The students are all acting like that Literal Internet Guy who doesn’t understand how normies communicate. The problem isn’t the existence of implicit assumptions. The problem is that students with normal social skills will understand those implicit assumptions in advance. If you ask any normal student, before the experiment, “if the pendulum stand falls over, will the measure of the pendulum’s period prove much of anything”, they’ll not only answer “no”, they’ll consistently answer “no”—it really is something they already know in advance, not something that’s made up by the professor only in hindsight.
Of course, this is complicated by the ability to use pedantry for trolling. Any student who did understand the implicit assumptions in advance could pretend that he doesn’t, and claim that the professor is making excuses in hindsight. Since you can’t read the student’s mind, you can’t prove that he’s lying.
You can likely find contact with some students in an entirely different place who haven’t heard of this experiment taking place, and ask them to find out.
The students are all acting like that Literal Internet Guy who doesn’t understand how normies communicate. The problem isn’t the existence of implicit assumptions. The problem is that students with normal social skills will understand those implicit assumptions in advance. If you ask any normal student, before the experiment, “if the pendulum stand falls over, will the measure of the pendulum’s period prove much of anything”, they’ll not only answer “no”, they’ll consistently answer “no”—it really is something they already know in advance, not something that’s made up by the professor only in hindsight.
Of course, this is complicated by the ability to use pedantry for trolling. Any student who did understand the implicit assumptions in advance could pretend that he doesn’t, and claim that the professor is making excuses in hindsight. Since you can’t read the student’s mind, you can’t prove that he’s lying.
You can likely find contact with some students in an entirely different place who haven’t heard of this experiment taking place, and ask them to find out.