Thursday, February 25, 2010

Courtesy

As Voltaire said, "Common sense is not so common." I'm having a particularly grouchy morning. I've talked to 3 different medical receptionists and nurses today and none of them has allowed me to finish a sentence. The last nurse I talked to told me she'd get right on "it" and get back to me. If she does get back to me, I'm going to ask her what "it" is, because she never found out what I wanted. Back up. The receptionist interrupted my first sentence, and guessed, incorrectly, what I needed and put me onto the nurse. Likewise, the nurse interrupted my first sentence and guessed, again incorrectly, what I needed. Well, we'll see how bad I can make her feel when she calls back.

Meanwhile, while I'm in this mood, grinding away at my mountain of work, a student walks into my office. The door was closed, but not latched. And this blithering idiot barges into my office without knocking. If he'd been one of my students, I'd have chased him down the hallway with a 3-hole punch.

So he stands there with some papers in his hand looking at me like I'm a shiny object. Then announces that he's going to leave his homework on my office mate's desk. "O" and then "K", I say, reaching for my 3-hole punch. How precious are his next words:

"Uh, you got a stapler?" I lied. Of course I have a stapler, but I'm not in the habit of loaning it out to bumblers who have just committed breaking-and-entering.

It sure seems like that which we called "common courtesy" as recently as 20 years ago is all but dead.

The core and founding principle of courtesy is respect for others' personal spaces. Yet look how much we violate this daily. Or minutely. I can't listen to Mozart on my car radio, because the escaped inmate in the next pickup is blasting his anti-music so loudly. I can't walk down the sidewalk without someone (who is apparently allergic to shampoo) accosting me about saving the environment (which a bottle of shampoo would go a long way towards.) I can't have a meal without an utterly insignificant politician calling me to yell about something.

As for my intrusive dirtball this morning: he didn't bother taking his earbuds out while asking for my stapler. The "music" was so loud I could hear it plainly and, while it didn't completely drown out the Chopin Nocturne I was listening to, it did interfere with it sufficiently that I had to start it over. To top it off, when I went outside my office later, the hallway was strewn with the little bits of paper produced by spiral bound notebooks. Yes, the dweeb had stood outside the door and torn these little bits off his homework and simply tossed them on the floor.

What can you do but shake your head and think, "What starts here changes the world," and "We are in so much trouble"?

And surely interrupting someone while they are speaking is equivalent to personal space violations. Both sorts of sin are sins of arrogance. If you barge into my office without knocking and invitation, you saying something about how much more important you are than me. If you talk over the top of my sentence, you are saying something about how much more important you are than me. Such covert messages are apt to put me in a very bad mood.

In sum: Couldn't we all get together and resurrect the time-honored practice of taking turns speaking and knocking before entering?

Thursday, February 11, 2010

Practice/sample Tests

Here's a treatise on my philosophy about practice tests. The bottom line is: They're bad for you. I have caved in over the years and I now upload copies of some old exams for students to look at. There are only two good results of this. First, at least there's a handful of problems everyone will really learn to work. Second, students get to see what the format of the exam is apt to be. These advantages are sorely outweighed by the disadvantages, and if my thousands of students hadn't worn me down over the years, I would cease making old exams available.

The worst result is that so many students will do nothing except work the practice exam over and over. Instead of studying the material for the sake of actual understanding, they will spend their study time memorizing pencil strokes.

So first, they end up learning nothing. Then they, surprisingly, are furious when they bomb the real test because "it was nothing like the practice test." ((facepalm)) First, the practice test is not supposed to be like the real test. Second, but in fact, the real test was very much like the practice test, however, in their narrow view of studying, they didn't learn the broad view which was the goal of the course. If one understands the material at the level we're after, then one would see the similarities between the tests. Further, the point of the practice test wasn't to show you exactly which topics would be covered, so that you could ignore and skip things that are part of the course. It was just to show you how you would be tested (because that reduces some people's anxiety. I don't know why, it just seems to.)

So it does no good (and if fact makes you look bad) if you complain that there was a linear approximation problem on the real text, but none on the practice test. We educator types really, really hate (maybe more than anything except grading) indications that a student is trying to minimize his learning. I can't teach you anything when you're working so hard not to learn anything.

I'm trying to make this clear: The practice test will not help you study for the test. Puh-freakin'-eriod.

Therefore, I have this policy: I don't give out solutions to the practice test, nor do I help students work problems on the practice test. You're already distracted enough from what you should be doing (working a large number of a large variety of problems.) There's no sense in you and I both wasting our time helping you memorize the answers to several problems which won't be on the real test. Especially when that means I have waste my time 100 times, while you do it only once.

The best way to prepare for a math test is 1. to do lots of different problems. Almost all textbooks have more problems than you can work, so you really don't need an extra source of problems (like a practice test)
and 2. make sure you're well-rested and fed before walking the test. I have seen lots of guys try to take math tests when they're so tired that their skin is green. I've never seen one of them pass a test.