The article title sensationalizes the sum of two separate findings, without arguing (except by anecdote) that the findings can be summed that way (or at all).
That is, "teachers don't like creative students" is not at all the same thing as "teachers report not liking disruptive behavior" + "creativity is positively correlated with disruptive behavior."
I strongly suspect many readers on HN:
- are creative
- were at times disruptive in school
- were nevertheless well-liked by the vast majority of their teachers
Speaking as a former TA who ran college classrooms for a while...
Classroom management rides the line between order and chaos. You don't want students constantly interrupting, but you don't want them to be silent. Assignment grading is rife with judgement calls - what qualifies as 'correct' work? Some students feel incredibly entitled and challenge any slighting (ie., getting downgraded for being wrong). In these conditions, it's easy to see how rolling out a pigeon hole system becomes the solution to the challenge.
So Teachers Don’t Like Creative Students is a bit of an unsubtle title, full of false dichotomies and ignorant of nuance.
I attended German, Hungarian and US schools in K-12. In my experience, the US system is the weakest form of education and all the touchy-feely liberalism just results in a crappy education. I knew guys who were taking some idiot version of algebra in 11th grade, homework was doing multiplication on a calculator?
No, I do want my students to talk. Please do not tell me what I think. I want my students to move from being bumps on a log to engaging in the subject, ie, becoming fluent in it.
Also, I hold the expectation that mere facts are dealt with out of the classroom - class is about moving into interpretation and analysis, which does not always have obvious solutions.
I guess I tend to have the opposite view, that the European systems tend to focus on drilling facts and highly regimented exam- and track-based advancement structures, while the U.S. system produces more creative students and more flexibility (and more entrepreneurs and inventions). But then neither of us are citing data. =]
edit: Though I suppose "European" probably needs to be further qualified, because my understanding is that the Scandinavian systems are in many ways even more liberal than the American one, with a strong emphasis on students' autonomy to co-direct their own education.
However, it's still not that difficult to grade for "well-done" work in subjective areas.
Whether the thesis of a literary analysis paper is "correct" may be opinion, for example, but it's definitely possible to grade fairly based on a rubric of "did the student defend their thesis in a clear, organized manner, properly using appropriate citations from the text" (after filtering out theses that are completely inane or insane).
I was a TA for several years as a grad student, and was the sole instructor for an introductory programming class. I constantly asked my class questions - I did not want them to be silent. If your just march on through material without getting feedback from the class, you have no idea if anything is sticking.
TTT, Teacher Talking Time, something that should be minimized in most classrooms. I taught English to non-native speakers for a year, and did my best to minimize talking time, and to increase creative opportunities through games, strategies, team work, and entertainment. Of course in a conversational English class, minimizing TTT is extremely important. But I would say even in most other classes, teachers just talk too much, and don't focus nearly enough on properly engaging the students.
I spent a couple of years teaching at a career college in MA. The problem was not so much dealing with disruptive creative students, and I certainly had several of those, as it was dealing with students that didn't have the prerequisites and mental tools to learn the skills they needed to express themselves usefully.
An example: I had one student who spoke very well, he was from Cameroon and in fact spoke _several_ languages, was something of a class leader, he had very good visual ideas and his presentation style was remarkable. But. He did not know how to read a ruler and fractions were a complete mystery to him. Algebra was completely beyond him at his current state.
He was in a graphic design class and was going into a web programming class, and following that a 3D modeling class. He often became actively resentful that I was forcing him to focus on things that he considered trivial and not apparently related to the results he wanted. He very much felt I was stifling his creativity.
Convincing him that he would simply fail at his goals without studying some basics was very difficult.
We got the fractions and ruler issues licked with some outside class work, but he simply was not able to handle the coding in the web design class and failed. I didn't teach the 3D class, so I don't know how well he did there, but I can only imagine.
(One of the reasons I left the school was that with such a wide variety of students with incredibly varied levels of education, I wasn't allowed to adapt the classes to meet their needs. I did finally get the school to offer remedial math and reading lessons, but they were not prerequisites and they did no kind of testing to determine need.)
My point is that creativity is important, but basic skills often are more important, at least at the beginning. And no matter how gifted one is, developing the discipline to work on non-interesting and non-creative tasks is essential in the real world. There are problems that have aspects that are simply beyond hacking and shooting from the hip. And they are often, ultimately, the most interesting and rewarding to solve.
It's not that teachers don't like Creative Students -- my wife is a K-12 Special Ed teacher working on her Ph.D -- but that the educational system doesn't know what to do with students who do not fit into their state-provided lesson plan. In Kentucky, the state dept of Education provides:
- The lesson plans
- The Powerpoint slides
- The quizes
- The lecture outline
The lazy teachers use the state provided materials and don't change it.
The good teachers modify the plans to suit their students learning behavior and work accordingly.
The great teachers identify a different instructional design model and make it work for all of the students in their class.
The kids are tested every year at a state level that ensures that the student who lives in BFE, Kentucky (where I live) receives the same level of education as a student in a medium sized town and both students learn the same things that a student who lives in a 'major' area like Lexington or Louisville will learn.
If a teacher isn't making the grades at a statewide level, they will get rid of her or cut funding to the school. Sadly, this means that many lazy teachers are just teaching to the test, and nothing else.
If the system works as you describe, then it's fantastic - state provided standards ensure a minimum level of education, while still allowing some students to receive a superior level of education.
Perhaps the rest of the country can learn something from Kentucky.
Did you read what he said? The bad teachers just "teach the test", the good teachers are far better off without state provided standards and equal outcome mandates rendering the entire exercise pointless.
No, he said the lazy teachers "teach the test", i.e. strive to make sure their students meet minimum standards. A system which makes sure even lazy workers perform adequately is a good system.
...the good teachers are far better off without state provided standards...
No, he said the good teachers are just as well off - they modify the standard lesson plans and are only penalized if their students do poorly.
I'm not sure if you are being deliberately obtuse. The lazy workers are not performing adequately under the system, they are gaming it by focusing only on monitored metrics.
This has real consequences for good teachers, who have to justify what they are trying to teach to a principal who only cares that school funding will be cut unless standardized test scores improve.
As long as the monitored metrics are appropriate measures of what the school is trying to teach, there is nothing wrong with optimizing them. If the metrics are insufficient, then the problem is the metrics, not the attempt to maximize them.
Since neither you nor imroot actually criticized the metrics, I see no reason to believe they do a bad job of measuring performance.
Actually, in the district where my wife works, both gifted kids as well as children who have emotional and behavioral disorders are placed in the "Special Education" department. She does half a day doing "Pull-Out" special ed, where she'll pull the EBD children into a corner of their existing classroom to work on things, then another half day doing the same type of pull-out work with gifted kids.
So many job adverts ask for creative people, but on the job creativity is discouraged. Employers want employees to implement the employer's creations.
That said, getting along socially is enormously important. Smart, creative people figure this out. The general impression that to be creative one has to be some sort of social misfit is overblown.
As Piccaso demonstrated, great creativity is born aloft by great mastery. It's not that hard to Get a bad haircut and some outlandish clothing to pose as a creative naughty person.
Homeschool. Then you don't have to deal with group dynamics like that. If you care about your children's education and don't trust teachers then do it yourself.
Homeschooling can be a great option but it's not feasible for everyone, esp. those without the time and/or resources to be able to do homeschooling. It's still important to look at public education critically to look for ways of improvement since there are many that rely on public education as one of the, if not the only, available source of group education in their communities.
Definitely agreed. The public education system needs a cold hard look and it needs to be overhauled. We haven't really changed it since its inception, and it's just assumed that it works.
But its core assumptions are being proven false. A one-size-fits-all education is failing most of our students, the students who are slower and can't catch up, and the students who are faster and are held down.
The vast majority of people who homeschool bring in less than a typical salary for a good developer. It's not about feasibility for the HN crowd, it's about willingness to prioritize.
Most families today choose a dual income over the reduced childcare and educational costs and greater control over the education of their children. It's a trade-off few people consider. Income is not the only aspect of this.
Learning about group dynamics and social situations is probably the most important part of middle/high school, and more often then not homeschooled kids are at a disadvantage in these situations when they finish school then when compared to non-homeschooled kids.
This isn't always the case, and social awkwardness can go away after x amount of time, but I know that I am glad I wasn't homeschooled despite the occasional bad experiences at high school. Knowing how to deal with people face to face is an extremely important skill.
As a commenter in the original article pointed out, homeschooling is a work around, not a solution.
As a home-schooled kid myself, I would suggest thinking very long and hard about all options and long-term goals before doing it. There are positives and negatives to everything of course, but the +'s and -'s of home-schooling can be very far reaching and long-term. You can't just exit the plan and move on without consequence.
It's not a workaround. A workaround wouldn't solve the original problem: getting an education. Homeschooling does that.
"It's not a solution, it's a workaround" is used when one does not wish to allow solutions that reject the current system, in this case education by the state.
That's a solution for you, but the education system would remain broken for everyone else. That is bad for the country as a whole. Thus, home-schooling your child is a work-around to the bad state of education, but the solution for all children is to fix education.
You assume that education for most must be done by the state. Yes, what I stated is a solution, and it does work around the state education problem. I admit the possibility that the state education system can be fixed, but I also admit the probability that it won't be in my lifetime.
If you have a problem, and you can use a different infrastructure to avoid it at an acceptable cost, it makes sense to use it.
I think this is generally true, but there are counterexamples---I'm sure many of us here remember some of our own teachers that bucked this trend. Speaking for myself, I do try my best to foster the creative ones; they can be kind of a pain in the ass sometimes but they keep me on my toes and exert a net positive influence on the class by hitting ideas from an unexpected angle (i.e. one unexpected by me and therefore one that the other students wouldn't have otherwise been presented with). That benefits everyone.
I do have to rein them in sometimes, though, e.g. "when I give you a spec you really have to implement that function, not something else that does something similar, however much more awesome that other thing is". Because sometimes you really do have to just implement the spec.
That finding relies heavily on reports by teachers, not actual tests of creative ability. As such, the methodology tends to filter out any non-disruptive creatives, leaving people who have both creativity and anti-social behavior sets.
This was made painfully clear to me when I took an English literature class in college. The class focused on short stories and involved a lot of "deep analysis". My method of analysis was to approach stories from a rational standpoint, which doesn't sound creative at first, but the problem with fiction is that the stories exist in a realm without rules (or incomplete rules, in the best case scenario). Approaching this type of work from a rational standpoint usually leads to a nearly endless number of possibilities, each of which cannot be proven more likely than the next.
Analyzing fiction is a guessing game at best, and a completely naive, amateur attempt to perform psychoanalysis on dead authors at worst. Anyone who points this out will not fare well in such a class... take it from someone who learned firsthand. Professors who have taught the same interpretations for twenty years don't like it when someone has a new idea of what their favorite stories might mean.
You sound like you missed the entire point of a college level literature class. You must have made your TA's life a pleasure arguing that your homegrown, self reinforcing, critiquing system was just as valid as those being taught in class.
Just so you know, you're exactly the same as the student arguing creationism in a biology class, the young earth model in geology, or the solipsistic freshman in Philosophy 101. Just another thick skulled, pompous, snowflake student who would rather pretend to know everything than learn how to think different (AKA in the manner being taught in the specific class). That's ok, you probably moved on in life calling the professor and TA idiots and never skipped a beat while whining about your C.
This comment was constructed using the rational system where I can't be wrong and you can't be right.
What's the standard for correctness in literature criticism? Biology has one (agreement with externally observable reality). I don't know what the objectives of lit crit actually are, nor what their research methodology is, but it seems that lit crit has more to do with conforming to the culture and tradition of lit crit than anything else.
1) Learn and understand the critical framework you will be applying to a work
2) Read the work with the framework in mind
3) Write a critique based on that framework
If you hand in a paper on a completely made up framework that is
poorly defined, arbitrary and only exists in your head, then the paper deserves an F. This is called the "Make it up as you go along" critique.
The make it up as you go along technique is akin to writing up a lab without describing the procedures or recording the results. Then you draw conclusions from the procedure and results that exists only in your head. No one could reproduce it so no one can say you're wrong. You'd still get an F.
In writing, If you speak to the professor and say you have an idea for a new/unique style of literary critique and get permission to write up both a description of your technique, as well as a paper utilizing that technique, then you can get an A. Who knows, it depends on the class. The professor could very well say "This is an intro level class where you learn about existing techniques. Save inventing your own for a seminar or senior thesis."
But what the OP presented was not a scholarly approach to critique, but a snowflake "All ideas have equal value" approach.
Someone who has taken a literature class more recently feel free to correct me.
tl;dr Professors put a lot of thought into their academic work and pompous undergrads usually haven't learned enough to know what they don't know.
"Analyzing fiction is a guessing game at best, and a completely naive, amateur attempt to perform psychoanalysis on dead authors at worst."
Actually, one of the cardinal rules of literary criticism is that you should not attempt to psychoanalyze the author of a work; rather, you should treat the work as a self-contained unit. If you're going to analyze the author, then it's an entirely different task. Blending the two bastardizes both efforts. So yes, I would agree that bad criticism tends to employ such efforts. But I would also argue that no literature professor worth his tenure should even be proposing such methods in a classroom.
I do agree that trying to discern intent is a "guessing game." But some ways of guessing are much more effective than others. And some guesses are more sound than others.
While I sympathize with much of what you're saying, I think you give short shrift to the field of literary criticism and analysis. There's some genuinely insightful, analytical, occasionally profound stuff out there.
"My method of analysis was to approach stories from a rational standpoint..."
What do you mean by this? "Rational" in what sense? Are you studying the rationality of the text? Are you proposing a set of logical guidelines to be used in evaluating a text? Are you focusing on the internal coherence and consistencies of the world within the story? Are you focused on the story's structural soundness? "Rational" is a pretty big and broad word that begs clarification. As you can see, I just generated a handful of different ways of interpreting your statement. This would seem to indicate that the statement needs further clarification.
Now, the real problem with this is that you're suggesting that your approach was "rational," and implying that other approaches are irrational. Such a claim demands explication.
"...the problem with fiction is that the stories exist in a realm without rules (or incomplete rules, in the best case scenario)."
Again, this is pretty vague. What do you mean by "rules?" And are the "rules" you're proposing in any way tainted by your own subjectivity? It's very, very, very tricky to define sets of rules for fiction. By and large, we're still pretty much working with the set that the Greeks came up with a couple thousand years ago.
I don't mean to knock you or your post, because I think I understand what you're saying. But if you're going to attack a system, you need to be very clear about a) what's wrong with the system, and b) what your alternatives entail.
Except that those cardinal rules of literary criticism are more or less pointless and arbitrary. It's like how the cardinal rules of certain types of astrology form a (mostly) internally consistent system, but so what? Neither astrology or literary criticism produce useful results, except by happenstance. No one system of either discipline is provably better than another, so it's ridiculous to draw a line at psychoanalyzing dead authors when everything else is built on a foundation of sand.
Teaching classical literary criticism techniques is probably as good a way as any to improve students' reading comprehension, critical thinking, and writing skills. But let's not pretend it has some deeper significance beyond being a pedagogical tool.
My problem with literary criticism is that it's essentially a disingenuous pseudoscience. Critics make authoritative pronouncements on human nature, culture, society, etc., when they're not actually qualified social scientists. They constantly misappropriate theories from other disciplines, yet they make no effort to support their claims with research or empirical evidence.
Literary criticism as a whole seems to suffer from a fundamental misunderstanding of epistemology (for which I'm sure we can thank postmodernism). It's the perfect platform for anti-intellectuals to espouse their unsubstantiated social and political theories while enjoying immunity from any rigorous scrutiny.
With all due respect, I think you're reading the wrong literary criticism.
That's quite a broad brush with which to paint the entire field, and I can assure you that most of it does not "deal in authoritative pronouncements on human nature, culture, society, etc." or "misappropriate theories from other disciplines." The best literary criticism analyzes and evaluates what's in the text, and does not attempt to conflate literature with philosophy or sociology (unless in an anthropological sense of those fields).
Perhaps some of you have had some bad English teachers or professors? I think we all have. There are vanishingly few good ones out there these days. But we should not confuse bad literary criticism with all literary criticism. Just as I wouldn't look at a horribly coded mess and conclude that the field of programming is bunk, I wouldn't look at a terrible example of criticism and condemn the entire field.
You might be confusing the process of analyzing fiction and producing an analysis that demonstrates whatever a given English lit professor is looking for.
Though you might be also happy to know that such luminaries as C.S. Lewis think that analysis itself may be the wrong way to talk about stories -- that if you're doing it right, you you experience them more than you "analyze" them:
It's certainly true that some professors (not just literature, but of any discipline in which there are subjective or aesthetic issues, which is arguably all of them) really don't have a sufficiently flexible view to accommodate thinking outside of the paths they've personally trodden.
But my experience is that a lot of literature people really just want to see that you've had some kind of experience with the work and are capable of articulating insights that you've connected from it.
"the problem with fiction is that the stories exist in a realm without rules (or incomplete rules, in the best case scenario)"
It's not clear to me that anybody lives in a realm with complete rules (unless some of them are inconsistent). And even if we are in fact located in such a place, I'd be willing to bet that nobody has anything resembling a complete model of the world in their heads.
"Analyzing fiction is a guessing game at best, and a completely naive, amateur attempt to perform psychoanalysis on dead authors at worst. Anyone who points this out will not fare well in such a class... take it from someone who learned firsthand."
I wasn't there, I have no way of telling whether or not you were as confrontational about the fundamental worthiness of an endeavor many people find deeply enriching and to which your prof had probably chosen to dedicate their life to as you seem to be here, or if you were simply unfortunate to take a course from someone who couldn't handle some any challenge let alone thoughtful deviation from accepted analysis is unfortunate, but I'd submit that in either case there was probably some opportunity for real education.
As for whether it's just a game: the universe may well be ultimately orderly, and the limited rationalism we're possessed of might even yield the tools to eventually encompass most of its secrets. But the universe most of us really inhabit -- the one made of the stories in our heads -- is a lot messier, and fiction and the tools of analyzing fiction can be as important in navigating it as logic is.
That is, "teachers don't like creative students" is not at all the same thing as "teachers report not liking disruptive behavior" + "creativity is positively correlated with disruptive behavior."
I strongly suspect many readers on HN:
- are creative
- were at times disruptive in school
- were nevertheless well-liked by the vast majority of their teachers