I have been a teacher before, and I think certain teaching “motivations” or “encouragements” really tend to have the opposite effect of what is desired:
I think that such advertisements or exhortations as, “My teaching method has a 93% success rate!” and *“9 out of 10 students who took my class became fluent in German in one year!” *are well-intended, but often have the opposite of the desired effect.
First of all, you’re making the 7% (who are not part of the 93% successful group) feel even more miserable and abject when they can’t pull it off. There will always be late bloomers or such who cannot do it, and saying, “93% of my students succeed!” just rubs salt in the wounds of the 7%.
Closely related to this is the teaching “encouragement” of this variety: * “Calculus (or Russian, or biochemistry, or whatever,) is easy. You need to stop thinking of it as hard. It is easy. It is a piece of cake.”*
…those subjects are *not *easy. So not only have you made students feel even more like a loser if they can’t learn it, but you also diminish the success or accomplishment that students would feel if they successfully conquer it.
Seems like a best-of-both-worlds approach is to 1) communicate that the subject is difficult, and that struggles and frustration are the expected norm, but 2) express confidence that the students are sharp and capable enough of tackling a difficult task. That way they feel accomplishment should they pull it off, don’t feel misery if they can’t, and have confidence for the task.
Anyway, my IMHO 2 cents, any thoughts?
I had a job a while back (why yes, it IS the same job I mentioned in the “worst job ever” thread) that had monthly “team/morale-building” meetings that had the obligatory “you can all be replaced” speech.
“Immersion” education, or “Throw them in the deep end and make 'em sink or swim” has some success…but it’s a bummer when you’re one of the ones who sink.
I’m suspicious of “make it into a game” or “let’s all have fun” educational strategies. I don’t remember material clearly that I associate with fun. I study by cramming, not by playing games. But this might be different for different people.
In late grade school I’d get the highest score in the class on something and get a “B”. Because the teacher knew I was smart and should have done even better. (They knew my IQ tests and such.)
So in high school (where teachers didn’t know much details about each student), I played dumb. Just sort of did well enough, etc., so I’d earn a forgiving “A”. This had some implications later on.
But it then happened once again in grad school. Grrr.
If you want to discourage students, grade them down this way. Works really well.
And when a student comes up with a better way to solve problems than in the book, grade them down for that, too. You don’t want to encourage such behavior, do you?
Personally, I’m always honest about how easy or hard a topic is. That said, there are some topics which have a long history of being thought of as hard, but which are actually very easy, once you approach them the right way (complex numbers and tensors both come to mind here). In those cases, I make absolutely sure to tell the students that they’re easy, and take care to show them the right approaches.
Oh, here’s another one I hate that I think fits this thread. Fake it til you make it. Usually actors tell each other this stupid phrase. Which I guess is fine for actors whose ENTIRE CAREER depends on FAKING IT for a living. But when they try to give me that advice for finding an IT job, I want to strangle them. If I fake it, get the job, and fuck it up, MILLIONS of dollars can be lost PER SECOND.
I’m going to cut this post short before I turn this into a pit type post.