"profsplaining"
[headdesk]
Explaining things you don't fully understand to you is literally that person's job.
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LEGO Americana Roadshow: Building Across America I just checked out this traveling exhibition from LEGO and was quite impressed. The scale ... -
Merry Christmas, everyone!
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When we let politics trump science, people are needlessly put in harm's way. http://arstechnica.com/science/2017/01/self-censoring-fears...
When I was teaching the Boy Scouts robotics merit badge, a young man interrupted the safety discussion to ask, "when do we get to play with the robots?"
ReplyDeleteI patiently explained that the safety stuff is a hard requirement of getting the badge.
"But I don't even want the badge."
I didn't even have to answer that, because three Scouts in the room asked, "Then what are you doing here?"
Any professor guilty of "profsplaining" should get a pat on the back for doing their job. I've had one or two professors who won't or can't.
ReplyDeleteThe Professor has no idea what you meant to say, only what you actually said. He was preventing the rest of the class from being mislead by your incorrect explanation.
ReplyDeleteLinda Tewes Studentsplaining? Pupilsplaining?
ReplyDeleteEDIT: -1 to reading skillz today. I blame lack of coffee.
Morio Murase Teaching.
ReplyDeleteCraig Froehle I would love to see the comments from the original post.
ReplyDeleteBearman Cartoons That's why you draw. It works. :)
ReplyDeleteMorio Murase I love it when that happens. OTOH when it doesn't happen and the whole class is like that, I wonder how it is that they are in here and what the hell they think the title of the course is.
ReplyDeleteBob Calder I get maybe one or two kids like that every quarter (particularly true of nonreligious homeschoolers). This particular kid was definitely on the spectrum, possibly Asperger's. On the second to last day his mom had to come and pressure him to take the class seriously... He still didn't, which resulted in him only getting 1 requirement out of like 7 finished. Or was it one part of 1 requirement...?
ReplyDeleteSometimes I wonder if I was too hard on him-- when he wasn't taking the requirement workbook seriously and handed it in with incredibly half-assed responses, I replied sardonically to one of them along the lines of, "You know, some examples would be nice." But the reality is, I didn't have the wherewithal to handle both him and the rest of the class (which was rambunctious in a very different way). At the end of the day, I took a "lead the horses to the trough and see who eats" approach.
The worst thus far, though, has got to be the kid who thinks that if he's being honest, he shouldn't get in trouble for what he said. So he said to my face, "You're not a very fun person."
ReplyDeleteOf course, when I asked him to repeat that for his mother, he couldn't find an exit fast enough.
"the professional explainer of things just explained a thing to me and must be ridiculed"!!!
ReplyDeleteMorio Murase "you're not a very fun person" seems like a perfectly acceptable thing to say... is there something I'm missing here?
ReplyDeleteMorio Murase Where did he get the silly idea that you're supposed to be a fun person? Sure, it's nice but it's not a job requirement.
ReplyDeleteAs I recall, it was out of the blue, and the kid barely knew who I was. There might have been a few other things he said about his friend that was less respectful.
ReplyDeleteThat said, I'm not sure if it's appropriate for an 8 to 10-year-old to say that to a relative stranger more than 3 times his age.
Bob Calder wrote "...OTOH when it doesn't happen and the whole class is like that...."
ReplyDeleteSee, that's why I'm lucky to teach engineering. When that happens, and the whole class - or at least the 1/2 that bothers to show up - is like that, I just pull up a random engineering disaster and point out all the ways that the engineer in charge fucked up, and that it'll be a cold day in hell before I let anyone pass my class that shows symptoms of being as deficient, apathetic, and/or negligent to do that (whatever that disaster du jour was).
That gets their attention.
Filippo Salustri I love the Hartford Civic Center roof collapse for that reason. "Nobody thought". . .
ReplyDeleteAlso, I don't get why the OP's ID is redacted. Seriously, we (the rest of us profsplainers out there) need to know who that douche was.
ReplyDeleteFilippo Salustri Because shaming a person is much less my objective than is shaming an idea.
ReplyDeleteCraig Froehle Why not both?
ReplyDeleteI get the idea of taking the high road, but that's not really going to help.. The Deplorables will patently ignore everyone on the high road.
The US government is a perfect example.
Drumpf is in office, and the US government is going down the toilet, because there's too many Deplorables. There's too many Deplorables because the non-Deplorables have categorically been unwilling to put their foot down and tell the Deplorables to STFU. There are insufficient laws to control them; there are insufficient means to prevent them from causing harm. Thus, they spread like a cancer.
This happens at every level of society including some ignorant bag of skin like that pathetic case of "affluenza" in the OP.
Sorry to rant like this, but this is really a big deal for me. The high road just doesn't work.
Out of general interest, re:engineering disasters, a famous Linguist, Benjamin Lee Whorf, started out a chemical engineer, and discovered one item of linguistic interest in his work as an insurance investigator.
ReplyDeleteFor instance, he pointed out that when a device for drying things is called "a blower", it may cause people to use it in unfortunate ways:
His real-world example was some drying sheds from the fur industry that had caught fire, because the blowers were pointed into the sheds, allowing sparks from the engines to fly into the drying furs. He pointed out that the blowers can be safely used when pointed out of the sheds, evacuating air instead of "blowing".
He had a whole bunch of examples like that, and it was the basis for his input on linguistic relativism.
Andreas Geisler my dad, a mechanical engineer, taught me that concept except not linguistically - his lesson was to physically reorient the fan in my bedroom as well as a prof/engineersplain of the reasoning - a fan pointed out the window of a hot room will blow the hot air out and the change in air pressure will pull cool air in = mind blown ;-)
ReplyDeleteFilippo Salustri and Craig Froehle why not use the word educate?
ReplyDeleteShaming has not been found effective in studies on treating addiction and has been found to increase risk of violence when used in other ways. And in business research negative feedback has also been found to be ineffective as the person given negative feedback tends to just seek out other coworkers to work with or spend time with in the future who give more positive feedback. Sacrifice of individuals is associated historically with less equal societies. Shaming in itself may be addictive as it may be increasing dopamine levels in the person doing the shaming. smh.com.au - Shame addiction: Neuroscientist Alex Korb explains why guilt makes us feel good
Best wishes to your success at teaching.
Jennifer Depew Shaming and educating serve 2 different purposes. You're welcome to try to educate them, and I wish you luck. I believe I have better things to do. And please don't take that as an insult to those who may undertake to educate them, because I don't mean it as such.
ReplyDeleteI personally think they cannot be educated because they're mentally ill.
Shaming isn't about the person shamed, it's about trying to prevent others from believing the crap that the Deplorables believe.
Everyone does the best they can. Some people are educators; others are shamers. Both play a role.
Andreas Geisler When I read about the 'blower' (vs evacuation), it put me in mind of a "creativity technique" used by designers, where you consider the opposite of what the desired function (a verb) of a thing is. Kind of like the SCAMPER technique.
ReplyDeleteFilippo Salustri Not listening doesn't educate anymore than shaming promotes change in observers, it may just be promoting increased violence and resistance to change in observers. The conservative and liberal problem is both might be viewed as mentally ill by the other as both have different brain structures and different responses. https://www.google.com/search?q=conservatives+versus+liberals+brain+differences&rlz=1C1CHWA_enUS600US600&oq=conservatives+versus+liberals+brain+differences&aqs=chrome..69i57.11627j1j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 Truly valuing our diversity and trying to work together to accept the different brain structure's strengths and weaknesses would be my ideal whether SCAMPERing to the solution or just ambulating slowly.
ReplyDeleteWell you got me there - climate change is real.
ReplyDelete