A few days ago, some colleagues and I were discussing the year that just ended, and the curriculum in general, and the frequent lament about needing to repeat ourselves came up. Due to some quirks of our calendar, we have a lot of students taking courses out of sequence, and as a result, have to teach the same mathematical techniques in multiple classes.<\/p>\n
On top of that, though, the students tend to say that any given technique is entirely new to them, even when they’ve already seen it. When that part came up, one of my colleagues said “Well, of course they do that– I did that when I was an undergrad, too. Everybody does.”<\/p>\n
I realized, though, that I didn’t. If a faculty member asked me “Have you seen this before?” I’d say “I think so– it looks sort of familiar,” whether I had or not, because I didn’t want to admit ignorance. Then I’d go home and frantically read about the technique in question in whatever books I had, to get caught up. In fact, I still tend to do this.<\/p>\n
It occurs to me that either this is a new way of dividing the world into Two Kinds of People, or I’m just an insecure freak. So, a poll for those readers who are still around:<\/p>\n
\nIf somebody is explaining something, and says “You’ve seen this before, right?,” what do you say?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Do you say “No, explain it again,” even if you’ve seen it, or do you say “Sure, keep going,” even though you haven’t?<\/p>\n
Answer honestly, now…<\/p>\n
(There’s probably some connection between this phenomenon and the idea of “interactional expertise” recently discussed by ZapperZ<\/a> and Tom<\/a>, which in turn connects to this article about the advantages of being a non-scientist<\/a> in a science writing position. That’s a longer and smarter post than I have time or energy for, though.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A few days ago, some colleagues and I were discussing the year that just ended, and the curriculum in general, and the frequent lament about needing to repeat ourselves came up. Due to some quirks of our calendar, we have a lot of students taking courses out of sequence, and as a result, have to… Continue reading Academic Poll: Have You Seen This Before?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,13,9,7,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2706","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-education","category-math","category-physics","category-science","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2706","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2706"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2706\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2706"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2706"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2706"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}