Topic: Bang Your Head on Your Desk - the thread of teaching despair!

[mythbuster]

I tried it with something really non-academic: Kermit the Frog. I get stuck in a loop between fiction, non-fiction and document. Worked like a charm with Louis Pasteur though.

[Cheerful]

The first major assignment for one of my classes (graduate level) is due today. I've been fielding emails over the last 48 hours (the task requires an integration of several skills, so I expect questions).  However, last night, I received an email that essentially asked if I was grading on accuracy.  Umm, yes?

Grading on accuracy?  During a pandemic?  That's mean!

Graduate level?  Wow.

[brixton]

The first major assignment for one of my classes (graduate level) is due today. I've been fielding emails over the last 48 hours (the task requires an integration of several skills, so I expect questions).  However, last night, I received an email that essentially asked if I was grading on accuracy.  Umm, yes?

Grading on accuracy?  During a pandemic?  That's mean!

Graduate level?  Wow.

I usually put off accuracy till at least the end of the term.. :-)

[Parasaurolophus]

I tried it with something really non-academic: Kermit the Frog. I get stuck in a loop between fiction, non-fiction and document. Worked like a charm with Louis Pasteur though.

Hehe

I suppose 3% of entries is actually quite a lot of entries.

[Charlotte]

Not entirely a bang, because I actually found this really funny, although I was poleaxed for a second when it happened:

Last week was the first week of my intro to metaphysics and epistemology, and the topic was 'What is philosophy?'. Among other things, I introduced students (asynchronously) to the Wikipedia philosophy game ([urlhttps://en.wikipedia.org/.../Wikipedia:Getting_to_Philosophy]you know the one[/url]). In their weekly quiz, I had them play two rounds of the game for pre-selected Wikipedia pages.

In today's live Q&A, the first question was: "I don't get it. How do I download the game?"

This is the first I've heard of this game. How interesting. I did manage to get there, but I had to skip the links about pronunciation and so on. There was a bit of a loop in which an IPA pronunciation link sent me to the IPA page which sent me to linguistics over and over again. It's like an emergent wiki version of the Collatz conjecture. I wonder if it's an accident that this result leads to an entry about knowledge in a wiki that is about storing knowledge. If there were a different wiki of a comparable complexiity--such as TV Tropes---would all paths end up leading to the entry for 'television' or something? Or is it an accident, and if Wikipedia were regrown from scratch we'd find that all paths end up leading to some similarly well-linked article, like 'language' or 'biology' or something, and it's just an accident that philosophy specifically ends up the target in this universe?

Yeah, you have to click on the first link that's not a footnote, in italics, or in brackets. Pronunciation stuff is typically in brackets.

The explanation I've seen is twofold. Partly, it's because philosophy is more or less the ur-discipline for most of the academy, and its subject matter is highly general and highly fundamental stuff, so there's always something philosophical in the vicinity of any subject.

More importantly, it's just got to do with Wikipedia's architecture. I don't remember how it's structured, but it's something to the effect that the structure prioritizes as top-level content the kinds of very general subject pages that are the bread and butter of philosophy (like 'knowledge' or 'logic', etc.). (Ironically, the logic page sends you on an infinite loop now. It didn't used to.)

There's another neat structural feature, although I can't find the confirmation of it any more: from any given wikipedia page, you can get to philosophy (or maybe it's a topic in philosophy?) within something like seven clicks (not nevessarily by clicking on the first link each time, though).

I found this interesting video on it in case anyone else is interested:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0418hfr

[Caracal]

The first major assignment for one of my classes (graduate level) is due today. I've been fielding emails over the last 48 hours (the task requires an integration of several skills, so I expect questions).  However, last night, I received an email that essentially asked if I was grading on accuracy.  Umm, yes?

Grading on accuracy?  During a pandemic?  That's mean!

Graduate level?  Wow.

To be fair, there are things I don't grade on accuracy, like discussion posts. I just grade them on whether the student appears to have done the reading. If they seem like they have, but have misunderstood it, that's still full credit.

[OneMoreYear]

The first major assignment for one of my classes (graduate level) is due today. I've been fielding emails over the last 48 hours (the task requires an integration of several skills, so I expect questions).  However, last night, I received an email that essentially asked if I was grading on accuracy.  Umm, yes?

Grading on accuracy?  During a pandemic?  That's mean!

Graduate level?  Wow.

To be fair, there are things I don't grade on accuracy, like discussion posts. I just grade them on whether the student appears to have done the reading. If they seem like they have, but have misunderstood it, that's still full credit.

Yes, I can appreciate that. I have a couple classes with assignments like that--journal entries, mini reading responses, weekly application questions--as long as it's good faith effort, you are generally going to get full credit; it's a minimal part of the grade total. This is not that assignment. It's worth 10% of the grade, has serious scaffolding, and there are objectively correct/incorrect answers.  I've just never had a grad student ask me if accuracy mattered before, especially in this class. But, remote teaching is a new game, maybe I wasn't as explicit as usual. I answered the question as non-snarkily as possible.

I'm also getting questions (again grad level) about why I don't have participation credit in my classes.  Umm, because coming to class prepared and being actively engaged in the class is expected.  Again, I know there are course/discipline differences and I've got a rep as a hard-a**, but I just can't believe that most grad courses in this Basketweaving subfield are assigning participation points.

[the_geneticist]

I have participation points in my one graduate seminar course I teach.  I rationalize it as the "carrot and stick" model of rewards.  Graduate students ought to attend class, stay actively engaged, and ask thoughtful questions.  Most of them are good participants.  But bad behavior is contagious.  One person trying to "multitask" by answering emails/texting/whatever leads to more folks being disengaged. 
I'm really worried that teaching the class online will only make this worse . . . .

[OneMoreYear]

I have participation points in my one graduate seminar course I teach.  I rationalize it as the "carrot and stick" model of rewards.  Graduate students ought to attend class, stay actively engaged, and ask thoughtful questions.  Most of them are good participants.  But bad behavior is contagious.  One person trying to "multitask" by answering emails/texting/whatever leads to more folks being disengaged. 
I'm really worried that teaching the class online will only make this worse . . . .

OK, well maybe I need to rethink. Thanks for the perspective.
I will say that some of my classes have actually been more participatory/engaged online (even the dreaded methods class) because they are using the chat feature to ask questions/given examples/make comments/send me cat emojis in response to my attempts at jokes.  They are also using the break-out rooms effectively, especially if there is a task to complete. I would even be willing to continue online for some of my classes after we are cleared to go back to in-person, except for the one class that has no business being taught online, but we are doing it anyway.

[evil_physics_witchcraft]

I honestly wish I could tell students how they are wasting my time and their time when they cheat. Student copies and pastes from multiple websites. So, now I have to do paperwork and waste my time writing this crap up. Student wasted hu's time by copying and hoping that I wouldn't notice.

[teach_write_research]

I have a student who did well on the exam but does none of the chapter activities and rarely attends our synchronous class meetings. This is a weird profile so I'm pondering what direction I want to go with it. Have you seen this and what did you do to follow-up?

• It's a small class at a small college. We've communicated and I know they're having a hard time with remote learning. I've already notified support people that the student is off track.
• I checked and you could pay $50 (on sale!) for the textbook test bank. So that's a temptation. The student's essay answer though doesn't match the test bank and isn't lifted from the textbook (exam is open book open note with more than enough time).
• I've considered that maybe they had someone else take the exam for them. We don't have remote proctoring. I use the activities and participation in the meetings to confirm that the real students are making progress. I don't have that data for this student.
• Maybe they did the activities but couldn't figure out how to submit them through the phone app.
• Maybe they are repeating the class and used old materials. Technically that's cheating too because I did not teach the Spring class.The chapter activities and participation (synchronously or asynchronous options) are also 50% of the grade so they're currently failing.
• They got lucky.
• Maybe the chapter activities are actually distractions and I just overloaded and confused the other students. Ha-ha

Thanks for your thoughts

[Parasaurolophus]

I honestly wish I could tell students how they are wasting my time and their time when they cheat. Student copies and pastes from multiple websites. So, now I have to do paperwork and waste my time writing this crap up. Student wasted hu's time by copying and hoping that I wouldn't notice.

I honestly wish I could tell students how they are wasting my time and their time when they cheat. Student copies and pastes from multiple websites. So, now I have to do paperwork and waste my time writing this crap up. Student wasted hu's time by copying and hoping that I wouldn't notice.

I do explicitly tell them that. I'm not sure it registers with the ones who need to hear it.

I also tell them that if they put as much effort into following the instructions and writing a paper as they did into covering up the cheating, they'd do better (and probably even get a bare pass, at least in some cases!). But that, too, goes largely unheard in the relevant quarters.

[polly_mer]

I tried it with something really non-academic: Kermit the Frog. I get stuck in a loop between fiction, non-fiction and document. Worked like a charm with Louis Pasteur though.

Hehe

I suppose 3% of entries is actually quite a lot of entries.

Yes, 3% of 6M English articles is 180 000.

By clicking on the first link in the Wikipedia article, I did get to philosophy eventually for nearly everything I tried this week.  However, the average was about 30 clicks. 

There's no logical reason I would have clicked on most of the first links that get quickly to philosophy because they were mostly big, broad categories like information, knowledge, science, or mathematics.  The more an article was written like an old-school encyclopedia article, the more likely that the first link was one of the big, broad categories that no one should need to look up instead of being something possibly new or hardly recognized that is worth clicking to learn more.

[Parasaurolophus]

In today's help session, a student asked for help figuring out where the brackets go when we translate sentences from English to our formal language. I explained that they're used to disambiguate, and showed them how to do it. I then figured: what the hell, let's do a really tough one. So I came up with an inordinately complex sentence in English on the fly, and proceeded to show the class how to translate it, with all my tips and tricks. This took... ages. I must have spent at least ten minutes on it.

Only to discover, at the end, that it wasn't well-formed in English to begin with because it was missing an entire disjunct.


D'oh! *headdesk*

[kaysixteen]

Para, do you mind sharing with us the model English sentence you came up with, and why you think it was a malformed English one?  I am not sure a sentence missing a 'disjunct', if we are using the term correctly, is necessarily a malformed sentence, but I would be interested in your sentence, and why you think it was badly formed?   Also, for extra emphasis, the French translation you offered?