I’ve been teaching part time at a community center for a while now, and it’s been interesting for me to see how the first impressions I had of the various students stacked up against the experiences I had knowing them over an extended period.
I can put numbers to it- out of a bit over 50 students, there were three for whom I found my first impressions to be substantial misjudgments of their habitual character, and one who I came to suspect I had misjudged, but for whom it turned out that the evidence that let me to suspect my initial judgment was wrong was actually uncharacteristic of him, whereas the behavior that formed my first impression was not. Of course, there’s a likelihood of confirmation bias here, but since I discuss the students’ personalities and behavior extensively with the other teachers, our assessments of them tend towards agreement over time.
Of course, error rates are going to depend strongly on context, but it’s nice to have some idea of my expected error rate in this particular context.
I’ve been teaching part time at a community center for a while now, and it’s been interesting for me to see how the first impressions I had of the various students stacked up against the experiences I had knowing them over an extended period.
I can put numbers to it- out of a bit over 50 students, there were three for whom I found my first impressions to be substantial misjudgments of their habitual character, and one who I came to suspect I had misjudged, but for whom it turned out that the evidence that let me to suspect my initial judgment was wrong was actually uncharacteristic of him, whereas the behavior that formed my first impression was not. Of course, there’s a likelihood of confirmation bias here, but since I discuss the students’ personalities and behavior extensively with the other teachers, our assessments of them tend towards agreement over time.
Of course, error rates are going to depend strongly on context, but it’s nice to have some idea of my expected error rate in this particular context.