panoptical

Alice: I'm hungry.
Bob: Want a sandwich?
Alice: Meh... not really.
Bob: How about a hot dog?
Alice: Oh, yeah, that sounds good.
Bob: Aha! So you do want a sandwich.
Alice: What?
Bob: Well, technically a hot dog *is* a sandwich, so when I asked you if you wanted a sandwich and you said no, you were mistaken.
Alice: ...
Bob: (complicated internet argument proving a hot dog is a sandwich).
Alice: Okay, fine, whatever. I'm hungry.  Just make me a "sandwich".
Bob: (hands Alice a ham and cheese sandwich)
Alice: ...okay, see, this is literally the exact thing I *didn't* want.
Bob: But you said you wanted a sandwich!

What's happening in this parable is that Alice is making an honest attempt to communicate... (read 549 more words →)

Teacher here: you're conflating course content with assessment, which is a mistake - the two are logically independent.

I assume the purpose of a course called "Survey of the Arts" is to get you to learn some content - that is, some set of facts about art movements.  Because it's a survey course it should be broad general knowledge.  Survey courses often exist to allow students to dabble enough in a subject to see if they're interested in any particular field.  I did a linguistics survey class and discovered I was really interested in sociolinguistics and not very interested in phonetics.  That in itself was useful.

The purpose of an assessment is to measure... (read more)

I'm a teacher and in the country where I live we had a few weeks of school in-person this September-October until the fall wave got too high and we all went home.  School was run with a reduced class size and distancing rules in place, but try telling that to a sixth grader.  At one point a kid jumped out of his chair and ran up to me and I had to tell him to back up and go back to his seat.  Another kid asked, "Mr. Z, are you scared of coronavirus?"

What did that feel like?  It felt like being offended.  I sort of mentally seized up, and my chest muscles... (read 433 more words →)