Another Socratic dialog in the form of an IM cut and paste, that has been somewhat cut up and cleaned up and reordered:

Former Student

Hey, did you get the student evaluations from last term?

Peter

I did!

Former Student

Just wondered if you wanted more explanation from me on my comments. I thought you did a really good job!… but if you were planning to teach (more) you might want to be mindful of how to respond to certain questions. No biggie!

Peter

Yeah – what was the issue with how I did that? Student egos are fragile things and they don’t need teachers to be ruthlessly stomping on them for no reason.

Former Student

This particular student is also pretty forgetful :) so it would be helpful to check what I wrote, but I think I remember feeling that a couple of times you responded to a question (I seem to remember at least one from Mr E) as if it was kind of humorous in it’s ramifications (which it was) but your response could have been taken as belittling the questioner instead of the question itself…

Now I’m almost sorry I brought it up as I don’t remember exactly what it was I remembered so clearly 7 weeks ago!

Peter

I do try not to belittle the questioner, but I can see how when there’s someone already at a disadvantage, I might have to be extra careful. But Mr E and I got along pretty well outside of class, so I may have taken verbal liberties with him that I wouldn’t take with other students

Former Student

Yeah, it was probably no big deal at all. I’m kind of frustrated with myself as at the end of the term there was a very clear “I thought he did a good job but he should be careful of X” thing in my head, which is now mostly gone…

Anyhow, check what I wrote if you want, and ask me any questions about it that you want, maybe a specific question about what I wrote would jog my memory. Regardless, take care and I hope you do well with your grad studies!

Peter

[...] Maybe be careful of how you respond to questions… I didn’t feel this way myself, but I could see how someone else could feel that responses were condescending or dismissive. I think that if is just your personality / sense of humor and again, did not feel this way myself. Just mentioning a possibility. [...]

Peter

But I do take your point well. There’s a lot of stuff that happens in class that seems accidental but isn’t.

Former Student

?

Peter

Examples:

  • My mode of dress, especially on the first day
  • The way I deal with the students who ask questions to show off instead of learn
Former Student

I didn’t notice the dress thing, myself.

Peter

I dressed very down. That way people would think I was extremely nerdy and technically capable, but would worry about my ability to string a sentence together. Then they would (hopefully) be pleasantly surprised when I could actually communicate.

Dressing up would give the impressions of organization but not perhaps technical competence. And in truth, I am a bit scattered, but I am also highly technically competent. So by projecting complete scatteredness, I set expectations at a point where I can exceed them.

Former Student

I probably wouldn’t be very patient with people who asked self-aggrandizing questions, either :)

Peter

People who ask self-aggrandizing questions often don’t realize they are doing it, so dealing with that is a very delicate situation. You want them to shut up so you can bring the rest of the class up to speed, but you don’t want to kill their enthusiasm.

One way of doing that is to quickly establish your cred as alpha nerd.

Former Student

haha beat down on beta-nerd!

Former Student

Oh, question? RESPONSE. BAM.

Peter

Not so much like that, but we are primates, and primates are prone to establishing dominance hierarchies.

I try to short circuit it in some regards, but theres about 10-20% of a given class that just needs a demonstration that I actually know something before they will listen.

Former Student

Might as well teach to the top of the class as well as the bottom…

Peter

and one way of demonstrating that is by finding those people and dealing them a verbal smackdown. Those people are generally not offended, because the people who are establishing these hierarchies tend to be pretty socially oblivious. But observers of this process will generally (and correctly) watch the process with some horror.

If we could prevent students from establishing these messed-up social hierarchies in the first place, that would be best of all. But second best is to make sure that the person who climbs to the top is the person who you would want in charge.

Which hopefully is the teacher.

Perhaps ensuring that all learning experiences were uniformly excellent would do the trick (“the trick” being the elimination of crappy social-dominance hierarchy formation). But while I am dreaming, I would also like a pony.

Former Student

That gives me something to mull over, which I will. I admit I don’t often give people credit for doing things purposely which seem like accidents, even as I do those same things and hope people can tell the difference.

I hate thinking that the people who I care about can’t even tell the difference when I am self-deprecating to avoid embarrasment to them (for example).

Peter

Anyhow, sorry to blather on about this, but it’s an issue I’ve thought about at some length. Teaching people who have historically seen teachers as a barrier to education instead of a helper presents a challenge.

And that exact attitude is present in many students who haven’t moved on sufficiently from high school or who haven’t had a teacher push them or give them an opportunity to excel.

Self-deprecation is a nice example of the kind of behavioral trait that is present in the people who would look in horror on the social process of the technically adept and socially notsomuch.

Because quite of bit of it is this blatant and ugly chestbeating, only people are pounding their frontal lobes (instead of their chests) in this messed-up fashion.

Former Student

Not a bad thing to be concerned with! I think I’m somewhat naive at detecting this sort of thing; but do you think you are being sort of pessimistic about people’s motivations? I’m completely pessimistic about most things including people’s motivations, so don’t feel like you need to convince me, but I like to dream that I’m wrong.

Peter

I think that people genuinely want to learn, and that most of the class wants the knowledge they could get from the class. The issue comes up that some of the students have established a very high cynicism barrier that I have to get over, due to prior bad experiences.

In particular, the ones who are most prone to this hierarchy stuff are usually the ones who have the most fun when the class gets going, because the feedback loop between their submissions and the class content is so tight.

It’s not an issue of people having bad motivations – bad motivations to me means “uninterested in the material, except for the sole purpose of getting a degree” – it’s more an issue of people being cynics. And again, many of the people doing the chest beating have no idea that they are doing it.

Former Student

I seem to have some things to think about. I thought I believed in leveling the playing field as much as possible, but I have to admit large amounts of frustration with any sort of (mental, social, etc) hierarchy.

Peter

Levelling the playing field is very important. But it requires directly engaging those forces which distort it – the chest beating thing is one, low self-confidence is another, peoples’ instinctive reaction to a person in a tie is another, etc.

Former Student

I need to go check on dinner.

Peter

Have a nice dinner, and thanks for worrying about the feelings of your fellow student.

Former Student

and teacher :)
Later on.

Two links might be the best coda to that conversation. The first is the idea that many nerds may suffer from a mild form of Diogenes syndrome, and the second is that the people I am specifically referring to generally have a lot in common with the bipolar Lisp programmer.