what the fuck am i getting myself into with this grad school stuff

have fun though. simon singh is a good egg.

my wife's experience may not necessarily be typical given that she was in a small cohort at a relatively elite private school, but here goes:

1&3) of the dozen or so in her cohort, i think exactly one was a former teacher and she was the only class member over 30. my wife was about 25 when she started and had already completed a master's in counseling, so she had some experience working in schools. a friend of hers had worked in adult protective service, but i think that was the extent of experience in the group. nearly everyone else had come straight from undergrad and had been a psych major (one or two may have been ed majors).

2) this might be another anomaly because in our lovely state (texas) you are not considered a psychologist per, but rather a 'licensed specialist in school psychology (LSSP).' this is because doctorate level psychs are nancies who don't want to debase their title by associating with master's-level ppl. BUT, there are some programs with which you can get your LPA license simultaneously which would allow you to do private practice in lieu of or in addition to your school bidniss (i believe the stipulation with the LPA is that you must practice under the supervision of a PhD level psych).

more direct answer tho, most of them are going to be working in schools because it's easier to make a living as a newly minted LSSP in schools than the venture out into the world (informed speculation on my part). then again i dont think anyone tried to do the LPA this go-around, so they may not have the option anyway.

hope this wasn't tl;dr

x-post x3

so glad my entire two-hour class this evening is being given over to repetitive, boring, useless five-minute student presentations (including my own)

― congratulations (n/a), Monday, October 5, 2009 6:31 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

ughh this is the fucking worst. student presentations are the biggest waste of time for everybody, except for the professor obv who doesn't have to do shit

hate those so so much

my class yesterday was 2 hours taken up by 4 student presentations. ridiculous i tell you. it's useful in that we are going to get a lot of speaking experience this semester, but it's frustrating to do all that reading and not get to discuss anything because there's more powerpoint ahead.

in an hour i have to go meet with my temporary adviser to talk about my master's research project...i am SO unprepared, because i don't even know where to START. yikes.

cheers caek! sad how SS fucked himself over with those *goddamn* libel laws ;_;

suspect you're going to see a lot of #libelfail at that talk

it's a trending topic, do you see what i did?

It's tough b/c as a prof, student presentations sound like a good idea in lots of ways beyond their easiness qua prep: for instance, they promote hard work through social shaming for bad presentations. But that's the thing: so many of them are bad that it's not clear the shaming makes any difference. But from the prof's view they sound bad for many reasons too: your students are paying you to teach, not paying each other; and they take away from valuable class time which even in a 14-16 week term is scarce.

But as a student: these are great practice for giving talks, which, if you stay in academia, are among the most important things you'll do. People get a reputation for great talks, and those who give shitty ones also get a reputation (and hence fewer opportunities to travel to cool places on someone else's dime/euro/whatever). And even if you're not in academia public presentation is important for lots of good jobs.

And the ability to give good talks is partly a matter of natural talent and partly training/practice. You get better at organizing material for presentation, at least, as you do it more. You get over your nerves if you're naturally afraid of speaking in public. So it's really something worth working at.

I still have never assigned them as a prof. Maybe if the students lobbied me some term I might change my mind. I'm just saying that as a student they're a great opportunity to practice a valuable skill with low stakes (relatively to post-school life).

I understand the value for public presentation skills, but I think in my class at least, they need to be more time limited, especially if they're very regular - in a 2 hour 20 minute time slot, student presentations should not be running 30-45 minutes each and leaving 15-20 minutes for actually addressing the readings, as they have been for the last few weeks. I think cutting each presentation down to 15-20 minutes would result in a much better balance and really don't understand why the professor has not commented on how they've been getting longer and longer (20 minutes was the original assignment).

(And then of course there's the pressure of realizing that your 20 minute prepared presentation is going to look about half as extensive as everyone else's, so you go ahead and extend it...that may be why they keep getting longer. But I swear I'm going to buck the system!)

(xpost) My hat goes off to Simon Singh for being able to write books about (in places fairly impenetrable areas of) maths and still make Joe Maths-Fearing Public e.g. me breeze through it thinking they know what's going on.

This is a talent I didn't really appreciate until I read a Marcus du Sautoy book about the Riemann Hypothesis, which is only ever explained in terms of being a bit like finding a lake near some mountains, an analogy which is repeated on page after page with no attempt to explain what they represent in even vaguely mathematical terms.

(OK, I'm not ever going to understand the actual maths of that one, but I'm not ever going to understand half the things mentioned in FLT/The Code Book either, and somehow Singh leads you on a cheery ice-skate past them all without you realising you aren't actually keeping up with the world-class mathematical breakthroughs of the past century)

"your students are paying you to teach, not paying each other; and they take away from valuable class time which even in a 14-16 week term is scarce."

how does this tie in with learner-centered teaching? does that even happen in math/phil? clearly the faculty who go in for this in a big way aren't trying to avoid work, and are a self-selecting group of enthusiastic teachers, but i wonder if the students feel short-changed?

LJ, you should read my post on the adult education thread about a couple of physics courses i certainly think any aspirant science writer (and ideally any voter) should have under their belt.

haha i see what you did...given a moment's respite from this **goddamn** shorthand class i will check it out :)

we have all been forced to join twitter at gunpoint pretty much btw o_O

**goddamn**

twitter will be irrelevant within the year

we r also bloggers now fwiw

I don't know precisely what you mean by "learner-centered teaching", but in math maybe it would be the analogue of "discovery-based learning" where the students are supposed to discover theorems by computations/ graphical experimentation on computers. Those are typically done as a lab, though, rather than replacing traditional lectures.

In phil our courses are typically lecture+discussion, at least in the US. My intro courses have as much student discussion as I can get out of them, which turns out to be quite a lot. A few students have complained about this, too, on the grounds that it's not what they're paying for. But most of them enjoy it and I think, on the whole, they learn more from listening to them talk and then me trying to coax them into clarifying what they've said, and coaxing others to comment on what they've said, then from "listening" to me. And I comment on what they've said, too, in addition to lecturing in between questions to promote discussion.

clearly the faculty who go in for this in a big way aren't trying to avoid work, and are a self-selecting group of enthusiastic teachers, but i wonder if the students feel short-changed?

ha tbh, i couldn't always tell if the professors were trying to avoid work - some professors weren't but others i think most definitely were - but by and large the students did feel short-changed. it might be a valuable exercise for the individual students giving the presentations, but for the rest of the students, it was hard to really gain much out of it. there's really a value imo in learning something from an expert (who has spent a lot of time writing/researching/reflecting on the subject) than from a newcomer who has learned this stuff for the first time.

in a given course, out of say 15-25 student presentations, maybe 4 of those were really, really good. the rest, not really

yeah but what I'm saying is that the value to the individual students giving the presentations can be really, really high---possibly much higher than whatever you would have learned and forgotten that day.

"learner-centered" is some jargon for interactive stuff. In physics at the moment this takes the form of entire "lecture" courses (not just the labs or whatev) being taught as "think-pair-share", which is where you do like 20% of a lecture as traditional recitation, but most of it is multiple choice q which you get them to argue in pairs about who is right. this particular strategy is useless for subjects that don't work as multiple choice though (e.g. phil, math, presumably).

the details not important for our point though, which is that any of these approaches which involve more talking by the students necessarily involve less talking by the instructor. so even if they work better (and evidence is clearly that they do), they feel short-changed. were the complaints you received just casual griping about how the course was going, or did they actually end up on evaluations? do you think they're really motivated by laziness ('i don't come to lectures to work') rather than their view of the best way of learning.

to be clear here i'm not talking about taking up a 90 minute class with 5 min student presentations, which is obviously bullshit (but probably has to be done)

Good questions. Each term maybe two or three students complains (in a casual, off-hand way; they're not pissed off) to me in person that they prefer it when I talk and they can "absorb" (as they put it). Occasionally a student will write this on an evaluation too. I don't think these students are motivated by laziness; they wouldn't bother talking to me or completing their evaluation. I think it's more that they're in the habit of coming to class and being passive learners, and my classes break that habit. As a result they're jarring.

I don't do multiple choice but I have colleagues (in both math and phil) who do. But arguing about what's right in my phil classes is all we do, so in a lot of ways my class is "learner-centered". My dean will be happy to hear it as my university is "student-centered" (however that's to be understood I am not sure).

yeah I think presentations of 20 minutes or longer are necessary to make them worth the bother, and for them to help the student learn how to present better.

thanks euler, very interesting.

-- an aspiring college professor

xp to self: oxford undergrad physics takes the following approach to presentations: in a four year course, students must give one presentation of ~20 mins in the 2nd year. this is worth a fraction of a % of the final classification, is aggressively curved so everyone who turns up and doesn't faint gets 50-80/100, and alcoholic drinks are served. i think this is about right. the students get the fear at least once and everyone else whose time is wasted gets free booze.

20 mins seems about right. like you say, 5 mins is too short -- there's little time for anything to go badly wrong and less need to think about structure, so they don't need to try. but a 1h presentation by someone who hasn't at least attended a lot (like more than 20) 1h academic talks is a pretty awful experience. most undergrads and masters students will not have this experience until much later.

within the humanities lectures are a ridiculous pre-15th century anachronism.

Full disclosure: for some reason in undergrad I ended giving a lot of talks; maybe it was something that the university promoted? By senior year they were full class presentations, e.g. 50 minutes. So I was forced to work at this. By the end I was pretty good at it. And you end up giving professional talks pretty quickly in grad school. My quals my first year involved a 30 minute talk on an advanced topic, and then I gave a 1 hr version of it to the logic seminar a few months later. I gave my first conference talk at the end of my second year, and then we're off. Not only does this have cash value qua professional development, but you become a better teacher as you start to think of public presentation as normal and don't get nervous about it.

I think MORE than 20 minutes sort of borders being a waste of the other students' time though. Whatever public speaking and organizational skills you get out of a 40 minute presentation will still exist for a 20 minute presentation, and you might have to be more organized to keep from going over anyway. (I'd be more tolerant if this weren't something happening in TWO CLASSES EVERY WEEK, which may be an extreme circumstance.)

xp bison: definitely not tl;dr and really useful - thanks very much.

kind of wanna get an MPH but i should stop this whole going to school thing

mphs are quick

meal patrick harris

good one, max

yeah and i hear from someone who has done both that it's a joke compared to a jd and i already have one of those and it wasn't that hard so

but i should prob wait a few years at least, or not do it at all

i just miss science and i want to know more things and looking at admission requirements it appears i have all the prereqs covered (statistics, social sciences, stuff) except the "recommended" one biology course but i think i can figure it out. i'm smart. arrrrrghhhhhh

just finished a draft of paper II. off it goes to my co-authors! yaaaaaow!

the last one was kind of worthy, this one is half the length and has a CONTROVERSIAL CONCLUSION. exciting!

harbl do health law or something and feel out what yr interested in, then do mph

i don't wanna do health law though! more intersted in like, crimes and stuff, mental health, addiction. but yeah i'm gonna try and wait 2 years and save up some money. i'm not even 25 yet. i have time. *sigh*

harbl do health law or something and feel out what yr interested in, then do mph

― butt sound insanity (gbx), Thursday, October 8, 2009 5:26 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

meal patrick harris?

miles per harbl

u guys are masters of comedy

still getting my comedy bachelors :(

ok don't do health law! do stuff w crime and addiction and stuff. which btw is v v interesting.

all things i have considered getting add'l degrees in:
ethnomusicology
straight up musicology (some ethno included)
mba
jd
accounting/finance
maybe another bachelors in computer things

but yeah, like harbl, i have to stop myself.

I am in Jew School and taking an ice skating class. Does this count as grad school y/n.

only the ice skating class imo