A reminder to myself, sharing for whoever needs to hear it:
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@inthehands and I really wanna hammer in home that's this lecturer is one of the best in the faculty in the sense that he actually cared about us and didn't see us as a burden. I'll let you imagination paint a picture to how the rest of the faculty members were
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@engravecavedave oof
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young man yells at the cloudreplied to CaveDave last edited by
@engravecavedave @inthehands Assuming the "badness" of each year of students follows a normal bell-curve distribution, "this year of students is particularly bad" *is* a statement that can be true. However, I don't think the solution is to shrug and say "oh well, what can ya do, these kids just suck."
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Paul Cantrellreplied to young man yells at the cloud last edited by
@bamboombibbitybop @engravecavedave
Ask me about the 2020-2021 school year -
Framing it with an analogy:
I think for students, the syllabus feels a lot like the EULA for the course.
Do •you• read and absorb every EULA software throws in your face? Do you even scroll through it? (And of course some few of you can honestly answer “yes,” but that doesn’t mean that EULAs constitute good communication, much less meaningful consent.)
True, a syllabus isn’t written in legalese, but for students the experience is more similar to an EULA than we profs like to admit.
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@inthehands Our local school district has instituted a fairly aggressive policy on retakes and the dialog in local parent forums is just an astonishing wall of folks telling on themselves that way. Whenever I interact with them with my stock “are we doing better for the student long-term by working towards mastery of the subject or by issuing grades to assess knowledge at a specific point in time?” I get back various sputtering about consequences and rewards for high achievers.
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@donw
I am completely unsurprised by all of this. -
@inthehands perhaps one issue with the syllabus for students is that to absorb the syllabus fully often takes knowing the subject of the course already - knowing the jargon and terms and context, recognizing the works cited or the issues noted as being discussed.
But if the students had that knowledge they often wouldn’t be in the class. Upper level students (and grad students) may more often have the context to make sense of it snd use it for insights into the professor’s focus and goals
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Michael Dekkerreplied to Paul Cantrell last edited by
@inthehands with all due respect to Tufte, the cognitive style of powerpoint breaks up a wall of text into digestible chunks, often adding memorable images that function as memory aids. A slide show is a great application for syllabi.
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Paul Cantrellreplied to Michael Dekker last edited by
@dekk
Maybe? I feel like a well-organized syllabus with basic structural attention — good organization, good headings, visual anchor points — is going to serve as a better reference than a slide deck. And ultimately I feel like a syllabus should work primarily as a situational reference, not a linear read.