That’s true. Though if these people have difficulty making accommodations that would make some of their students significantly better off, then that seems to me like evidence that they’re not among the best teachers, and that it might be good to select against them.
On the contrary, it is nothing of the sort. The best teachers are those who are best at teaching, period. Making accommodations for mental illness is, at best, orthogonal to this. If one teacher is better at teaching than another, that’s that.
Also this bit sounds like we are now talking about something like… what university-level policies should be like, and while that’s not an unreasonable direction to be going in, I was originally thinking of this just as a discussion of the choices of this particular teacher. It seems to me like one should first get on the same page about whether his specific decision was good or bad, before trying to consider possible policy implications. (Since it can be that a particular choice made individually is good or bad, but trying to create an institution-wide policy that everyone/no-one should make the same choice has unintended effects; but one can’t talk about the policy-level tradeoffs before first knowing what the effects on the individual level are.)
Sorry, but I do not find this plausible. The quoted original post is very clearly advocating for people to do as he describes himself doing.
What’s more, in such a case, the choices of any particular teacher are, in fact, effectively part of the university’s policies, if they affect other students. We do not know for a fact whether that’s so, but my examples show, I think, that it’s hard for them to avoid doing so.
It’s easy to generate lots of “what ifs”, but a long list of them doesn’t mean they’d be hard to answer in practice. Your first two questions in particular seem to me to have obvious answers—automatically extending the policy to all students only makes sense, but if someone explicitly wants to know if they are wrong or not, then they presumably won’t mind being told if they are.
Ah, and so you demonstrate the point I just made. Now we’ve got a situation where the accommodations granted to one student immediately and substantially degrade the clarity of communication to all the other students. Having made what is allegedly just a personal choice on one teacher’s part, we’ve barely started exploring the consequences and we’re already into “making the learning environment worse for everyone” territory!
On my Facebook wall where I originally shared this post, various people chimed in with their experiences from either teaching or work, and several mentioned that this wouldn’t really come up for them because they had never had a reason to tell anyone “you’re wrong” anyway.
I’m not surprised that it’s easy to find any number of anecdotes like this. (Although I was particularly amused by “My academic field is history, if that matters”—oh, I’d say it matters quite a bit!) But what is the use of such things? I can recall plenty of times where my teachers have said “that’s wrong” or “you’re wrong”, where my college professors have said such things, my coworkers to me or to each other, my bosses to me or to my coworkers, and of course I to various people… but what does any of this prove? Only that people’s experience is different…
While not everyone agreed, many people seemed to have the position that avoiding “you’re wrong”-type language is just a net improvement and that they’ve never ran into a situation where one would need to use it (and I think at least some of those people do also work in fields with people on the spectrum). This also matches my own experience, and makes me skeptical of how likely it is for any of your scenarios to turn out to be a problem in practice.
I find this position to be wildly implausible. A net improvement, really? I’m sorry, but this does not pass the smell test… and as I said, I have encountered scenarios similar to those which I have described, many times.
… applying the same policy to all students would likely also make several others feel more comfortable.
This is possible. Does it outweigh the downsides? It seems to me that it can’t even plausibly begin to do so.
In any case, it would seem bad to me if this teacher, in considering whether to grant the request, would conclude that he has to deny it because of some complicated hypothetical scenario that assumed other students reacted in very specific ways. Given that it’s also very plausible that none of that happens and everything goes just fine.
Indeed, the teacher should not deny the request for such a reason. He should deny the request on far more general principles than that, namely that (a) that there are many possible ways for other students to react that would impose serious costs and cause detrimental effects, (b) the very predictable (and not at all hypothetical) effects of granting the request would be bad even aside from any specific reactions on the part of any specific students, and (c) the incentives created by granting the request would be far-reaching and almost universally bad.
(There is also an even more general principle, which is that the default response to any requests that one change one’s behavior in order to mitigate some supposed problem that someone else is having, should be “no”. Of course, in this particular case we have many more specific reasons to respond in the negative, but still this is a solid default, and well worth keeping in mind, because the aforementioned specific reasons exhibit patterns which recur in many other circumstances.)
It is of course possible that some major unexpected cost comes up, but if that happens, he can consider them and then shift his approach accordingly.
Can he? One of the effects of having such requests granted is the creation of precedent, and the shifting of the Overton window. In other words, decisions like this exhibit hysteresis. This is yet another of the many dangers and downsides of granting requests like this: you limit your ability to say “no” in the future, and restrict not only your own future choices, but those of your colleagues, etc.
Grant such a request once, and you will find very quickly that you have incurred an obligation.
(Of course, I am quite sure that the author of the quoted original post is well aware of this, and indeed that this is his explicit goal. But that just gives us another reason to resist such advocacy!)
I have a hard time seeing this as particularly problematic, given the previously mentioned view that saying “you’re wrong” just doesn’t seem to be necessary in general. “Having your brain automatically flinch away from” something sounds bad if you phrase it like that, but part of the process of acquiring any skill is to learn to automatically flinch away from performing the skill in a bad way. Similarly, if there’s little reason to ever say “you’re wrong” while there are good reasons to avoid it, then I see this less as distorting cognition and more as optimizing it (or more specifically optimizing the skill of good communication).
I’m sorry, but this reads to me like naked Dark Arts. Having your brain flinch away from thinking “that’s wrong” when you hear something that is wrong is disastrous—the worst kind of cognitive distortion. We should be doing everything in our power to identify and root out such flinches, not encouraging them!
On the contrary, it is nothing of the sort. The best teachers are those who are best at teaching, period. Making accommodations for mental illness is, at best, orthogonal to this. If one teacher is better at teaching than another, that’s that.
Sorry, but I do not find this plausible. The quoted original post is very clearly advocating for people to do as he describes himself doing.
What’s more, in such a case, the choices of any particular teacher are, in fact, effectively part of the university’s policies, if they affect other students. We do not know for a fact whether that’s so, but my examples show, I think, that it’s hard for them to avoid doing so.
Ah, and so you demonstrate the point I just made. Now we’ve got a situation where the accommodations granted to one student immediately and substantially degrade the clarity of communication to all the other students. Having made what is allegedly just a personal choice on one teacher’s part, we’ve barely started exploring the consequences and we’re already into “making the learning environment worse for everyone” territory!
I’m not surprised that it’s easy to find any number of anecdotes like this. (Although I was particularly amused by “My academic field is history, if that matters”—oh, I’d say it matters quite a bit!) But what is the use of such things? I can recall plenty of times where my teachers have said “that’s wrong” or “you’re wrong”, where my college professors have said such things, my coworkers to me or to each other, my bosses to me or to my coworkers, and of course I to various people… but what does any of this prove? Only that people’s experience is different…
I find this position to be wildly implausible. A net improvement, really? I’m sorry, but this does not pass the smell test… and as I said, I have encountered scenarios similar to those which I have described, many times.
This is possible. Does it outweigh the downsides? It seems to me that it can’t even plausibly begin to do so.
Indeed, the teacher should not deny the request for such a reason. He should deny the request on far more general principles than that, namely that (a) that there are many possible ways for other students to react that would impose serious costs and cause detrimental effects, (b) the very predictable (and not at all hypothetical) effects of granting the request would be bad even aside from any specific reactions on the part of any specific students, and (c) the incentives created by granting the request would be far-reaching and almost universally bad.
(There is also an even more general principle, which is that the default response to any requests that one change one’s behavior in order to mitigate some supposed problem that someone else is having, should be “no”. Of course, in this particular case we have many more specific reasons to respond in the negative, but still this is a solid default, and well worth keeping in mind, because the aforementioned specific reasons exhibit patterns which recur in many other circumstances.)
Can he? One of the effects of having such requests granted is the creation of precedent, and the shifting of the Overton window. In other words, decisions like this exhibit hysteresis. This is yet another of the many dangers and downsides of granting requests like this: you limit your ability to say “no” in the future, and restrict not only your own future choices, but those of your colleagues, etc.
Grant such a request once, and you will find very quickly that you have incurred an obligation.
(Of course, I am quite sure that the author of the quoted original post is well aware of this, and indeed that this is his explicit goal. But that just gives us another reason to resist such advocacy!)
I’m sorry, but this reads to me like naked Dark Arts. Having your brain flinch away from thinking “that’s wrong” when you hear something that is wrong is disastrous—the worst kind of cognitive distortion. We should be doing everything in our power to identify and root out such flinches, not encouraging them!