Excellent objections, commenters. It sounds like the overall reaction is “this incentivizes grade inflation, likeability, packed classes, and easiness—not quality teaching.” I like waveman’s point that graduate schools, employers, governments, and others have skin in the game as well.
And of course, the changes I’d like to see aren’t going to be achieved by handing out petty cash here and there.
In my local community college, the main things I miss are well-designed curriculums and good teachers. It’s just too spotty. Some teachers are angels, and some are just stinkers. Some curriculums are delightful, and others have gigantic flaws that make a class into 12 weeks of misery.
As a student, becoming intimately familiar with each and every flaw, it’s easy to get the sense that “if this is how bad it is, this teacher/department must just not care about the experience of their students. They’re getting paid the same whether or not they offer a quality class. Students aren’t going to just quit if they get hit with a nasty teacher offering a disorganized class—they’ve already paid, they’d get a W or an F on their transcript, and even if not, where would they go?”
But I need to remember that even though this is kind of true, and even though this is a plausible explanation for why there are flaws in a class, there are other explanations that are more sympathetic:
Some of the teachers may not be the best in the world, but they’re still offering an education with high altruistic and earning potential attached to it at an amazingly low price relative to the long-term benefit. It’s still a pretty good deal, even with all the stress and frustration.
The teachers might have the same frustrations with the school bureaucracy, the curriculum vendors, shitty, dishonest, manipulative students, and their own demanding and stressful lives. They might actually be working hard to offer the best class they can—and it might just be a hard problem to solve.
The systemic problems are extremely difficult and don’t have any lovely solutions. Goodhart’s Law isn’t just a cute explanation for individual problems. It’s the institutional equivalent of gravity. It’s what drags everything down, slows us down, makes things collapse. Oh, we can try to evaluate and incentivize. We can test, we can evaluate, we can complain. But the value of it all is dubious.
So rather than anguishing over the shortcomings, the right response is to appreciate that we’re able to have even so much. For a mere $12,000 or so, I’ve been able to go from a music teacher scraping by to a top student eagerly sought by bioinformatics grad programs that will offer the chance to more than triple my annual salary and do work that I’m very passionate about. That’s the American story right there. It’s not supposed to be easy or smooth. It’s just possible with grit, hard work, and intelligence.
What if I shift from seeing schools as a “staircase to knowledge” to seeing them as “a climbing wall of knowledge?”
A staircase is something that takes effort, but every effort has been made to engineer the experience to be as stable, organized, and safe as possible.
A climbing wall still has safety features—you belay—but the point is to give you a better climbing experience. It’s fundamentally a demanding, self-structured solo activity. It includes a combination of deadlines and grades as a commitment device, and some social supports. But if I take organic chemistry, learning it through a class is just the same as learning it solo, except that the experience has been structured the same way that routes get established on a climbing wall.
Does having that perspective on school change the way I interpret its “shortcomings?”
Definitely.
If schools do as good or better a job than students could have done as autodidacts, then they’ve succeeded. I doubt I could force as much knowledge of chemistry, linear algebra, and molecular biology that I’m acquiring this quarter into my head if I was studying on my own. It would probably be less stressful without the constant pressure, but it would be slower at the very least. If school can ram more knowledge into your head in 12 weeks than you could have shoved in there on your own, then it’s doing its job.
If schools actually hold students back relative to what they could have learned on their own, then they’ve failed. I have taken one or two classes from teachers who truly seemed to add so much stress, with so many negative idiosyncrasies, that I think there’s a good chance I’d have been better off with pure self-study. But even so, it’s very hard to know, since I wouldn’t have had the commitment device of having to earn a grade. And that’s just my experience—maybe others would have done better in the class than on their own.
In the future, I will try to shift to the “climbing wall” perspective. School is here to offer some support and structure. But it’s also here, primarily here, to breathe down my neck and MAKE me learn. It’s here for the same reason the drill instructor is at boot camp. It’s not to make the 100 pushups easy. It’s to make damned sure that I do them and that I can’t give myself an easy pass, push it off til next hour, next day, next week, next year. I’m paying $600 per quarter for a drill instructor.
Supplying the curiosity, the organization, the learning, the success—that’s entirely up to me. School’s a commitment device first and foremost. It’s a place where I can rent educational capital (access to labs, tutoring, grading). It’s also a place where I can purchase the opportunity to form relationships that I can leverage into further opportunities, through letters of recommendation, career advice, introductions, and so on.
The least important thing school has to offer is “teaching” or “education” or “learning.”
Excellent objections, commenters. It sounds like the overall reaction is “this incentivizes grade inflation, likeability, packed classes, and easiness—not quality teaching.” I like waveman’s point that graduate schools, employers, governments, and others have skin in the game as well.
And of course, the changes I’d like to see aren’t going to be achieved by handing out petty cash here and there.
In my local community college, the main things I miss are well-designed curriculums and good teachers. It’s just too spotty. Some teachers are angels, and some are just stinkers. Some curriculums are delightful, and others have gigantic flaws that make a class into 12 weeks of misery.
As a student, becoming intimately familiar with each and every flaw, it’s easy to get the sense that “if this is how bad it is, this teacher/department must just not care about the experience of their students. They’re getting paid the same whether or not they offer a quality class. Students aren’t going to just quit if they get hit with a nasty teacher offering a disorganized class—they’ve already paid, they’d get a W or an F on their transcript, and even if not, where would they go?”
But I need to remember that even though this is kind of true, and even though this is a plausible explanation for why there are flaws in a class, there are other explanations that are more sympathetic:
Some of the teachers may not be the best in the world, but they’re still offering an education with high altruistic and earning potential attached to it at an amazingly low price relative to the long-term benefit. It’s still a pretty good deal, even with all the stress and frustration.
The teachers might have the same frustrations with the school bureaucracy, the curriculum vendors, shitty, dishonest, manipulative students, and their own demanding and stressful lives. They might actually be working hard to offer the best class they can—and it might just be a hard problem to solve.
The systemic problems are extremely difficult and don’t have any lovely solutions. Goodhart’s Law isn’t just a cute explanation for individual problems. It’s the institutional equivalent of gravity. It’s what drags everything down, slows us down, makes things collapse. Oh, we can try to evaluate and incentivize. We can test, we can evaluate, we can complain. But the value of it all is dubious.
So rather than anguishing over the shortcomings, the right response is to appreciate that we’re able to have even so much. For a mere $12,000 or so, I’ve been able to go from a music teacher scraping by to a top student eagerly sought by bioinformatics grad programs that will offer the chance to more than triple my annual salary and do work that I’m very passionate about. That’s the American story right there. It’s not supposed to be easy or smooth. It’s just possible with grit, hard work, and intelligence.
What if I shift from seeing schools as a “staircase to knowledge” to seeing them as “a climbing wall of knowledge?”
A staircase is something that takes effort, but every effort has been made to engineer the experience to be as stable, organized, and safe as possible.
A climbing wall still has safety features—you belay—but the point is to give you a better climbing experience. It’s fundamentally a demanding, self-structured solo activity. It includes a combination of deadlines and grades as a commitment device, and some social supports. But if I take organic chemistry, learning it through a class is just the same as learning it solo, except that the experience has been structured the same way that routes get established on a climbing wall.
Does having that perspective on school change the way I interpret its “shortcomings?”
Definitely.
If schools do as good or better a job than students could have done as autodidacts, then they’ve succeeded. I doubt I could force as much knowledge of chemistry, linear algebra, and molecular biology that I’m acquiring this quarter into my head if I was studying on my own. It would probably be less stressful without the constant pressure, but it would be slower at the very least. If school can ram more knowledge into your head in 12 weeks than you could have shoved in there on your own, then it’s doing its job.
If schools actually hold students back relative to what they could have learned on their own, then they’ve failed. I have taken one or two classes from teachers who truly seemed to add so much stress, with so many negative idiosyncrasies, that I think there’s a good chance I’d have been better off with pure self-study. But even so, it’s very hard to know, since I wouldn’t have had the commitment device of having to earn a grade. And that’s just my experience—maybe others would have done better in the class than on their own.
In the future, I will try to shift to the “climbing wall” perspective. School is here to offer some support and structure. But it’s also here, primarily here, to breathe down my neck and MAKE me learn. It’s here for the same reason the drill instructor is at boot camp. It’s not to make the 100 pushups easy. It’s to make damned sure that I do them and that I can’t give myself an easy pass, push it off til next hour, next day, next week, next year. I’m paying $600 per quarter for a drill instructor.
Supplying the curiosity, the organization, the learning, the success—that’s entirely up to me. School’s a commitment device first and foremost. It’s a place where I can rent educational capital (access to labs, tutoring, grading). It’s also a place where I can purchase the opportunity to form relationships that I can leverage into further opportunities, through letters of recommendation, career advice, introductions, and so on.
The least important thing school has to offer is “teaching” or “education” or “learning.”
Only I can offer that to myself.
Sadly, student ratings are partially about this, and partially about how difficult were the lessons.