> “You should have failed this class. I’m going to make accommodations so that no student can pass next semester the same way you did.”
> This is what my Ancient History II professor told me when my group and I got our final group project essay handed out.
What a terrible, hack of a teacher.
If you've ever said something like that to a student, quit your job.
Those people are the reason academia is such a miserable experience for so many.
Yep. The main reason I didn't further pursue History academia was that it was too much of a monoculture with a bit of nepotism sparkled all over it. Not to discard everyone there of course; there were some awesome courses and faculty. But there's no way I was going to dedicate my life to such environment with so little in return for it.
Nah, the teacher was just wrong about the facts. If they had been right about the facts, there's nothing wrong with saying that imo. The reality was that it was the partner who should have gotten that lecture rather than the author.
So I'd say that you shouldn't say that if you're relying on your own feelings and impressions to judge facts not in evidence, because your instincts may be wrong. They may even be racist or sexist (i.e. something that the person you're maligning has to deal with constantly), instead of in this case when it was just a weakness for ass-kissers.
Too many times somebody else got a good grade from my work. I don't begrudge them the grade because I don't care when other people get nice things for free (I love it when me or my friends get nice things for free), but they certainly had no knowledge in what had been taught in the class they just got a B in.
> Those people are the reason academia is such a miserable experience for so many.
School isn't a therapy session or entertainment. If it's a miserable experience and you come out smart, it's 1000x better than if its a wonderful experience and you come out dumb.
That's a big if. I've learned far more from settings and courses I enjoyed than from ones I hated. I expect the causation flowed in both directions, and there's no way I'm unique in that regard.
> So I'd say that you shouldn't say that if you're relying on your own feelings and impressions to judge facts not in evidence, because your instincts may be wrong.
That's exactly my point.
That teacher didn't have any facts, they just decided someone was a slacker based on vibes and used that bias to single them out.
And presumably would go on to add systems to allow them to persecute others they deem to be slackers.
> School isn't a therapy session or entertainment. If it's a miserable experience and you come out smart, it's 1000x better than if its a wonderful experience and you come out dumb.
As someone who gets told he's smart somewhat regularly by his peers, and had a school mandated therapist because they thought he was a suicide risk, I believe that's a statement that needs a citation.
In any case they're not mutually exclusive, you can have an education system that works without grinding people down into lifelong anxiety disorders.
> The structure of this post is a bit of a miss for me. Sorry about that. I wanted to write a short post about writing non-fiction but it turned out to be a bit longer than expected and I need to get to work now. I hope you enjoyed it.
It almost reads like the author climbed the tree to shake its branches and content himself with whatever dropped. Which in this case is fine by me.
To be honest what happened was that I tried to write a short introduction with both stories from university, they got way too long, then wrote the writing advice, and then tried to mix them both into a coherent post, then noticed the analogy of the trunk was a good anchor and remixed the article even more around that, and this is what we got. Still I enjoyed writing it.
There's always hope for a Part II. Maybe on rhetoric; which is what I interpreted "The second most important thing" to be about. But the concepts introduced there are entirely new to me so I may be off.
As I understand it, the author was sharing the story to convince the audience he was a good writer and, thus, we should value his opinions on how to write non-fiction.
This was the intention. Originally it was more clear but I moved the other half of the story to the conclusion where it's even more evident that the stories were a way to build rapport and establish some kind of credibility.
I like these abrupt switches that tie-in later. Kind of like a b-roll but in text.
No you are not missing anything. This is a more recent bait-and-switch method of writing articles. I'm not sure where it comes from but if I had to be extra pessimist, I'd say it is a trope among failed writers. Sometimes they use narrative devices that work best in novels, but they end up being applied to normal every-day articles and the result is something that seems out of place.
Arguably if HN is to use LLMs to curate and administer submissions and comments (which it has been doing already), one would hope they can short-circuit this for all of us and scan the article/blog post, providing a summary directly underneath the submission/comment reply box. Reason being is, a lot of the time many paragraphs are spent belaboring one or two points that would best work in a tl;dr way and jump over these narrative passages, framings and backstories that serve very little to the points themselves.
> "Knowledge has to be packed and unpacked. And in order to do that we increase and decrease the complexity in semantic waves. One key tool for packing is Nominalization, that helps the reader pack the knowledge they’ve received into a concept to be stored in memory. But if you only speak in tightly packed abstract concepts students get lost. And thus you drop down in abstraction and teach through examples, stories, images, that help students digest the contents."
Really? While reading I couldn't help but think about how I wish this article on writing well were... written well. That block quote loses me in the first sentence, I had to re-read it a few times.
"Good teaching requires alternating between two views, going up and down levels of detail. Sometimes you zoom out and give students one word for a big idea, calling a whole chain of events a "collapse." This 'Nomiinalization' lets them hold the idea in mind instead of the whole story. But summary words alone can lose students, the abstract loses meaning as details are forgotten. So you zoom back in with examples, stories, pictures, concrete cases. Those reinforce the idea of the summary word."
I like the trunk analogy, the branches can only grow so much before the tip the entire tree over.
I usually use the example of a blue sky. Write that the sky is blue. That's it. Simple yet the temptations to paint the sky with clouds, trees, and emotions is hard to resist. Always come back to the writing, and endure that you clearly wrote that the sky is just blue.
> This is what my Ancient History II professor told me when my group and I got our final group project essay handed out.
What a terrible, hack of a teacher. If you've ever said something like that to a student, quit your job. Those people are the reason academia is such a miserable experience for so many.
I'm not trying to test whether the best student knows the material; I'm trying to test whether all the students know the material.
As the person who regularly carried such groups when I was in high school and college, I was especially sensitive to this.
So I'd say that you shouldn't say that if you're relying on your own feelings and impressions to judge facts not in evidence, because your instincts may be wrong. They may even be racist or sexist (i.e. something that the person you're maligning has to deal with constantly), instead of in this case when it was just a weakness for ass-kissers.
Too many times somebody else got a good grade from my work. I don't begrudge them the grade because I don't care when other people get nice things for free (I love it when me or my friends get nice things for free), but they certainly had no knowledge in what had been taught in the class they just got a B in.
> Those people are the reason academia is such a miserable experience for so many.
School isn't a therapy session or entertainment. If it's a miserable experience and you come out smart, it's 1000x better than if its a wonderful experience and you come out dumb.
That's exactly my point. That teacher didn't have any facts, they just decided someone was a slacker based on vibes and used that bias to single them out. And presumably would go on to add systems to allow them to persecute others they deem to be slackers.
> School isn't a therapy session or entertainment. If it's a miserable experience and you come out smart, it's 1000x better than if its a wonderful experience and you come out dumb.
As someone who gets told he's smart somewhat regularly by his peers, and had a school mandated therapist because they thought he was a suicide risk, I believe that's a statement that needs a citation.
In any case they're not mutually exclusive, you can have an education system that works without grinding people down into lifelong anxiety disorders.
According to the story (which seemed to lack a "trunk"), the proposed system was individual essays.
It almost reads like the author climbed the tree to shake its branches and content himself with whatever dropped. Which in this case is fine by me.
I like these abrupt switches that tie-in later. Kind of like a b-roll but in text.
Arguably if HN is to use LLMs to curate and administer submissions and comments (which it has been doing already), one would hope they can short-circuit this for all of us and scan the article/blog post, providing a summary directly underneath the submission/comment reply box. Reason being is, a lot of the time many paragraphs are spent belaboring one or two points that would best work in a tl;dr way and jump over these narrative passages, framings and backstories that serve very little to the points themselves.
— Long time subscriber.
this is top tier writing. thanks for sharing
"Good teaching requires alternating between two views, going up and down levels of detail. Sometimes you zoom out and give students one word for a big idea, calling a whole chain of events a "collapse." This 'Nomiinalization' lets them hold the idea in mind instead of the whole story. But summary words alone can lose students, the abstract loses meaning as details are forgotten. So you zoom back in with examples, stories, pictures, concrete cases. Those reinforce the idea of the summary word."
I usually use the example of a blue sky. Write that the sky is blue. That's it. Simple yet the temptations to paint the sky with clouds, trees, and emotions is hard to resist. Always come back to the writing, and endure that you clearly wrote that the sky is just blue.
But I'm a little disappointed that one of those ink blot looking circles (preferably the big one on the left) did not lead back to the home page.