He consistently disrupted the class with highly-technical comments that were irrelevant to the subject matter. I imagine the did this mainly to signal his technical superiority and undermine my authority. His final evaluation degraded the class as amateurish. 14/n
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Most recently, I taught intro to computational text analysis to early grad students. A senior faculty member sat in, and interrupted my lecture, calling it "useless". Why? In a 1-hour unit on topic modeling, I skipped the statistical properties + optimization of LDA.15/n
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All of this raises a series of questions for me. 1) why do advanced methodologists feel compelled to sit in on my INTRO courses if they don't find it helpful for their needs? (I make my approach known up front + no one is holding a gun to their head!) 16/n
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2) What is the end goal of methods training? Which people deserve to be taught? What is the intention behind teaching "technical details", and how does it actually function with our students? 17/n
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I suspect the answer to both questions has to do with the endless gate-keeping that ensure the exclusivity of a club called "methods," and the status associated with membership into that elite circle. 18/n
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Ironically, such gatekeeping does nothing to improve the methodological sophistication of the discipline, and actively undermines that goal. 19/n
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For example, which course constitutes "better training": 1) a highly technical course taught by a brilliant methodologist but awful teacher, so poorly and unskillfully taught that every student (except 1-2) checks out and gives up? or 2) a less technical, well taught class? 20/n
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I suspect that many of my critics would inherently find the more-technical class to constitute better training, even though the average skill level of students faired worse than the second course. 21/n
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Thus there's a conflation between accessibility and poor training; and between rigor and "weeding out". But I suppose that's a feature, not a bug, of (a portion of) the methods community in Political Science. Much like a LV handbag, greater popularity means less prestige. 22/n
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I'll end this thread with a question I posed earlier: What is the purpose, the goal, the point of teaching methods? Is it to increase the methodological sophistication of the discipline, or to maintain a hierarchy? As a community, we need to wrestle with that question. /END
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