the nerd wiseguy answers anyway, he/she doesn't actually want to disrupt the teacher's flow, he/she finds the ten seconds of complete silence awkward and wants to move on to the next thing.
Seriously, it was so annoying to have to participate in the charade. I put a paperback in my pencil case, but some teachers took it personally if I read during class, and it's absolute torture to have to listen to a disengaged group stumble through an answer to a question like this with your full attention on the front of the class. As an adult nobody tries to teach you using question and answer for anything that requires more time than a first aid certificate because they know damn well that you'll leave and/or pull out your phone.
Cunningham's Law: "the best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question, it's to post the wrong answer"
A professor once taught me: If you want your presentation to be remembered, don't make it too perfect. Add some (obvious) errors, mispellings etc. to keep the audience awake.
I teach math to smart nerdy high schoolers. I do this. It's great! Fun for everyone :)
Great article.
It reminds me of another anecdote, regarding a university professor who told his students that he would deliberately include one falsehood in each lecture, and the students were charged with listening carefully and identifying the 'mistake' in each class.
For the very last class in the course, the professor trolled his students by not including any mistake.
Kai Chang's "Dr. K" in economics (2008)
https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/my-favorite-liahtml - https://zenmoments.org/my-favorite-liar/
"let me explain how I teach. Between today until the class right before finals, it is my intention to work into each of my lectures … one lie."
Ah, that must have been it. Thanks for the link!
Reminds me of https://xkcd.com/386/
I have worked as a teacher. I have tried this. This doesn't work. Period.
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