Unintended consequences

We find, again, that the message we thought we sent is not always what was received.

Our consultants whose students receently returned to visit have been doing some additional thinking about what they said.  We’re tempted to conclude that the job market today is much more driven by temporary, limited-term employment than it was in the past.  That may in fact be true, but students and recent students have always been prone to moving around, so we can’t really say so on this basis.  That some students will go in (to us) obvious directions, while others will pursue quite unexpected paths, is hardly surprising, though worth bearing in mind when making plans or predictions.

What struck us most forcefully, however, was the fact that what the students remembered about their teachers is not the central message we were trying to get across.  They mentioned sayings or anecdotes that we told more or less along the way, things that were at best intended to spur a moment’s thought or illuminate a side issue.  We do remember saying them, and they’re not really anything to regret, but they’re not what we would have chosen to epitomise our teaching.

Well, maybe it’s only that what we thought of as the main teachings were so obvious they needed no mention, or that the subject matter has been so thoroughly assimilated that the process of learning it needs no comment.  But the fact remains that what a teacher thinks is being sent out to the students is not necessarily what is being received.

One clear class of examples occurs to us as students and teachers of physics.  The teacher is demonstrating a calculation or derivation in class; his focus is on the physical ideas involved, say the conservation of energy.  But the students are struggling to follow the mathematics.  They are concentrating on mastering details and miss the main idea.  (We’ve seen this many times.)

On a much lower level, the teacher may have mannerisms of which he or she is quite unconscious, but which the students notice to the exclusion of the course material.  One instructor we know had the habit of aiming his lectures at an unoccupied seat in the front row, leading the class to speculate as to the identity of the ghost student and thus miss out on some aspects of associated Legendre polynomials.

And even when an episode comes across intact it may carry the wrong lesson.  An anecdote intended to show that a graduate student must take charge of his or her own studies (rather than relying on a supervisor to decide to act) may only discourage any desire for a graduate degree at all.

This can be alarming, the idea that we’re constantly sending out messages of whose content we’re unaware.  So far the feedback we’ve gotten is that the lessons have been innocuous, even benign.  But it prompts us to look again at what we’re teaching, and how.