it's really bizarre how often students are like "help i'm stuck on this problem" and when you ask what they're stuck on they reveal that they don't even know the meaning of one or more of the words in it
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like... of course you're stuck on the problem, you don't even know what it's asking! but for some reason it doesn't occur to them to ask "help what does this even mean"
maybe they don't feel like they're allowed to?
cursed school system
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i have a half-baked rant in the works about this and it's not all the way done yet but there's something really fucked up and gaslight-y about how school teaches you to orient towards knowledge
knowledge as what authorities say rather than knowledge as derived from perception
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okay yeah here it is: school teaches you that being gaslit is the *fundamental source of knowledge*
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remembering that story about a teacher who told their students that 1/3 was irrational
one of the best things about being too smart for your own good as a kid, at least, is being disabused of the idea that teachers had any kind of special access to knowledge that i didn't
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(i am thinking about all of this in the context of e.g. how poorly the vaccine rollout is going, how unwilling people are to disobey guidelines and vaccinate people who aren't "supposed" to be vaccinated, the bad situation around covid epistemics generally, etc.)
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I find this is fairly common in my every day experience of trying to understand things. I'm confused about something, then when I try to define my confusion I realize that I don't even have a full grasp of what I was trying to understand in the first place.
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that defining confusion step is real valuable
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One of the things I'm unlearning is all the places in my brain where I encounter something and decide I can proceed no further. It's like, I'm not even aware of what I can do or what my options are. a subconscious U-turn I have to catch in the moment
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This.
When students struggle with a problem it’s almost always to do with a wrong assumption, or a lack of understanding about terms, definitions, context, background etc.
it’s almost never to do with missing a leap in logic or process step
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My experience as something comparable to a teaching assistant was that the students that said "I don't get this" often either thought they wouldn't get it and hence didn't even really read it yet, or that they were hoping to get out of the hard work by having all steps explained.
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In both cases it was a happy coincidence that I was usuallynot informed in advance what the students would be doing, so my first question often was "I'll gladly help. What's the task?" which almost always resulted in them explaining the whole task step by step to me after finally
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