tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7992064785578189137.post8720046647705763..comments2023-06-12T08:08:03.452-07:00Comments on michael nagle's blog: my own experiences learning: part 2, TAing at MIT.Michael Naglehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17968368143277245108noreply@blogger.comBlogger7125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7992064785578189137.post-58996499316963802372008-12-17T19:15:00.000-08:002008-12-17T19:15:00.000-08:00i found your emphasis on "intuition" in the learni...i found your emphasis on "intuition" in the learning process interesting. i think next quarter, instead of simply laying out the rules -- why is something italicized vs. quoted, where do commas/quote marks belong -- i will try to get the students to explain (or at least guess at) the logic behind said rules.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7992064785578189137.post-52179044379607925172008-12-10T08:16:00.000-08:002008-12-10T08:16:00.000-08:00Modeling without calc. Basically we do linear, exp...Modeling without calc. Basically we do linear, exponential, log, power, and logistic regressions of data. Even when the data doesn't fit, I've had students come up with good ideas. One of my students really hates cigarettes, so his project was writing a letter to get cigarettes sales banned in gas stations. He looked at the historical data for how many cigarettes are smoked in the US. These regressions don't fit that data, but he broke it into pieces that did. WWII had pretty close to exponential growth, and currently we have linear decline. The other thing we do is "smoothing techniques" (if we have enough data points). I found data from the glacial monitoring service (after the students nominated it as a topic) about glacial ice melt. That data bounces around a lot, so we smoothed it. As for "does the question speak to you", I don't know. They chose their individual topics before they started looking for data on the topics. I did have one student change topics after he couldn't find data. For the most part, students chose topics that seemed pretty important to them. The turkey hunter in my class modeled turkey population in WI and how many permits could be issued to maintain the population (which one could make more complicated with a harvesting model, but that's not the point). He was totally chuffed at what he'd done, and I'm pretty confident when he goes home for Christmas break, he'll be telling all the hunters in his family about his project. <BR/><BR/>I learned a lot of stuff "supervising" these projects. One of my students thinks land trusts are going to save the planet, so when they chose their topics, he chose land trusts. I didn't even know what a land trust is. <BR/><BR/>Another student had her home flooded last spring, and she chose that as her topic. (I didn't see how that was going to work at the beginning either). Flooding in Waldo WI? Anyhow, she ended up modeling the age that dams fail at, and comparing it to the age of the dam in her town. (75% of dams have failed by the time they get to be as old as the dam in her town). <BR/><BR/>As for next semester's students choosing their grading scheme, I think I'll prompt them with some alternative ideas. The other thing I'm concerned about is getting a class with a divided opinion (which happened to me this semester when I let the class choose when they get tested). Cross that bridge later.Manda Riehlhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12938705490286397795noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7992064785578189137.post-6451146473061295382008-12-08T21:14:00.000-08:002008-12-08T21:14:00.000-08:00@Manda:"I had already decided that next semester I...@Manda:<BR/><BR/>"I had already decided that next semester I was going to have my students decide what their grade would be based on instead of having it written in the syllabus on the first day, but what you said about students having say in their education made me think about it again. It will be interesting to see if they think attendance, homework, participation, exams, projects, etc, is what they want to be graded on. I also wonder if it will only be a token gesture because they might try to replicate what they're already used to."<BR/><BR/>I think that without some discussion structure or clear prompting, you will just get a rehash of traditional grading. I see this all the time with kids -- when given freedom, and then asked what they want to do with it, they often default to a slight modification of the normal structure: because they can't think of anything different, and there's heavy, heavy conditioning you're working against. <BR/><BR/>I think you will either need to have a discussion that really points at grades as feedback or prompt with some alternative models. I'd be curious to see if my prediction is right (meaning whatever you do, tell me!)<BR/><BR/>Derrick Jensen talked about a cool grading scheme in _Walking On Water_. It was a creative writing workshop, and he wanted people to write honestly and about themselves as a starting place (everyone's got a story.) He felt grading was beyond obnoxious ("This was a heartfelt, touching story about your struggle with heroin, but you had lots of spelling mistakes and used poor syntax throughout: C.) and so developed a system where everytime someone turned in a piece of writing, rewrote it, or came in to discuss it with him, they got a check mark. I don't remember the details, but basically it was an effort based system, rather than merely reflecting pre-existing aptitude for material (as is often the case with grading.)<BR/><BR/>and re: your environmental class... what would you model without calc about the environment? (Does that question speak to you or does it just fit your constraints well?) Jensen talks about how really, students could be doing anything, including having sex, in the time they come to lecture. So if a student shows up, it should be worth it. I really like that analogy.Michael Naglehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17968368143277245108noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7992064785578189137.post-15518088619020389162008-12-08T18:14:00.000-08:002008-12-08T18:14:00.000-08:00Hi Nagle,I think this is interesting, because I ha...Hi Nagle,<BR/><BR/>I think this is interesting, because I had a similar experience in 18.03 (the differential equations course that comes after 18.02). I hated lecture, which was taught for engineers, and the course as a whole seemed like a bag full of procedures to memorize. It also turned out that once I started teaching calculus I realized I hadn't understood it at all, I could just DO it, but that's a separate issue.<BR/><BR/>I had already decided that next semester I was going to have my students decide what their grade would be based on instead of having it written in the syllabus on the first day, but what you said about students having say in their education made me think about it again. It will be interesting to see if they think attendance, homework, participation, exams, projects, etc, is what they want to be graded on. I also wonder if it will only be a token gesture because they might try to replicate what they're already used to.<BR/><BR/>Also as a professor this semester, I can say that my very favorite two hours a week are the two hours I spend with my research students. Since they are not PhD students, they are only there because they like math, and we follow our intuition and curiosity each time given the framework of the year-long topic. Its pretty awesome, we've proved several theorems that I would not have anticipated, and I come out of our meetings feeling "Math is so COOL." <BR/><BR/>I've been trying to replicate some of that in my Environmental Math class (which is a precalc modeling class of humanities majors) by doing some guided discovery stuff, but it has been pretty hard for me to accomodate different ability levels (with 36 students in the class) since I use heterogenous groups. It's been pretty hard since some of my students don't understand that multiplication distributes over addition, and others of my students have strong manipulation skills and intuition for applications. One way I tried to get around this was to have them do individual projects on whatever issue they care about, find data on it, and model the data. I had hoped that the stronger students would end up taking their projects further than the weaker students, but for the most part that didn't happen. <BR/><BR/>I have no idea what this post is about. I just read yours and decided to tell you about how my teaching is going this semester. Come visit anytime Nagle!Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7992064785578189137.post-14179537797575251962008-11-24T09:47:00.000-08:002008-11-24T09:47:00.000-08:00I really enjoyed this entry in your blog - a clear...I really enjoyed this entry in your blog - a clear and interesting read. I have some friends who've had similar experiences in very different contexts, but the general drift and their conclusions are very similar to yours.<BR/><BR/>While reading it I kept thinking about emergence. Usually I think of emergence when considering interesting stuff like weather patterns, flocks of birds, slime molds etc. - emergent phenomena that exist on a medium of many distinct but similar individual constituents. But it seems like emergence could apply in the case of the class you were TAing.<BR/><BR/>In a sense the class itself, multivariate calculus, has taken on a life of its own, independent of all of its participants. As you point out, nobody likes the class and nobody is particularly well served by it. For the teacher and the students it is at best an intellectual chore divorced from any useful context - a waste of time - and at worst harmful in that it often confirms the student's self doubt and insecurity. <BR/><BR/>So here we have multivariate calculus - a shared experience / activity that emerges out of the interactions of the people who participate. Like a flock of birds it persists across time even though its constituent members change. Birds come and go, are eaten and born, the flock lands and disbands for a while when it arrives at its destination and next season starts out again with some different members. The flock persists. Students add and drop, skip class, pass and fail, go on Summer vacation, but the multivariate calculus class persists. The main difference is that the structure of the emergent property we call 'flock' actually helps the members on which it is based. Otherwise they wouldn't participate.<BR/><BR/>I think a lot of educational structures persist in this way even though they don't really serve the people who participate in them. A lot of my experience in high school was like this, albeit less challenging. It begs the question of how one reforms a structure like this. As a bird, how does one convince the rest of the flock that this way of flocking sucks and does violence to its birds, and therefore needs to be changed?Lightninhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06536469679028585610noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7992064785578189137.post-46521953208824855072008-11-23T00:28:00.000-08:002008-11-23T00:28:00.000-08:00This is definitely my experience in many classes a...This is definitely my experience in many classes at MIT; particularly intro classes. My hall (East Campus, 3E) is luckily free from bibles, and several at least have realized they should skip class and attend recitation, but I'm pretty sure this is a minority situation. <BR/><BR/>Ways around this -- the degree of the problem varies highly by department. It's likely that if you like course blah1 you also like some course blah2 almost as much, and I think it's worth switching departments for this reason alone. (In particular, math does a particularly good job of this for its actual students .. you will not find these problems in 18.701, 18.901, etc.) Smaller departments are generally better than larger ones. <BR/><BR/>Also, it definitely gets better the 'higher' you go, if only because you have more flexibility in the classes you take and professors are teaching material they themselves are interested in. <BR/><BR/>Incidentally, outside of 3-4 departments, Harvard is free from most of these problems. Grades are not taken overly seriously by either students or professors. Professors completely write their own course material and problem sets; it would be as weird for a professor to use someone else's course as it would be to wear someone else's clothes. Professors also get bored of the classes they teach every 3-4th time and stop offering it, which means that the course material naturally stays up to date with the field. Many math and cs classes have one recitation set aside for optional advanced material. Pretty much all humanities courses have as much optional reading as course-related reading. No requirements are enforced, so you don't have the winner of the International Computing Olympiad forced to take 6.01, 6.02, etc. to graduate course 6. Interestingly, teaching is far more devalued at Harvard than at MIT, so this environment has come out of freedom given to professors, not higher pay or social reward for teaching. Also, a common misconception at MIT is that Harvard students work less or that the classes are less hard; outside of 3-4 departments it is probably actually the opposite.<BR/><BR/>On the plus side for MIT, there is no better learning environment than the Edgerton center, D-lab, MITERS, several living groups, 6.270, 6.370, MASLAB, pretty much everything IAP, SIPB, the PSC, UROPS .. I'm sure the list could go on. The GIRs are pretty much the worst MIT has to offer, and if seen as MIT's rock bottom they aren't so bad.Rishihttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10571277053559826405noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7992064785578189137.post-76450481970977019042008-11-22T13:01:00.000-08:002008-11-22T13:01:00.000-08:00Well that was nice to hear outloud and in such an ...Well that was nice to hear outloud and in such an organized way. Unfortunately the story isn't new. It's almost archetypal for anyone who went through an engineering curriculum (or similarly structured science curriculum). That’s really my main point: It’s not an anomaly… It’s actually the way it’s set up. I’ll blabber on for a couple paragraphs to substantiate, but that’s my only real point.<BR/>The story doesn't mention the people who succeed by the standards of the class who also found the class an inconvenience. I've been on both sides of this. In undergrad I failed my first math exam on multivariable calculus (a.k.a. MATH 2507 at Georgia Tech with Professor Johan G. F. Belinfante, descended himself from Physicists, and a blaze of chalk smoke would fly as he wrote). I considered quitting. Luckily the class had a "drop the lowest exam" policy. So I went forward determined to do whatever it took to get good grades... not learning the material (I have no idea what any of those theorems you mentioned are), but learning how to score well in the that class and future classes. Well in the rest of my time as an undergrad (including that multivariable calculus class) I succeeded according to their measuring system, getting A’s in nearly everything (I took two B’s: one in optics and one in literature). I’ll skip a whole bunch of the details, but I’ll say that at some point I ended up as a grad student at MIT. I wanted to revisit some of the math and electrical engineering skills I had never learned (despite getting A’s and often getting the top score out of 100’s of students). So I started sitting in on some of the undergraduate classes I had never understood. I really quickly realized two things: 1) Those classes weren’t teaching me anything about how the concepts worked and 2) I couldn’t keep up with the workload despite already having taken the equivalent class. I’d be willing to bet MIT is harder than Georgia Tech. But I don’t think that was the difference. I think the difference was I was no longer willing to put up with a complete didactic waste of time. I just couldn’t stomach it. So I really do feel that I’ve been on both sides of the grading system: doing good and doing bad. I’ve also been a T.A., and subsequently an adjunct professor teaching my own math classes. In all cases, I found the same basic problems you mention, the biggest symptom of which is: the professor, TA’s, and students don’t want to participate (that’s EVERYONE who is participating!!!). It was only after and outside of classes that I learned anything and helped myself or anyone else: in the community/on the streets, during research, or following my own separate educational agenda. It also took a long time to unlearn the fake methods of learning I had taught myself through a 4-year engineering bootcamp. I’m now a happy graduate student at the Media Lab.jayhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12614081612049802109noreply@blogger.com