An Open Letter to the Women at the Pool Last Night

Hello.  I'm not sure if you noticed me, or if you've seen me around.  I know I have seen you before, and while I don't know your names, I have come to know you as "They Who Lack Volume Control".  I had hoped that was your only vice.

Last night I encountered you at the BYU-H swimming pool, where three of you had decided to inhabit one of the swimming lanes.  As a person who swims laps, I and my ken are rather dependent on the existence of available lanes.  You, meanwhile, seem to have chosen to not only take up this lane, but to remain at the shallow end, wrapped cozily in floatation devices, talking to one another in the piercing voices that have become your trademark.

I could have excused this if there were an abundance of open lanes; if there were no area where you could sit besides the lanes; or if you were even occasionally swimming what could be called a "lap", but alas you fulfilled none of these exonerating criteria.  While there are many health advantages to swimming, there are relatively fewer to standing around shouting jovially at one another while partially submerged in water.  Your inactivity rather defeats the purpose of whatever you hoped to accomplish--as a matter of fact, I do not even have a clue what you were trying to do, but I do know you failed, so useless was whatever it is you were--and I use this word loosely--"doing".

I could see quite clearly that all three other lanes were doubled up for nearly the entire time I was there.  I noticed this while swimming back and forth, so you have no excuse for not noticing it while you were doing little but existing in a particular space, unless for you the mere act of existing takes up so much of your energy and focus you are unable to consider that others exist.  I have considered this possibility, as your existing moniker suggests.  Some people, myself included, even attempted to use the rest of the lane to work around you, functionally making you inanimate obstacles.  However, an inanimate object does not occasionally shift and shout and sway and cast dirty looks in just such a way to make working around it more difficult.  From this I can extrapolate that you are more useless than literally useless things.

I think you fail to understand that you could have stood just about anywhere in the pool.  Frankly, the pool was extraneous for what you were doing.  I'd wonder if you know how chairs work.

If you haven't gotten the gist, I hate you, mesdames.  You might not the worst people in the world, but your faults--that is, being so self-involved and stupid and stubborn that you are unable to recognize that you are not only being inconsiderate to others but gaining utterly no benefit from it--are the kinds of thing that I consider the worst traits a person could have.  You're the same kind of people who speed in residential zones and join pyramid schemes and I hate you.

How not to be a teacher

I've been attending schools of some kind for some fifteen years now, and in that time I've been able to pick up on some of the things teachers do wrong.  I thought I'd shine a spotlight on some of the stupidest and most easily fixed.

1. Don't discourage negative feedback.  This one goes first because it was only really a problem with one teacher, and I'm working my way from least to most stupid, roughly speaking.  If a few more had done it, it would be much lower on the list.

My Senior year of high school it was, in English class.  We gave two presentations during the year, one per semester, and the requirements for the audience were to write down the name of the presenter, their theme statement, the books or other works they cited, and a piece of positive feedback.  Only positive feedback.  We were not allowed to say anything bad about them, unless we cushioned it with about a dozen "Oh, but this part was so good so don't feel bad."  Bad enough, except that we, the presenters, did not even get to see what other people said, which defeats the point of feedback in the first place.

I've said it before: being a critic is simple, if not easy.  Find something you like, find something you don't like, explain why, and everything else is terminology.  If you don't discern between "good" and "bad" or otherwise analyze a work, then you're not reading a book or watching a presentation, you're watching someone jingle their keys in front of your face.

If I were to talk about all of the stupid things the students did with that relatively simple assignment, this would be an entirely different rant (I will say that I started doing mental shots every time someone referenced Gordon Gekko's "greed is good" speech), but for this particular bullet point I will just say that the entire point of doing a presentation in class is to get better at presenting and that's impossible if you don't know how to improve, or even worse (and what this teacher did) pretend there's nothing that needs improvement.

2. Don't teach a language like you're a phrasebook.  Teach grammar, not just words.  This one goes out more to those "You can learn X-language!" books than actual teachers, but people don't learn how to speak a language from phrases.  What they learn is how to parrot, which is not all that useful in the long run.  If even one of the words in each given sentence is changed, then everything they learned becomes useless, and considering how rarely those books update it's pretty much a guarantee the vernacular has changed since it was published.

But yes, there are teachers who teach like this.  In my French 1 class, we learned how to say "I am hungry" but we didn't learn the word for "food" until French 3, despite a couple of people straight-up asking the teacher "how do you say 'food'?"  Among other things.  Our school really, really did not have a good French program in general.

3. Don't grade essays based on your own extraneous guidelines.  Here are the guidelines for writing an essay: Make a point, then prove it.  That's it.  That's to what it all boils down.  Everything else is accessory to that goal.  Now, the point of things like MLA formatting and the intro/body/conclusion system are there because they make the essay clearer and they're a good way to organize your ideas, but that's it.  That means that if someone breaks from these molds, you should not grade them down if doing so makes their point clearer.

It gets even worse the younger you go.  In sixth grade, we were told we should never start two sentences in the same essay with the same word (or was it just the same paragraph?  I forget, since I've pretty much ignored it since then).  It's a decent rule of thumb to avoid getting repetitive, but it can also (very easily) be a good way to send clarity to hell.  But I had to do it anyway because I'd lose points if I didn't.

A recurring theme of this was being marked down for not including enough quotes.  If quotes are not conducive to an argument, then they should be omitted; they can be dead weight on your essay, particularly one based largely on induction.  Additionally, how can you use a single quote to wrap up an overarching theme from a large body unless said body outright states its point, which is downright bad writing on its part?  Paraphrasing the events of said passage and then extrapolating the point from it would be excellent form, but many teachers would tell students they should have used a quote instead.  Even worse, this can cause students to believe that just any quote will support their essay, since it will be graded all the same.  One of the student-made Animal Farm posters in my Freshman English class included four utterly inconsequential quotes from Snowball.  The teacher didn't care.  She deemed it not only worthy, but exemplary, and hung it on the wall.  This annoyed me from the very instant I first saw the poster, and told me that it wouldn't be a good year.

This can also go the other way: in the aforementioned presentations, we were required to have a visual aide.  For every single student except for myself and one other, the "visual aide" was a poster or collage of the movie posters or book covers of the works they cited.  This does not even vaguely help illustrate your point, particularly when your entire interaction with said visual aide is "For my visual aide, I used the cover of the book we all read and thus have all already seen the cover of, and the movie poster for Wall Street, which I cited."

4. Don't assign "fun" projects.  In that same Senior English class, we had to film a recreation of a scene from Hamlet.  Golly, that helped me learn about                     .

In fact, we weren't even allowed to make drastic changes, like when I suggested a science-fiction theme and was immediately shot down for being told it would be "too silly".  I'm going to put aside how that hurt my pride as a science-fiction fan, but it also illustrates how little this assignment had the potential to help us.  It would make sense if it was a film class--and in fact, I did do several similar things in my film class--but it isn't.  What practical English communication-related skills are we learning, except how much working with other people sucks?

I won't put scare quotes around "fun" if it is an activity which promotes learning which happens to be fun.  The problem is a lot of times "Oh, my students will enjoy this!" is not "How can I help them better understand the course material?  Oh, I've got it!  And it'll be enjoyable!"  I like watching ice water induce boiling, and it helped me understand how pressure affects phase changes.  That's fantastic.

Heck, even pointless showmanship is okay in moderation.  If you want to kick off a semester by showing off how awesome the course material is, you don't necessarily have to explain it.  As long as it slots into twenty minutes you couldn't have used otherwise.

If we could eliminate these "fun" projects that aren't all that fun anyway, then we could probably add another book to the curriculum or make the school year shorter.  I don't think many students would mind the change.

5. Don't penalize internet use.  One of the posters in my college's library says "Google can find you 10,000 answers. A  librarian can find you the right one."  Now, I've dealt with the BYU-H librarians, who are unable to find the correct answer to "Where is the fiction section?", but even ignoring that the quote (which, by the way, comes from a BYU-H faculty member since no one quoteworthy would actually say that) overlooks the fact that in the time it takes a librarian to find the correct answer you could have found nine or ten correct answers with Google.  I'd by the quote as accurate if he'd said Bing, but no one uses Bing anyway.

I'm still honestly surprised every time a teacher (like my 201 teacher, to whom I shall refer as Mr. Ludd) says "The internet is not reliable".  It's 2012.  Yes it is.  Are you unfamiliar with the massive list of citations at the end of every Wikipedia article?

To all the Mr. Ludds out there, yes, the internet is a fantastic resource.  I think you're just bitter that you didn't have it and you want to make your students work as hard as you did.  That's still possible, actually, but you're doing it the wrong way.  Instead, encourage them to use the internet, but then hold them to a much higher standard than you would have back in the olden days of yore since they have a much better resource.  It will lead them to make much better essays and research papers, which is a good thing, instead of forcing them to spend much more time to get an equal result, which is a bad thing.

6. Don't penalize reading ahead.  I haven't really had a problem with this one since elementary school, but it really, reaaaally got to me.  Because the class elected to read the book out loud, I had to sit and patiently wait for whoever was reading to get through any word more than one syllable.  And despite all his sputtering and vowel sounding and, he was not the one struggling.  But I dare not, oh, I don't know, read at my own pace, since when the teacher called my name and I had to backtrack six or seven pages, that counted as "being disruptive" and I was duly punished.  Great idea, teach.  That's how you get kids to enjoy reading, by making them stare at the same word for a good thirty seconds because little Billy, who is not me and whose reading ability is not mine and has no impact on mine can't figure out how to say "business".  Perhaps you could encourage better running speeds in PE by tying all the students together at the ankles.

How about instead, you give students power to opt out of group reading?  It would mean they get a better experience since they get to go at their own pace and it would mean the students who opted in get a better experience since they don't have to wait for the kid who got three chapters ahead to skip back to their level.  That's just one of the literally infinite better ideas than what they do.

7. Don't pretend you know things you don't.

Possible scenarios, from best to worst:

-Student asks question

-Teacher gives correct answer

-Student asks question

-Teacher does not know; looks up correct answer, gives student correct answer

-Student asks question

-Teacher does not know; tells student to look it up

-Student asks question

-Teacher does not know; instead, gives student over-simplified or otherwise wrong answer

-Student clings to this answer

It's okay not to know things.  It becomes a problem when you act on your ignorance.  If you're a teacher, then presumably you want your students to love to learn.  This begins with you being willing to do so yourself.

8. Don't grade homework.  Okay, this might not actually be the stupidest item on the list, but it's my list, and this is the one that has caused me the most grief at its sheer idiocy.

Homework is a good thing.  It's practice for the test.  The test evaluates how much a student has learned.  Learning is the point of the class.  How could we entirely subvert this whole system for the worse?

I've got it!  Let's grade homework.

Let's look at four very real and very common possibilities:

Like I said, homework is a good thing in theory.  But if a student does well on the tests, then it proves that she didn't need to do the homework, but if homework is graded, then she is getting penalized for not doing something she did not need to do.

For another example, let's examine the idea of grading rough drafts.  If someone does not do or turn in any rough drafts to a paper and turns in a great paper, that student should get an A.  They should not be marked down because they didn't bring in the paper three times prior so the teacher could tell them how to improve, because clearly the student figured it out on his or her own.  Again, they are being punished for being better than the teacher expected.

In addition, this means that students can often pass a class with little understanding of the subject or fail a class at which they have excellent comprehension.  I got a C in AP Biology; a class where I knew demonstrably more than the teacher, set the curve on all but two of the tests, and got a 5 on the AP test and 800 out of 800 on the SAT subject test.

I'd almost be willing to overlook this if it wasn't trickling up.  I sat in the dreary lectures I could have delivered myself and fantasized about when the grade would be determined 33% by the midterm and 67% by the final, but that hasn't been the case at all at my college.  Instead, they modeled it after high school classes.

To prove that class performance is not strongly correlated to understanding, I decided to compare AP scores and class grades here.  The resulting best-fit line has an a-score of .578 and an r² of .105, and for those of you don't speak Statistics that means "they're not related in any significant way".

If students are getting good grades on the homework and bad grades on the test, it means it's the teacher's responsibility to retool the homework and find something that works.

The interesting thing is, this one I can't really pin on teachers.  Studies on the subject show teachers don't like assigning homework any more than students like doing it.  The problem is actually a third element, the parents, who have an entrenched expectation that there be homework despite this.  This could probably best be overcome by an adamant teacher at Parent-Teacher night explaining the very simple reason why he or she chose not to grade homework in their class.

These are the big complaints I have, at least: the ones that deal with quality, not presentation.  Let me know if you can think of any solid justifications for the measures I questioned.