Students respond better to feedback when it's depersonalized.
Personal: Your wording here is unclear
Impersonal: The wording here is unclear.
Personal: Your organization is confusing.
Impersonal: The organization is confusing.
Personal: You made the opposite claim in the previous paragraph.
Impersonal: The previous paragraph made the opposite claim.
I've found that this makes a massive difference, giving students the detachment they need to focus on their writing.
@yasha I do this with all my students, and moving to high school I noticed the impersonal phrasing is waaaay more common
Probably because you know you're teaching this to kids for the first time
Most of the high school teachers I work with provide better feedback than peers in academia
College needs to do better
Wonder if requiring people to know something about teaching would help
It definitely wouldn't hurt!
@yasha inspired me to start a conversation on this lol
College profs are often Terrible teachers and that always ground my gears when teaching courses
I agree. With no formal training in teaching, most professors teach the way they were taught. That might seem reasonable were it not that the people who survive the system to become professors generally aren't representative of the students they're trying to teach.
Of course, it doesn't help that teaching well isn't well incentivized at many universities.
@yasha It's a terrible feedback loop
I would have first gen kids panicking in my office over Other classes cause of this situation
It is so harmful for students and pushes out kids
I think it's harmful to professors, too. It's definitely harmful to our disciplines!
I'm not quite as pessimistic as you are. Nevertheless, I can't deny that, for all academia is vilified in public discourse as a liberal bastion, it is, in fact, an incredibly conservative institution.
I can understand that! I suppose what gives me some hope is that sexism, racism, classism, and homophobia are far less evenly distributed than they were when I started as an undergraduate.
That isn't to say those problems aren't pervasive. They absolutely are. Still, if some pockets of academia can be reformed, perhaps there's some hope for the rest as well.
@yasha I experienced it far less in undergrad than in grad school where it was as pervasive as air
So I think seeing it so spread throughout US graduate programs made me very skeptical and I defended this past October
I'd hope it can be reformed but academia as is, with its reliance on adjunct labor and precariousness and the normalization of abusive advisor advisee relationships - I don't see it changing so much as become more exploitative
Right now, I see it as a coin toss as to which direction things will go.
When I started undergrad, my university had only recently lost a Supreme Court case to allow LGBTQ+ clubs on campus and my field was about 60/40 men to women. Now, my field is dominated by women and ally stickers adorn every other faculty office.
Of course, those faculty are decidedly monochromatic so...
Yeah, a coin toss.
Yasha Hartberg (he/him)
cyborgneticz