Also, birds continue to annoy me

[sniffnoy]

UNLOCKED May 24 2017

Why does it seem that half my students don't seem to be able to get out their textbooks and look up what "bifurcation point" actually *means* before attempting to answer a question that asks them to find one?

Comments

[pklemica]

They are paying all this money to go to college, *and* you expect them to put in some modicum of effort?!? No, no... you are the teacher, you are supposed to do all the hard work for them, and by attending lecture - or, maybe by not attending lecture but at least being enrolled in the class - knowledge is supposed to wash over them and permeate, like so many waves to the sand of a beach. It's a beautiful metaphor so it must be true! *Be* the ocean, Harry!!!


My favourite thing so far about the class I am currently grading for - a basic logic and probability course - is that any time they do not know why something happens, it's obviously because of DeMorgan's Law. It's like magic! Actually, my favourite might be when they say something is true because of the Fallacy of the Inverse :P They have already memorized the phrase *and* a formula - why should they have to think about what the words *mean*?!

My secret plan when I get in front of my own classroom is to teach error-checking alongside everything else. I *know* more of these students know that probability is between 0 and 1 (or 0% and 100%) than the number of answers over that I get each week.

[sniffnoy.livejournal.com]

Haha, I'm basically just a TA for this class, so I never did teach them about bifurcation points, presumably the professor did. Never came up in any of our review sessions either.

Logic and probability seems a strange combination. I mean, philosophically they're connected via Bayes's Theorem and such, but in terms of the actual mathematics? I mean I guess if you can't do basic logic you can't do probability, but if you can't do basic logic you can't do any math, so... (I mean, to hell with axiomatizations; for practical matters all you need is truth tables. Or, forget those and just have, y'know, an appreciation of what words actually mean. And a good understanding of the concept of vacuous truth. Right?)

Attempting to use a fallacy as a justification is pretty boggling. (Though I suppose someone might say something like that when studying psychology, but then they'd just be using the term as shorthand for the tendency to that fallacy, not the fallacy itself.)

With you on the error checking. Last semester they had me teaching their "precalculus" course, and after noticing a bunch of errors that could have been prevented by such, I wanted to do something like that, but the whole thing was so tightly-scheduled I really didn't have a chance. Did a bit during the review session for the first exam but it didn't seem to much sink in, IIRC. Of course given the sort of thing we're talking about here, I didn't call it "error checking" but "sanity checking". Wonder if that affected their reception of it. :P

I have to say I can't really understand how people manage to do much of anything without such sanity checks. I imagine a lot of it comes from not having an intuitive feel for the material yet, in that once you do, you'll notice such an error quickly, but in general this is a habit that shouldn't be specific to any particular discipline or to... well, much of anyone, really. I recognize that the skill is not native, but I still have to wonder "How did these people not pick this up?" Which of course means that what we should actually be asking is "How did others do so?", but actually answering that sounds hard and not something I'd actually much like to investigate. :P

Still, what I'm used to seeing are things like dimensions that don't match up, or people equating vectors to matrices or such - that anyone would turn in a probability not in [0,1] is very surprising to me, as I would expect people *would* have a prior intuitive notion of what probability means, even if not how to work with it (we're pretty bad at that, I know).