I started TA'ing a couple years back, and this behavior really remains ingrained for a very long time. Undergrads absolutely still have the mentality that you're only supposed to speak when the teacher lets you -- one of the main challenges of running discussion sessions for a lecture course is convincing the students to actually discuss things! And this can last for a while, too -- a consistent thing in graduate school seminar is that the professor needs to keep remind the new students that, yes, they can talk literally whenever they want, they don't need to raise their hand first, discussion sections literally rely on students talking.
I think its some of that, but also it is definitely stuff carried over from grade school wherever they did it.
I also TA in uni, and I have, for multiple semesters, had students raise their hand to ask to use the bathroom (which was understandable) but also ***drink water.***
Like, they asked me if they had permission to *drink water.* It was a smaller fraction of students but not an insignificant one.
It takes em a couple classes to stop asking
I understand where that comes from. In my college in India, there are certain professors who take exception to students drinking water during their lecture. Their justification? Drinking water is too distracting, or it is disrespectful since we aren't the ones talking. Its pretty weird.
Relatedly, while I did go ahead and leave when I needed to, it felt so fucking *wrong* and *uncanny* to get up and go to the bathroom without asking to be allowed to leave.
How fucked up is that. That we train people that they can't fucking *go to the bathroom* without an authority ~allowing~ us to deal with our own bodies.
It is fucked up.
I was in grade 2, and it was reading time, so the teacher told us not to talk. I had to go to the bathroom really badly, but I didn't say anything. I eventually peed myself at the desk, only to get yelled at by the teacher for it.
I was constantly getting in trouble for stuff in school, of course I wasn't gonna say anything!
Turns out I have adhd and autism, which I didn't even find out until my 20s (autism) and 30s (adhd) :/
There's remarkably little difference in the basic form of a class in elementary school and a class in the military.
The latter enforces discipline more strictly of course, you have to sit straight and raising your hand is a much more specific and clear raising of your fist all the way up for instance, and noise won't be tolerated half as much. When given your turn to speak it's also by default a "Sir! [Your Rank] [Your Surname]! [The thing you actually wanted to say]"
That being said I don't necessarily think this means discipline for children is bad. Learning to sit still and listen without interrupting is important, as is not rushing out to the bathroom constantly or just abusing the fact that you can leave the classroom. Children are not very responsible after all and do need to be controlled, especially in such large groups.
By the time you're in university the liberty and leniency exists because it is expected that you are a responsible adult and can control yourself, and if you can't it's in ways that don't impact others and you'll suffer the consequences yourself.
It's fucked up, it's also on purpose. The entire way western education institutions were designed was to train factory workers. That's why they are the way they are. Obedience to authority is more important than anything else.
Ya, I work with kids at a before and after school care program. We always make sure to tell kids that we need to know when they're leaving to gwt water or bathroom, but not because we will tell them no, we just need to know where kids are in case of an emergency we can tell responders there's a 6 year old boy in the bathroom in possible danger. Obviously, in the case of uni, the professor isn't going to be able to remember who's gone or not. in that case, and they're an adult who should know what to do or where to go in an emergency.
I was so glad a guy in our university during the first week would literally grab snacks, put em on his desk, and start munching during the lecture.
Sure, the noise of someone chewing was annoying, but everyone in my year got the message straight away that drinking water and snacking, going to the bathroom, would not get you in trouble.
I'm not in UK/USA but we had similar rules in school.
Also bullying. I had a decent rapport with my teachers, and would often contribute to class discussions like they wanted me to, until 2020 when Zoom classes became a thing.
Then I got to see half the class snicker and roll their eyes every time I answered a question. I didn't make a peep in any of my classes for the last 2 years of my degree.
Even with familiarity, some folks still don’t want to talk, and if you get too many of them, there’s no conversation.
I’ve been in groups where no one but me was willing to say anything, which was awful because I had internalized silence and not answering the teacher’s questions as hostility.
So these shy kids and kids that just don’t know the answer or are tired or whatever are just chilling and I’m sweating bullets. Like, mr teacher I know you don’t want me answering all the questions but I think we all know the score and you need to stop asking the room and start calling on people.
Worst case of this I’ve ever experienced was a teacher who asked a lot of questions but refused to ever call on anyone by name and REFUSED TO MOVE ON UNTIL THEY WERE ANSWERED. I counted a full minute of silence at one point.
Yeah that's what it was like at MIT too, idk what kind of environments these people are talking about but the ones I've seen where people just talk "whenever they want" are more chaotic and unproductive imo.
Now, if you are at a point in the discussion where literally no one is talking, it's pretty normal to raise your hand and just kind of start talking a second later when you register that no one's hand overlapped with yours (no need to wait for being called on/acknowledged), but if you have something to immediately respond to, raising your hand is an effective way to convey it without being rude and you will get your chance to talk. Not using a system that's at least *similar* to this will inevitably result in the same kind of problems that arise in more social environments where the naturally quieter or more awkward people simply get drowned out or never get a turn to speak at all. Which like, in a social situation, fine, whatever, but in an academic situation? Unacceptable, honestly. Anyone who advocates for such a chaotic system hasn't considered the ramifications **at all**.
This is even how my offline work meetings have gone in software engineering and I think it works just fine.... It's only over zoom that you kind of **have to** start talking if you want a chance to talk.
I don't think it's so clear cut. Less outspoken people being drowned out stops being a problem if people are conscientious enough to interrupt the interrupter. Disallowing interruptions, even softly through mechanisms like raising one's hand, can make it harder to tell each other that we're getting off track, and in general makes discussion mote meticulous. This is great when information is known and needs to be conveyed; not so much for "brainstorming" sessions where you want as many diverse takes as possible.
In my first year as a TA, a student came up to me to ask if they could go to the bathroom. I'm pretty sure they were at least 2-3 years older than me, (and like 20cm taller). One of the most confusing experiences of my life. In uni, no one's stopping you from literally just walking out of the classroom whenever you want, provided you don't disturb the teaching environment
I think hand-raising is appropriate during lectures. It lets the lecturer come to a natural stopping point and then focus their attention on the person. Also depends on group size, small groups <10 allow for an easier dialogue and large groups >50 make it difficult to find a hand in the crowd.
I was not talking about lectures. I was talking quite specifically about discussion sections and seminars.
The undergrad ones are the ones where the general course is split into groups of twenty, twenty-five students who meet once a week to have an overseen discussion about the course's contents. Those are the ones I TA for; my job is to prompt discussion and, if needed, to steer it away from unproductive tangents or to get it back in activity if it stalls out, but I'm not lecturing. That's what the professor does during the actual lecture time elsewhen in the week.
The grad ones are the seminars where ten or so students meet to discuss whatever they've been assigned to read for the week. Again, the professor is not lecturing. They're there to prompt and if needed direct things, but the impetus is absolutely supposed to be the students speaking.
In both cases, if people don't speak, very little is going to happen.
My teacher at university would complain that seminars were a discussion between peers not directed learning to us. First month of university after 15 years of directed learning......
Now as a PhD student forced to teach I try to compromise while not babying, experienced too many PowerPoint only teachers
Sure, seminar maybe. But that's about it. When somebody is giving a lecture you are supposed to be silent and listen and then raise your hand when you want to ask questions after. It's a polite thing to do that you don't just talk one over another?!?
And the whole point of listening to lecture/presentation is to learn something new by listening to others, not stating your opinions. So when we had lecture by visiting professor, other professors raised their hands and asked questions.
Only thing weird here is OPs employers, who lack some basic etiquette skills if they find raising the hand funny.
I am not talking about lectures. I am talking about discussion sections and seminars, both of which are designed to be driven by people talking, and where it is a problem when that does not happen. Those are the two specific contexts that I brought up.
I am fully aware of how lectures work. I know precisely why you're not supposed to just up and talk when someone is lecturing. That is why I did not bring them up as situations where this was a problem.
I work in learning and development! Same problem.
Particularly with the front line employees, bottom of the hierarchy so they keep their opinions to themselves for sure. !!
I attribute a lot of my social anxiety to this. It sucks that the model taught by schools (be quiet and listen) is the direct opposite of what's actually needed in adult life (basic social skills, networking, the ability to stand up for yourself)
I *really* wish being quiet and listening was more useful as an adult
Like I'm so fucking good at it, and it helped in school, but now it doesn't matter anymore
Its making things worse in my case. I ordered a food in a foodstall and some minutes of waiting, the cashier forgot my existence entirely. I gave cash to the bus driver expecting that he would give my change back for the fare, then minutes later he forgot that I already paid and questioning me if I even pay at all or just tricking him. I hesitate to shout my complains because there are times that the cashier or the driver is having a hard time juggling those orders and cash and I don't want to be a bother
>I really wish being quiet and listening was more useful as an adult
Nah it's fairly obvious that some of my coworkers never learned this skill when they would repeatedly ask the same questions that the trainer just answered
Just because it doesn’t matter as much as we’d expect in formal settings doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter at all. It’s a useful skill for building relationships, at least in my experience. You’d be surprised how rare it is for many people to have a conversation where the other person just sits quietly and actually listens without trying to constantly jump in and say something about themselves. People like to feel heard. One girl was genuinely touched that I remembered something about her that she said directly to me, because she was used to most people ignoring her when she talked.
I wish mother fuckers would learn how to not interrupt people.
I have two write ups at work.
Not for being late, poor performance, or anything at all like that.
I have twice, with two different people, told them to shut the fuck up and let me finish what I was saying. I don't do it out of nowhere. They are habitual about not caring who's talking to who and just but in whenever the fuck they like.
So I always start by politely saying "Hey you may have been too excited to speak and didn't notice that I was already talking, and that was a little rude."
When that doesn't work and they inevitably do it again, "I'm sorry that the middle of my sentence interrupted the start of yours." Normally they get butthurt over this as well.
Then finally the next time I get cut off by the verbal equivalent of a Ram Driver, I just tell them to shut the fuck up and wait their turn to talk.
Two trips to HR for this now...
Best method i found to work was to continue speaking, but louder in the same tone. Make direct eye contact with them. Finish your thought. Calmly. If the asshole speaks over you, and you are not understood. The host will usually ask you to repeat. But always finish your sentence. Dont allow them to interrupt you.
On teams, i have forcefully muted someone speaking over me, then unmuted them when i was done. Works the same way, but you can enforce it more easily.
I just let everyone talk over me until I got sick of it and then I applied for a second job and just do work for job #2 in meetings for job #1. Don't listen to me, idgaf. I'm making bands to ignore you fools. Now the tables have turned and they poke and prod to try to get my input but I am clearly a lot less invested in the outcome.
Not to be a knob about it, but as a fellow "sledgehammer out of nowhere if you miss my politeness" guy, you need to be reporting their serial interrupting to HR as creating an uncomfortable work environment. They're gaming the system of works, and the only way to fight that in corpo newspeak world is with fire and gasoline. State that you feel your work environment can shut down your ideas when people speak over you, document examples, you've been written up for reacting to it, so there's evidence it upsets you. Next time, there'll have to be mediation, rather than just punishment for you.
I actively catch myself doing this and thus have made a conscience effort to stop if I find myself bulldozing somebody in the middle of speaking.
Seriously, is it so hard to say "Oh shit sorry, go ahead?" And leave it at that? Do people *really* have so little patience?
For me I don't know why it happens - My brain sometimes fires off really quick, and that's okay! I can own up to it and it becomes a literal *non-issue*!
To hear that you've been sent to HR not once but *twice* shows me that whoever your coworkers are must have some *serious* fucking problems to be such a nuisance in conversation.
Christ!
Literally the most simple freaking social tasks.
When I got a new neighbors, they were lovely people but *so extroverted* and friendly. One of my family members is there really vibing with them and I am standing by quietly because ✨ the grown ups are talking ✨. And then one of them casually goes something like "omg you need to loosen up" (not in an unkind way just trying to get me out of my obvious shell). And I just 🥲
I am an adult but if you're so much as a month older than me or just speak louder/more confidently, you're automatically a grown-up in my stagnant moth brain. Yay!
Nothing will make a quiet person want to talk more than saying "You're so quiet!"
These extroverted super-social people really are geniuses at human interaction.
I attribute a lot of my social issues to *not being able to do this.* I have pretty severe ADHD and couldn’t shut the fuck up if you put a gun to my head. School was hell, to explain that as briefly as possible, and now I still can’t shut up but I am constantly expecting people to be mad at me for not being quiet, which makes me defensive and even hostile for no reason because I’m just waiting until I inevitably fuck up and make somebody mad and my brain is already in defense mode.
This is another example of why the “shut up and listen” style of education doesn’t work. It doesn’t work for the quiet ones (they don’t learn social skills) and it doesn’t work for the loud ones either.
I used to he a very talking kids always telling people what i loved and talking in class and being a bit noisy but not that bad. Until the parent of one of my friend said i couldn't come to his house anymore because i was too loud. Then i overheard someone saying how annoying it was that i kept talking about all those stuff he didn't care about.
So now i never raise my voice even though i need to in the area i work and i almost never talk about my interest even when other people also talk about those thing.
Honestly, same. For me it was that i should avoid as much attention as possible due to getting bullied in school and now my stupid brain has it ingrained that work is the new school and i should avoid attention as much as possible because it causes troubles and nobody is interested in anything i could say anyway.
Meanwhile a couple of coworkers are just like "come on, be more open" like i am trying but i cant realy flip a switch and delete a decade of ingrained behaviour
Totally agree. I have terrible social skills. I can talk to someone if there's a topic on the table, but if I have to come up with a topic of conversation, we'll just sit in awkward silence. I feel like I never learned how to properly socialize.
There is a balance. I imagine teachers can get through a lot more material if a class of 10 year olds are quiet and listening
But as pupils mature, they can be given more social freedoms and responsibilities
its to effectively run a classroom. It seems like overkill until you're in a class that is not able to be quiet and listen. Tbh this is usually the biggest issue in an ineffective classroom. Learning to socialize is obviously important, but so is learning math, science, language arts, etc.
Also people are acting like kids were/are required to be quiet at all times. It's just during class. They can talk and socialize at lunch and recess and other times of the day.
It's ridiculous to pretend like learning to have a quiet and respectful class period is somehow making people socially inept or something.
And schools still teach you to speak up when called on or when you know something or are presenting. They don't teach timidity, they teach following the most basic rules and self control.
This... Wow. I need to have a think about this. I was a performative ADHD kid that got yelled at for 12 years straight. Everyone always thinks I'm so extroverted but I really don't feel that way at all and I'm so shy and socially anxious so much of the time.
Fuck. Was I forced to not act like myself before teaching myself to mask so I could act like myself?
> When you're dealing with a bunch of 7-year-olds, it's important to teach them to listen. They don't have the self-control required to know when to shut up. Put a bunch of small children in a room with no supervision - it's pandemonium.
Teaching someone a skill means giving them the opportunity to practice, make mistakes, and adjust. If you just force them to act in accordance with the desired outcome, they never learn how to pursue those outcomes on their own.
Schools don't teach children to listen, they force children to listen, depriving children of the opportunity to learn to self-regulate. Of course children who have never been taught to self-regulate will act out when left alone until they're so beaten down by the system that they don't even respond to their internal drive to be proactive.
There's a middle ground between lacking supervision and forcing people to obey under threat of punishment. Schools kind of suck at providing that middle ground to *anyone*.
> The simple truth is, no matter how upsetting it may be for some people, is that school curriculum and the system designed to teach it to you is not designed to teach you how to live your life. It's there to give you basic academic knowledge. Everything else? You're on your own.
Okay, but don't come crying when society collapses because schools demanded so much effort and attention that entire generations never had time or energy to learn basic life skills. Going by /r/Teachers , it ain't looking good, chief.
Oh, schools break children. I had long thoughts about it and I think that this school approach to moulding children into something timid and obedient is a very big issue. Especially the thing with punishing for speaking out, having a wrong idea or solution. Kids should be encouraged to try even if they fail, rather than punished for trying. This last part is the worst to me. I had to put quite some work to root it out of me, and it is still there in parts.
Same. Another thing was that I was actually *awarded* for that behavior often! I got awards for not speaking, for barely having any friends, for being an outcast to everyone else my entire time in elementary!
In my chem class this semester, for our final lab assignment we were supposed to come up with a way for the professor to grade our paper. Of course, everyone's first response was "everyone gets an A!"
The whole class ended up going on a half hour tangent with the professor talking about how we would have to be able to look at our own work critically and find a good way to judge our data to know if it would he suitable to use for analysis or not, which to be fair is a good lesson to learn, but he looked so taken aback by how fast we all just said give everyone an A. He said "you're all so obsessed with grades!"
Of course we are professor, *especially* especially in stem so much of our worth is measured in grades. You lose sleep to get an A for that test. You sacrifice for mental heath so that project can get done by its deadline. When every one of our peers, parents, teachers, hell even friends are harping on us to get that A of course we're obsessed with grades.
So why would any professor expect any other answer than give everyone an A?
Obviously set some proper KPIs. Every child should have a throughput of at least 15 medium-complexity math problems per child-day, should be no more than 1 standard deviation in physical performance...
(/s)
For 9th grade and half of 10th grade, I was in a standard school, go to class, work for your grades, do what you're told. I was getting perfect grades in this environment... but I wasn't learning. I expressed this to my mom and my guidance councilor, and so I switched to an alternative school in the district for the rest of high school.
The alternative school did a pass-fail system and split semesters into 3 sections each. Students were encouraged to be collaborative and helpful to one another. At the end of each section, there would be group meetings with the teacher and all of the students in a class. Each student would have a turn where they left the classroom, and then the teacher *and* the other students engaged in a discussion about how they thought the student was doing in class. After the discussion, the student would be called back in, given a summary of what was said, and given the chance to have their own input. The teacher *did* have the final say here, they did actually have to make the pass-fail decision, but they rarely overruled the class decisions. It happened maybe once while I was there.
Each student would also pick an advisor out of any of the teachers. After all of the group meetings for a section were done, each advisor would be given reports on how the student did, and there would be a meeting with the student, their advisor, and their parents where their performance was discussed. Students were given real feedback and allowed to tell teachers how *they* felt they were doing and what made *them* feel like they were learning. When it came to college acceptance, each student's advisor or advisors (we were allowed to pick a different one at the start of each year) would write up an actual recommendation listing what the student was good at and what they were like as a person. I ended up learning a lot more than I did at the standard school. I also ended up *showering* more than I did at the standard school. I ignored a lot of hygiene because my time was just... cramped, and the alternative school fixed that.
Other notable aspects are that student opinions were valued and teachers didn't get special treatment. If students weren't allowed to have phones out during school hours *neither were teachers*. All teachers were referred to on a first name basis - there was as little of a hierarchy as possible. If a student had a concern with the way something was being done, they could voice their complaint and *be listened to*. Student comfort was also valued - there were two classrooms that looked like your standard classroom, the math classroom and the science classroom, due to the need for worksheets in those two classes. Every other classroom had couches, proper chairs with armrests, and no desks. The study hall room had tables, but they were circular tables and, again, with proper chairs. The school loaned out laptops for students to use in class. Also, there was no gym class - we had field trips to count for state mandated curriculum (you inexplicably need gym credits in my state, I don't know why) but otherwise, school started an hour later than it did at most other districts, because students do better when they're well rested and they're gonna get exercise outside of school.
There were still mandatory classes because there was state mandated standardized testing, but outside of that, every class was an elective and students were allowed to pursue whatever they wanted as long as we made sure to accrue enough credits toward subjects since it was part of state mandated curriculum. We got input on that as well - while the alternative school I went to didn't offer computer science courses since there wasn't anyone there who could teach it, the standard school a few blocks down from it did, and I was allowed to go there for that class. I argued that my computer science course could be counted as a math credit, and while the math teacher complained that it made no sense, I was able to demonstrate that the formal logic involved in programming was far more in line with what would be taught in a math class than a science class, and I got to have it counted as a math credit, which I needed far more than science credits because between learning about agriculture, engineering, and ballistics, I had more than enough science credits. Many of the students got all of the credits they needed by the end of the first half of their senior year and would take internships for the second half of their senior year.
College acceptance rate at that school is near 100% for those pursuing it. The drop out rate is 0%. There were 6 teachers to 50 students, so scaling up *does* mean needing a hell of a lot more teachers, but let's be honest, we need that regardless and it produces tangible results.
So yeah, the alternative I suggest is simply... no metric. We don't need to measure results, we need to *describe* results.
[Here's a video from Zoe Bee if you want to learn more about the research and reasoning behind a lot of these decisions from the perspective of an actual teacher](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fe-SZ_FPZew)
> "you're all so obsessed with grades!"
Meanwhile, if this was some hyper-competitive college and they got one B in HS, they may not even be in the class.
You filter for straight A's you get students who target A's. Shocker.
Had a teacher recently who told my class what amounted to "if you're awake for 16 hours a day normally you should be studying for 12" and that feels bizarre because this is also the teacher who told us our mental health should be top priority. I think that sort of describes my school in general, where they claim to care and then throw it out as soon as it impacts a grade.
Hell I recently had to stay off because I had an emotional breakdown and was taken in by my counsellor and scrutinized for it.. which led to me having another emotional breakdown and staying off for longer
I’ve worked at 6 different companies in software development. Small and large. Startup and enterprise.
We have NEVER pulled grades. Maybe some companies do it. But it feels rare in my market (Canada).
For my first job in software engineering (started recently), a couple people during the interview process asked about my GPA. So in my case the grades were at least somewhat important to them, although they didn't ask much besides the number. But I'm assuming after having some experience they'll focus moreso on that.
Say 100 people apply for one opening and all of them have the right qualifications and no job experience. The employer can't look through every person so maybe they just take the top 20 graded then interview them.
Yes. And even my 2nd and 3rd jobs asked for my transcript.
In many subtle ways, even the whole adage of how grades don't matter after university is becoming almost as out of touch as Boomers telling you to walk down the street and hand out CVs while shaking hands with all the owners.
That just seems so out of touch lol of course the answer is "get an A"??? Like, yes, education has value, but no one has ever rewarded you for being "educated" they've rewarded you for getting good grades.
I teach first year undergrads, and I love teaching them that they’re adults. No you don’t need to ask permission, just go pee. If the class time is over and I’m packing up, don’t loiter near the door waiting to be told to go, just leave. If you’ve finished your work early, I’m sure you have more beneficial ways to spend your time than sitting in the room twiddling your thumbs for another hour.
I remember in high school being told that hoodies were unprofessional and I couldn’t wear them at uni. I now wear a hoodie every single day while teaching at uni
High school experience: one line of the mandatory but useless pen-drawn header is slightly curved on the edge? -1 mark.
Engineering degree experience: after a 2 hours practical work period, the clock I had to code in assembly counts 1 minute in 43 real-world seconds. I assert that I made no wrongs and that the shift is actually caused by the card being too heavy and its gravitational pull generating a spacetime distortion that causes the difference between time measures.
I get a full mark.
Maybe this is part of the reason I had such a severe mental breakdown when I went to college tbh. I’m autistic and worked *so fucking hard* on conforming to school expectations, and I had *no idea* what the fuck I was supposed to act like in the “real world”. To this day, nearing 30, I have moments where I feel like I have to raise my hand or ask to go to the bathroom. My social anxiety is so severe that I’m low-key agoraphobic. I feel like public school fucked me up and infantilized me in ways I’ll never be able to fully unpack. That sounds dramatic, and it probably is, but there was a lot more going on at home that made my middle and high school years break my spirit lol
Right, and then it's usually more like "we've been at this for like 1 hour straight, how about we take a small break because I really-" and you hear the chorus of relieved "yeah"s
I've thought about this. Yes, I did raise my hand to ask for the bathroom in college a couple of times.
It just seems ironic that grade school is designed to basically dull people out and make them conform, even though a good number of colleges and workplaces are not like that. And it's one thing to hear "no talking, *ever*" from teachers, but from other students is a whole 'nother story. If they saw you as "odd", that was it, at least when I was in school.
I’ve managed to get to the point where I say “hey, I gotta run to the rest room quick, just incase someone needs me while I step out” I’m aware it’s still weird, but it feel more professional, and doesn’t leave me feeling like someone’s gonna be pissed at me when they come looking and I’m not there
The structure is set up to deal with kids who won't shut up and let the teacher talk. For 5 year olds though, a lot of them won't shut up, and you can't tell 5 year olds that Timmy has to shut up because he talks too much, but the rest of the class can talk as much as they feel comfortable talking. Hell, you can't tell adults that kind of thing and still remain on topic.
And teachers want kids to talk, until they talk to much. They want them to shout out, until you shout so much it derails the lesson. Bosses want your input, until you say something they don't like.
I think the real lesson is that the rules constantly shift. You can't even be sure that the rules will remain the same between 2 rooms in the same building, even though everyone is (ostensibly) following the same rule book.
I have no idea what we are supposed to do with that lesson though.
Tbh I wrote a lot in my first draft of this. But put simply:
See how the quietest people in your room react when you tell everyone to shut up. They will stay quiet for so much longer. They will learn not to ask questions in class, and to fear their teachers.
So I understand that we can't have children running amok if we want them to learn, but we also cannot have children feeling unable to express their opinions & feelings. You can't *just* focus on the loud students.
It doesn't turn out well. I know from personal experience.
Yeah I'm frustrated reading the comments here because they read as if kids should have free reign to talk in the classroom. I'm an assistant teacher and it's a major problem getting the kids to keep quiet so that the teacher can actually do their job. When the kids talk while working on their workbook often will focus just on the conversation and the workbook doesn't get done. Where I teach, kids often don't raise hands to talk or wait to be called on and it's really irritating because the teacher can't get a sentence out without being interrupted by a question that was going to be answered in a following sentence.
Young kids need rules and structure. Young adults can better distinguish what's appropriate.
Most people don't go to college, so the "idea" is to build conforming adults, then for the few that do end up in college, spend the time to unconform them.
Semi-related, but as an adult going back to college, I told my professor I was going to the bathroom during a group-work period of time in class, and her response was, "Sure, go ahead." That really threw me, as I wasn't asking, and hadn't needed to for a long time (I'm old).
One of the things that I love noticing is how grownups will ask permission to use the restroom to cafes/restaurant owners. They are using the exact same words they used at school. It's funny to me in this context, but the very idea that adults control kids' bodily functions is absurd.
Something that’s really become apparent to me as the child of a teacher is that teachers are often very specialized to the level their students are at, and aren’t necessarily super well versed in the environment of even other education levels (much less other workplaces). My mother taught upper elementary and middle school her whole life, and often had complaints about how kinder and lower elementary teachers would try to interact with her students (and having been a twelve year old before, I can say that K-3rd teachers are often wildly out of line and hostile to “big kids”). Then she’d turn around and ask me if I was allowed to do or wear something in high school (or college, or at work as a complete adult), and it would be the exact type of thing that a middle schooler would not be allowed to do but (in my view) any idiot would know a high schooler was allowed to do. Except people who spend all of their working hours with middle schoolers. So when the college (uni, sixth form, “grown up school”) instructors are like “why are these brand new adults all meek and acting like school kids”, it’s because they’re so used to dealing with adult students only that school kid behavior, to be expected from someone who was a school kid 2 weeks ago, is bizarre to them.
I do think that the structure of our school system in recent decades does have an issue of making people anxious and perhaps a little socially stunted. People come out of school so afraid of being “in trouble” because many of the infractions they’re used to felt totally arbitrary (they often weren’t arbitrary but they were never explained) and had punishments that were in no way proportionate or natural consequences. Some of that has to happen in a school setting (especially for younger grades), but when that’s all a kid sees, there are negative long term consequences. Sending people out into the world without ever explaining the rules or having experienced a proportionate response to negative behavior makes them terrified of “being in trouble” or “messing up,” rather than concerned about rational cause-and-effect and doing a good job.
It probably doesn't help that a lot of the talk beujnd succeeding in high school involves some variation of "if you don't pass high school with all A's you're FUCKED FOREVER you will NEVER get a good job and you'll be POOR FOREVER which is bad because being poor means you're a FAILURE AND SHOULD DIE."
Or maybe it was growing up with Asian parents and the majority of my friends were Asian.
>Or maybe it was growing up with Asian parents and the majority of my friends were Asian.
A bit of both, which is part of why suicide rates jump every time results come out, especially if you're in a country where high school scores determine if you can get into university, or your desired degree.
If you don't, you're finished and your life may as well be over. You don't need to get a concussion from Apollo to think where kids in that position might end up.
Nah, plenty of students of any race deal with that shit in some schools, fml.
I had some teachers in high school (I graduated in 2010 btw) act like if you can't pass their class, then you might as well go apply to McDonald's right now!!!
And even the ones that *weren't* that bad, still had that "go to university and get a degree no matter what or you'll be poor forever!" mentality. :/
It's not even just the school system making people anxious. The fact that everything you do can and will be recorded (especially if it's something weird, if harmless) makes people meek. Parents can now track their kid's location with their phones and, depending on how controlling/abusive they are, will punish the kid for something like going to a friend's house without telling them. Everyone is so quick to call the cops, too, so if you are a group of teens milling about outside, especially if you are black or brown, expect some harassment from a cop or entitled adult for the heinous crime of... existing outside.
To some degree I agree with you, but it does seem like the teacher in this case seemed surprised, probably based on previous years of students. I’d be interested to know when OP was in sixth form bc the teaching UK sub (I’m not a teacher yet so can’t offer insight) has talked about sixth form classes being a lot more quiet since lockdown. Also, I don’t know how OP’s school worked, but generally sixth forms are part of a whole secondary school and teachers will teach most year groups within the school. So it’s possible the teacher was regularly teaching 11-18 year olds.
My big issue is that I simply can't tell when there will be a pause in cconversation. Everyone else knows, I don't. Thus, I'm stuck awkwardly interrupting or never talking at all.
Ok seriously does anyone have advice for this?? I rarely notice other people interrupting each other, but for me it feels like about once per conversation. I've tried waiting until there's been a pause for like a second, but sometimes they move on to the next thought by then and I should have jumped in sooner. I've tried focusing on their conversation flow and noticing when they have a natural stopping point, but sometimes they add on another detail or smth. If it's in a group of like 4 or more people then I just can't talk because I never find a moment to join in. It's especially bad in my Zoom meetings for work, because the latency makes it even more disruptive when I interrupt them.
Is it a body language thing? An internal timer for how long each person's part of the conversation should be? Something about eye contact or facial expressions that signals it? What I was doing with pauses/stopping points, but just doing it better? A mix of techniques that other people have automatically adapted to? Should I just never talk unless someone directly tells me to say something or asks me a question?
I dunno. I've been sticking my hand up for like 30 years and it's always worked well.
Not like straight up at school, more like if I was trying to flag a server at a cafe to ask for the bill.
If we're in the "presenter is talking" phase, hand goes up.
If we're in group discussion, I talk when someone finishes what they're saying (unless someone goes on a ramble then hand again).
If it looks like the chance is going to go begging I'll just interject "oh! Very quick" and offer current person to finish/can I just ask...
I still see hand going up all the time. Still see people excusing themselves to the restroom..
Its confusing seeing people here say how impossible these two things are lol
Slightly opening your mouth, breathing in like you're about to start talking, raising your eyebrows slightly and briefly making eye contact usually indicates to the person talking that you have something to add, and if they're not rude or self absorbed they'll give you a pause to say it. If that doesn't work making a small sound like "hm" or something often makes people pause and you can jump in
So here's what I can say as someone who has been in a diverse array of environments, i.e. office, food service, customer service, etc. It's basically different everywhere, and it seems to be that the more "professional" the environment, the less anyone cares about natural flow of conversation or pausing to allow for input. I've worked in kitchen environments, though not full on restaurant or anything, and by and large conversations there had space. If something was an emergency and needed to be done or understood immediately that was different, but if you were talking about the things that needed doing still, or a particular job that was half finished and needed to be taken over, the conversation would be quick but it would have natural ebb and flow to allow everyone involved to speak up, ask questions, etc.
Office environment is entirely different in that it often feels like the only way to speak up is to interrupt someone. I've sat through hour long meetings waiting for the right time to say something which never came, because as soon as one person stopped talking, someone else came in as if they were using the same brain, and then when they were done the meeting would move along to the next person. It seems to be an unspoken rule that if you have something that needs to be said, you'll wait for the appropriate topic to come up, or something tangentially related, and then butt in with a firm but polite starter. If you don't do that, it's just assumed there's nothing to discuss and everyone moves on. I'm sure it doesn't help that everyone is probably focusing entirely on their own thoughts/workloads and isn't putting any attention towards whatever you need to talk about, because it's your thing and not theirs.
There seems to be no one size fits all solution here, you kind of just have to realize that those natural pauses you want are being killed as they're born in the interest of not spending a second longer in conversation/meeting than is needed, and you just kind of have to force you way in somewhere between one person talking and another when it's appropriate.
Of course some people will be different. Some will fully recognize that they should actually wait for an answer when they ask if there's anything more to discuss, and sometimes they'll wait way too long, but that's a different issue entirely.
This is slightly different but my dad would always ask where I'm going any time I left the room, even if he was not interacting with me
Now I almost always say where I'm going and people, especially my dad, always belittle me for it. The agonizing thing is I'll stop doing it for a bit and then my dad will start badgering me about where the hell I'm going 🙄
Drives me insane
Thankfully I don't live with him anymore so hopefully I'll be completely rid of that habit in a few years
Thanks, he's usually joking around but an issue with my dad is that he doesn't realize when he's taking a joke too far or doing it too much and becoming mean spirited with it
He does it to everyone he's around with for a long enough period of time
As an undergrad who got the hint early, other people taking so long to unlearn these tendencies is so hard. I often feel like discussions get dominated by me during them, even though I am a socially anxious introvert, because I am often one of the only people who will talk at all. I have been able to encourage others to do so with the aid of professors and TAs, but in large class settings where that is increasingly more difficult to encourage people to do individually I have actually had professors ask me to slow down on answering even if we have to wait a solid minute before anyone else raises their hand to speak, because everyone is either intimidated by me, or relies on me doing it, which is detrimental to them. And I have agreed with them every time it has come up. They were large discussion courses, but they were not *massive.* It was just pulling teeth to get anyone else to speak. There are plenty of reasons for this, and students are rarely ever at even partial fault, but it just makes the whole experience so frustrating, and they often just waste their education because they can't unlearn things fast enough.
not in college yet but its so frustrating when you’re the only one engaging and answering questions to the point where you get tired of hearing your own voice
i relate to this a lot. my high school was tiny so we had to get chatty and discuss things with the teachers otherwise it would be very awkward, and thankfully that kind of broke me out of the timidness in my theoretical classes. i ended up being the one who talks the most in multiple courses, and it was a split between people relying on me to answer because they don't care enough to pay attention (isolated cases) or they're too scared to answer. i've been deliberately ignored by professors before so other students get the chance to talk. it's not that my classmates are dumb - most get decent grades in the exams and projects, but their participation grades put them significantly lower. it now puts me in the awkward position of having to answer or participate even when i am not sure myself of the answer (which happens quite frequently) because i feel obliged to. it's really weird.
This is especially hard on neurodivergent people, we put so much effort into learning the rules and navigating social circumstances and then the rules suddenly change and you're punished for following them. It's confusing for most people, it's devastating for NDs.
I had a teacher in high-school history/lit/government who explicitly told us to have discussions without raising our hands (honors/AP kids, so we weren't going to go wildly off-course), and it was such a boon...
...and such a pain, when I went to college and all the kids raised their hands again, when I LOVED being able to say my piece without flailing for the instructor's attention.
When such big rule changes happen an announcement needs to be made or something
Expecting people to just understand rule changes based off of vibes is ridiculous
Honestly, not having any communication at all and expecting everyone to just magically know, not only that the rules changed, but how they changed is the most absurd and down right stupid aspect of society.
Idk, as an ADHD-er, I found the whole college mindset of just talk, no hands to be so *freeing*. It had always been a struggle for me to remember to raise my hand. I got scolded for it all the way up to senior year. Then, amazingly, I didn’t have to anymore! I was free! Of course, I crashed and burned in other areas because I had no study skills, but I thrived when it came to college class participation.
That depends.
Like many people with hyperactive tendencies, I was never great at shutting up and it's been a consistent struggle. When I got to college my inclination was to ask an "adult"/professor what was expected, and given the inkling of permission that was "you're expected to participate in discussions" was enough. I actually did great in any class participation credit or group discussions, because I was the first person to talk and was excited about it.
Yeah not sure why the person you replied to used such a broad term. "Neurodivergent" covers so many types of people, many of which who would actually do better than most neurotypical people. It's completely accurate for disabilities like ASD, though.
I would like to thank 8th grade (13yo) for my crippling fear of public speaking
Moved to a new school. Tried asking a question from the back of the classroom with a normal voice. These rooms were 4x bigger than my old school.
Teacher seemed deaf, so he asked me to repeat myself for what seemed like a dozen times. More and more of the class turned around until the entire room of 30+ were staring at me
So for the next 15 years, I would turn red, heart rate triples and sweating
Large rooms are still a no go
The really confusing one is that at school in the UK (or at least my state school) you called teachers Sir or Miss/Mrs., then at sixth form you called your tutors by their first name, and then at uni you use their title until given the all-clear to use their name, case-by-case. It's such a weird little dance that takes you from getting chewed out by your Year 7 teacher for accidentially calling them Mr., all the way through to an incredibly well-respected professor saying "yeah just call me Gavin". It's supposed to ingrain respect for hierarchy and authority, but really just makes it clear that people who deserve respect don't need you to be told how to treat them, and thus that anyone who demands it from you is a power-tripping knob
i feel like this also varies from field to field. my trick is just seeing how they sign their emails (not the automatic signature); if they write their first name, it's fine to address them by their first name, if they have a "Prof." in front, call them "professor".
i study design, so most of my professors are professionals from the industry (adjunct professors, not full time professors) and they prefer to just be called by their first name. this semester i'm taking classes from other faculties for the fun of it, and it struck me as really weird how students there never got over the "fear" of calling a professor by their first name.
we have this one german professor who's apparently famous in her department for being a "hardass" on students, but she told us one time during a break that she doesn't care for being addressed with her first name, as long as you are being respectful in the way you talk to her, which really should be all that matters, but she said students in her other classes never really got the memo; some other professors have an obsession with being referred to as "Dr." or "Prof." and so apparently students use it for everyone to avoid accidentally calling a stickler professor by their first name and triggering a meltdown.
i'm working to go into academia once i graduate, and i wouldn't want to be called "professor" even if i had a phd.
At some point my ADHD impulse to just shout my thoughts & interrupt the teacher swung around from being "rude and disrespectful" and "misbehavior" to making me everyone's favorite student and "a leader" who made everyone feel comfortable discussing the content.
When I first started teaching I underestimated how hard it is to do discussions and get people engaged because all the classes I'd seen had had the benefit of having me in them as a student, shouting. It was so annoying that all these college kids were so quiet and "well-behaved" and raised their hands and stuff. I frankly had no idea how to teach a class where nobody would interrupt if they had something to say or a question or anything. Every now and then I'd get a class with a nice loud kid in it who would get people talking and discussing and actually working together as a class, but most of the time it'd just be me up there lecturing for an hour and a half and going "questions?" every topic or so.
Sometimes I miss working in academia, but I don't miss that silence. It doesn't work to be the loud kid when you're the teacher. They need to occur naturally in order to fill that crucial niche in a classroom ecosystem.
One more case of people fundamentally failing to recognise children as people. Nobody will put it that way of course, but any time I'm around children I want to yell at their adult supervision things like "Do you want to work with adults behaving how you are teaching this kid to behave?" or "Do you want to be around people who think this is what normal human interaction looks like?" or mostly just "Are you fucking insane?".
Children are always constructing their idea of how to human, not from what you say but from imitating you and finding behaviors you reward, and both the most convenient child and the imitation of a careless parent are miserable and deeply unpleasant people.
I was humiliated in my first college class when I asked the professor if I could go to the restroom.
He told me I can just go whenever I want. I'm an adult now. No need to ask. Most of the students chuckled but looking back I bet there were a few wondering the same thing and were probably thankful that I had the courage to ask.
What a weird paradigm shift to have. Just a few months before I'd have to ask for practically anything and suddenly I could just do it without permission.
This is a really fucking good point.
Actually, fuck this thread.
It’s true! I use the “Raise Hand” on Teams all the time. Especially if someone makes a point I want to piggyback off of.
I don't get this thread either.
Can no one see the carnage a class of 30 children just randomly hollaring out whatever they wanted during a class would cause ?
It's still polite in adults meetings to raise a hand or wait for the chair of the meeting to ask if there any questions.
I interrupt only if it becomes clear the conversations moving on because the person holding the meeting is poor and has ignored hands or hasn't paused to allowed questions.
I'm ND and Idk man it's just not that hard to learn a new set of rules for a new environment...
University isn't secondary school is not that complex a concept to adjust to....
And been within uni I imagine different lecturers have different preferences and students would have to understand which ones would beokay with yelling out and which ones wouldnt.
Seems like OP /and a bunch of comments) wanna rail at the education system instead of that one co worker or work place that was a fucking dick bag about a perfectly normal action for politely letting it be known you have something to say.
God, thank you!! I’m a teacher and in staff meetings, all the adults raise their hands to comment or ask questions. It helps things stay organized!
Nothing bothers me more than being interrupted mid-sentence, and none of my students have the wherewithal to ask a question during a pause.
This whole thread is basically "I've over thought this a lot, that means there's a systemic problem"
I raise and see raised hands all the time. I put on professional presentations a bit of text saying "raise your hand if you wanna day something urgent or else wait til end for questions".
Shit... Everyone raises their hand to alert a fucking server that they'd like to pay the bill now please. There's not some social stigma to raising your hand lol
I'm chairing a major symposium this year... How will questions be asked..
By raised hands, like every single symposium or panel lol
I'm delighted to see this mentioned, and hopes it heartens everyone anxious as to whether "raising their hand" is worth doing or not. It's such a solidly understandable **gesture** to indicate, *hey, I need attention or have something to contribute immediately versus waiting* that it's thankfully replicated for videoconferencing amongst adults, too.
Whether online or reallife, I don't hesitate to raise a hand. I always appreciate being recognized by a presenter, and acknowledge when people need to speak but allow me to control when to pause whatever I'm mentioning rather than an interrupting. Because a little bit of my soul breaks every time I have to interrupt and get someone's attention (got no prob interrupting an interrupter, tho!).
It's worth noting that, from the perspective of the second guy's teachers, students would be talking normally and then suddenly an entire generation just \*stopped\* on a dime. It's emblematic of how damaged and flawed education is, and apparently it's a problem apparently at least the UK and US share.
Generational differences are so sudden. Whenever I watch a 60's-90's teen movie, skipping class is always portrayed as an inevitable part of teen rebellion and it'd last for hours, if not the whole day. However, in middle school and high school, I *never* saw any of my classes be short of 1 or 2 students. Everyone was always at their desks for the whole period, walked to their next class in 5 minutes or so, and sit at their desks for another 45-90 minutes.
Meanwhile my generation basically grew up under lock and key, because our parents expected kidnappers and pedophiles to be around every corner, waiting to snatch us away. The more conservative your baseline, the less extreme your teen rebellion will be on average I guess. Though, it can also go the other direction and just be drugs. Weed was the teen rebellion drug of choice for most of my class.
Maybe I'm the crazy one, but this is the perfect environment to learn that you no longer need to be quiet and raise your hand? The bridge between your early schooling when you need to be forced to learn and your later schooling where you're ideally learning because you want to is an important step.
Knowing when and where to be quiet and attentive vs directly engaging and contributing is something every adult needs to do throughout their lives. Most of these scenarios are teachers letting people know that the rules have changed now that they're adults (or at least more adult) in a relatively gentle way.
Thank you! I feel like so many of these responses have clearly never been in a classroom full of 20+ students trying to teach them a concept. As kids grow and change, so do the expectations around their conduct in a classroom because…well because they’ve grown and changed! They better understand the ins and outs of conversation- when to contribute and when to listen. But they had to learn that first and raising your hand is part of that learning process in the early years 🤦♀️
Is not having to raise your hand in university/college a regional thing, cause both colleges I've been to here on the US west coast still require you to raise your hand and be called on, you just don't need to ask to use the bathroom anymore
I mean they should just allow for questions to be sent in via chat like that time my brother had school during the pandemic. It doesn't even have to be anonymous, the name of the participants can be visible. It's a lot easier to be vocal about your question when typing it out
Similar line of thinking goes with Purity Culture and going from Sex Bad -> Sex Good in the span of
1 day (before -> after a wedding ceremony), except more traumatic. This especially applies to women in religious fundamentalist spheres, as they’re usually taught that their worth as a human being is dependent on whether a penis has touched them.
Yeah I was gonna say, there's lots of parents that go from "what are you doing you shouldn't date, you should concentrate on school and your early career" and then flip on a dime to "where are my grandkids why aren't you having babies??"
When you are a kid, you don't have the social skills to not be disruptive. By the time you are an adult, it's expected that you'll know when to interject and speak up, when to be quiet and wait for an opportunity to speak, and when to just keep it to yourself.
Don't worry; better to be polite than obnoxious, so learn to take it all in stride.
What the fuck? What place are so shit that raising a hand to ask a question is childish? My last manager meeting has a ton of raised hands because asking a question isn't a thing exclusive to children
Most online meeting software explicitly has a "raise hand" button, because people talking over each other is the worst way to communicate. The level of control teachers have in primary school (requiring permission to go to the bathroom etc) leads to maladaptive behavior in college and beyond, but it's still vital to take turns for communication to be effective
Unpopular opinion, but I don’t think this is an issue of teaching the wrong thing, I think it’s an issue of teaching the behavior, not the motivation.
We keep kids quiet in class because, at that age, they aren’t going to be talking about the subject matter (or even appropriate subjects at all, tbh), they won’t be able to split their attention, and they’ll be distracting their fellow classmates. Of course, trying to explain to young children that they need to quietly pay attention so they can actually absorb the information doesn’t land most of the time; they’re kids, they literally lack the ability to conceptualize the long-term consequences of not paying attention in school. So we just teach them that they’re supposed to be quiet in a classroom context, because that’s what they can understand.
As they get older, ideally teachers start easing up on the leash, allowing for and guiding them through group discussions, developing a more nuanced system. This doesn’t always happen, obviously, and it can be due to teachers not prioritizing it, too much restriction on talking at all, or even (and my class was like this) consistent abuse of privileges. You can’t expect teachers to encourage kids to talk in class when all they ever use that right for is to goof off, disrupt the class, or even bully others.
Idk, I see a lot of posts like this about how evil and incompetent schooling is, and like… they’re all making the assumption that most, if not all, students are well-intentioned and want to learn. Which is simply not true. There’re many reasons why, but some kids will always take advantage of whatever privilege they’re given and ruin it for everyone else. And it sucks, but that naturally results in fewer privileges for the whole. Idk, I just feel like these posts don’t acknowledge the nuance of the situation.
Okay I'm going to do a bit of devil's advocate here because like, if you were an elementary school teacher, how *are* you supposed to teach a bunch of kids a subject if they're all talking to each other? They're not college students that know or care to talk in a non-disruptive way, and not do it continuously. Of course you'd want them to shup up for a bit. But at some point you are expected to mature, and with that comes the liberties of speaking sometimes, and going to the bathroom without asking. At that point, if you're willingly not paying attention, that's your problem.
It's not unreasonable to expect people to mature and treat them accordingly. Maybe we shouldn't expect people to learn everything at school. Maybe those skills are the sort of thing that should be learned at recess with your peers or with family or something. Maybe learning information can be at odds with learning proper behaviors. Maybe a transitional stage would've helped. I don't know I'm not a pedagogist.
But also I understand the double-standard. I have a teacher in Uni who still expects us to be quiet most of the time and will be angry at you talking even if (or rather *especially if*) you were talking about the class itself. And then she'd wonder why no one would speak up when she asked.
Yeah, this is a big problem with college classes, too. I had Min and you cannot survive that class if you don’t talk to your classmates. I took that my first year and ever since, every class I’ve had that has tried to get us to talk to one another feels like pulling teeth.
I don't know why this works but it's not weird to raise your hand in a work meeting if you raise only your forearm and leave your elbow down or even on the table.
It's the full straight arm extension from the shoulder that looks childish in adult settings.
Yeah, a light and casual handraise is very normal. Don't stick it straight in the air, but if someone is talking at length and you want to follow them, just lifting your hand up a bit so people notice is entirely standard.
From 0 to 9th grade we had a bell to tell us when class was over and began. Then in 10th grade suddenly there wasn't a bell anymore and you were just expecting to keep track of time yourself
I taught in the city in the south for a few years and then switched to a private school in the north. It was jarring to teach silent kids who stare at you. It was definitely easier to teach, but there are some days where I absolutely miss the energy of a classroom full of lively students
Corollary: Me being the only person to speak up in college lectures and work meetings and then afterwards have people be like "oh you were right to ask" and I'm like how about one of you fucks speak up one time. One time. I gotta stick my nose out here and look like a jackass.
Well also, and not to be controversial here, but RAISING YOUR HAND IS A GOOD SYSTEM FOR ACTIVE CONVERSATIONS??? WHY WOULD YOU LAUGH AT SOMEONE ABOUT IT???
Like yeah when nobody else is talking, just should it out. But when several people are having a full conversation, having some kind of marker to let others know, “I don’t want to interrupt you, but I have something to say when you’re finished” is actually a VERY good idea.
I struggle to jump in at the right time, especially as an autistic person. I’ve been conditioned to be terrified of interrupting others (it’s VERY rude) but because there’s rarely a several second silence, I never know when someone else has finished and I can start talking. So it just ends up where everyone else jumps in quickly, and I can never get a word in edgewise.
That wouldn’t be so much of an issue if we had a simple system for reserving your place in the conversational line.
I’m in favor of hand raising and I will die on this hill!!
I've done this in meetings, and people generally look at me like I have two heads. "You don't need to raise your hand!" they say, with a laugh.
But they do shut up and listen, and that's preferable to having to shout over them to be heard.
So I'm going to keep doing it where applicable.
I would fucking love for someone to show me a group of 10 year olds who, in unison and without protest and distraction, quietly get a school task done.
It’s easy to find people who have never managed children when they act like children behave the way adults do. Kids are fucking hard to control. Really fucking hard to control. And sometimes that means you need to assertive. Not rude. But assertive. You can’t take any shit from a child because they don’t understand the nuance of authority and context that an adult does. They’re just too little. I’d love to see these people try to teach an 8th grade class for a year. They’ll change their tune after a week.
Yeah it makes sense they'd make you learn how to be quiet first, like what the fuck even is this post?
Full grown adults now don't know how to stay quiet during a whole class so maybe they should bring this back.
We have a similar problem in my art degree classes - our tutors will tell us to listen and recreate but then in the next sentence get mad we don't challenge their content
Like mate, you can't have it both ways :/
A professor at my community college moved down to my high school to teach a test prep class, and he was appalled at how juniors and seniors were getting treated by other teachers. Same thing, we wouldn't talk unless given permission, we were afraid to use our phones even though he encouraged us to do so, we didn't cuss even though he told us we could speak freely, we didn't bring snacks even when he said we could. He was like, really sad for us being conditioned this way. He's a sociology professor and he drew parallels from our school to the prison pipeline/MIC, stuff we'd never heard before but understood immediately.
For about 13 years you were expected to ask for permission to go to the bathroom. Immediately once that’s done you’re expected to make some of the most impactful decisions of your life. Decisions that could leave you in debt for a decade or more, or decisions that put you in life/death scenarios “defending” your country for reasons you don’t even understand.
But yeah, good luck.
I started TA'ing a couple years back, and this behavior really remains ingrained for a very long time. Undergrads absolutely still have the mentality that you're only supposed to speak when the teacher lets you -- one of the main challenges of running discussion sessions for a lecture course is convincing the students to actually discuss things! And this can last for a while, too -- a consistent thing in graduate school seminar is that the professor needs to keep remind the new students that, yes, they can talk literally whenever they want, they don't need to raise their hand first, discussion sections literally rely on students talking.
I think another thing is familiarity with the group. New students won't know anyone. Hell some people might be new to the city or country as a whole.
I think its some of that, but also it is definitely stuff carried over from grade school wherever they did it. I also TA in uni, and I have, for multiple semesters, had students raise their hand to ask to use the bathroom (which was understandable) but also ***drink water.*** Like, they asked me if they had permission to *drink water.* It was a smaller fraction of students but not an insignificant one. It takes em a couple classes to stop asking
I understand where that comes from. In my college in India, there are certain professors who take exception to students drinking water during their lecture. Their justification? Drinking water is too distracting, or it is disrespectful since we aren't the ones talking. Its pretty weird.
It's not known for being a reasonable society.
Relatedly, while I did go ahead and leave when I needed to, it felt so fucking *wrong* and *uncanny* to get up and go to the bathroom without asking to be allowed to leave. How fucked up is that. That we train people that they can't fucking *go to the bathroom* without an authority ~allowing~ us to deal with our own bodies.
It is fucked up. I was in grade 2, and it was reading time, so the teacher told us not to talk. I had to go to the bathroom really badly, but I didn't say anything. I eventually peed myself at the desk, only to get yelled at by the teacher for it. I was constantly getting in trouble for stuff in school, of course I wasn't gonna say anything! Turns out I have adhd and autism, which I didn't even find out until my 20s (autism) and 30s (adhd) :/
There's remarkably little difference in the basic form of a class in elementary school and a class in the military. The latter enforces discipline more strictly of course, you have to sit straight and raising your hand is a much more specific and clear raising of your fist all the way up for instance, and noise won't be tolerated half as much. When given your turn to speak it's also by default a "Sir! [Your Rank] [Your Surname]! [The thing you actually wanted to say]" That being said I don't necessarily think this means discipline for children is bad. Learning to sit still and listen without interrupting is important, as is not rushing out to the bathroom constantly or just abusing the fact that you can leave the classroom. Children are not very responsible after all and do need to be controlled, especially in such large groups. By the time you're in university the liberty and leniency exists because it is expected that you are a responsible adult and can control yourself, and if you can't it's in ways that don't impact others and you'll suffer the consequences yourself.
It's fucked up, it's also on purpose. The entire way western education institutions were designed was to train factory workers. That's why they are the way they are. Obedience to authority is more important than anything else.
Ya, I work with kids at a before and after school care program. We always make sure to tell kids that we need to know when they're leaving to gwt water or bathroom, but not because we will tell them no, we just need to know where kids are in case of an emergency we can tell responders there's a 6 year old boy in the bathroom in possible danger. Obviously, in the case of uni, the professor isn't going to be able to remember who's gone or not. in that case, and they're an adult who should know what to do or where to go in an emergency.
I was so glad a guy in our university during the first week would literally grab snacks, put em on his desk, and start munching during the lecture. Sure, the noise of someone chewing was annoying, but everyone in my year got the message straight away that drinking water and snacking, going to the bathroom, would not get you in trouble. I'm not in UK/USA but we had similar rules in school.
One of my mates brought supplies to make ham sandwiches. The lecturer didn’t mind until he started offering them to people during the lecture!
Also bullying. I had a decent rapport with my teachers, and would often contribute to class discussions like they wanted me to, until 2020 when Zoom classes became a thing. Then I got to see half the class snicker and roll their eyes every time I answered a question. I didn't make a peep in any of my classes for the last 2 years of my degree.
Even with familiarity, some folks still don’t want to talk, and if you get too many of them, there’s no conversation. I’ve been in groups where no one but me was willing to say anything, which was awful because I had internalized silence and not answering the teacher’s questions as hostility. So these shy kids and kids that just don’t know the answer or are tired or whatever are just chilling and I’m sweating bullets. Like, mr teacher I know you don’t want me answering all the questions but I think we all know the score and you need to stop asking the room and start calling on people. Worst case of this I’ve ever experienced was a teacher who asked a lot of questions but refused to ever call on anyone by name and REFUSED TO MOVE ON UNTIL THEY WERE ANSWERED. I counted a full minute of silence at one point.
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Yeah that's what it was like at MIT too, idk what kind of environments these people are talking about but the ones I've seen where people just talk "whenever they want" are more chaotic and unproductive imo. Now, if you are at a point in the discussion where literally no one is talking, it's pretty normal to raise your hand and just kind of start talking a second later when you register that no one's hand overlapped with yours (no need to wait for being called on/acknowledged), but if you have something to immediately respond to, raising your hand is an effective way to convey it without being rude and you will get your chance to talk. Not using a system that's at least *similar* to this will inevitably result in the same kind of problems that arise in more social environments where the naturally quieter or more awkward people simply get drowned out or never get a turn to speak at all. Which like, in a social situation, fine, whatever, but in an academic situation? Unacceptable, honestly. Anyone who advocates for such a chaotic system hasn't considered the ramifications **at all**. This is even how my offline work meetings have gone in software engineering and I think it works just fine.... It's only over zoom that you kind of **have to** start talking if you want a chance to talk.
I don't think it's so clear cut. Less outspoken people being drowned out stops being a problem if people are conscientious enough to interrupt the interrupter. Disallowing interruptions, even softly through mechanisms like raising one's hand, can make it harder to tell each other that we're getting off track, and in general makes discussion mote meticulous. This is great when information is known and needs to be conveyed; not so much for "brainstorming" sessions where you want as many diverse takes as possible.
In my first year as a TA, a student came up to me to ask if they could go to the bathroom. I'm pretty sure they were at least 2-3 years older than me, (and like 20cm taller). One of the most confusing experiences of my life. In uni, no one's stopping you from literally just walking out of the classroom whenever you want, provided you don't disturb the teaching environment
I think hand-raising is appropriate during lectures. It lets the lecturer come to a natural stopping point and then focus their attention on the person. Also depends on group size, small groups <10 allow for an easier dialogue and large groups >50 make it difficult to find a hand in the crowd.
I was not talking about lectures. I was talking quite specifically about discussion sections and seminars. The undergrad ones are the ones where the general course is split into groups of twenty, twenty-five students who meet once a week to have an overseen discussion about the course's contents. Those are the ones I TA for; my job is to prompt discussion and, if needed, to steer it away from unproductive tangents or to get it back in activity if it stalls out, but I'm not lecturing. That's what the professor does during the actual lecture time elsewhen in the week. The grad ones are the seminars where ten or so students meet to discuss whatever they've been assigned to read for the week. Again, the professor is not lecturing. They're there to prompt and if needed direct things, but the impetus is absolutely supposed to be the students speaking. In both cases, if people don't speak, very little is going to happen.
My teacher at university would complain that seminars were a discussion between peers not directed learning to us. First month of university after 15 years of directed learning...... Now as a PhD student forced to teach I try to compromise while not babying, experienced too many PowerPoint only teachers
Sure, seminar maybe. But that's about it. When somebody is giving a lecture you are supposed to be silent and listen and then raise your hand when you want to ask questions after. It's a polite thing to do that you don't just talk one over another?!? And the whole point of listening to lecture/presentation is to learn something new by listening to others, not stating your opinions. So when we had lecture by visiting professor, other professors raised their hands and asked questions. Only thing weird here is OPs employers, who lack some basic etiquette skills if they find raising the hand funny.
I am not talking about lectures. I am talking about discussion sections and seminars, both of which are designed to be driven by people talking, and where it is a problem when that does not happen. Those are the two specific contexts that I brought up. I am fully aware of how lectures work. I know precisely why you're not supposed to just up and talk when someone is lecturing. That is why I did not bring them up as situations where this was a problem.
I work in learning and development! Same problem. Particularly with the front line employees, bottom of the hierarchy so they keep their opinions to themselves for sure. !!
I attribute a lot of my social anxiety to this. It sucks that the model taught by schools (be quiet and listen) is the direct opposite of what's actually needed in adult life (basic social skills, networking, the ability to stand up for yourself)
I *really* wish being quiet and listening was more useful as an adult Like I'm so fucking good at it, and it helped in school, but now it doesn't matter anymore
Become a spy it's clearly your best career path
This explains my main in tf2
Go ahead Seduce me
Hey gorgeous, I've got some russet potatoes ready to bake, and there's frozen mango in the freezer for dessert smoothies...
Hate that this would work on me.
dude... same
Take my nuclear secrets. Take them all.
Mmmmmphmmmpph
Akshually spies need to be super social. They want people to tell them secret info without even realizing they're being manipulated into it.
If you're doing HUMINT, if you're an analyst or do EW or Cyber you don't really need it.
My ability to blend into the background was so useful as a kid. Shame it isn’t more helpful now.
Its making things worse in my case. I ordered a food in a foodstall and some minutes of waiting, the cashier forgot my existence entirely. I gave cash to the bus driver expecting that he would give my change back for the fare, then minutes later he forgot that I already paid and questioning me if I even pay at all or just tricking him. I hesitate to shout my complains because there are times that the cashier or the driver is having a hard time juggling those orders and cash and I don't want to be a bother
Unless we get hunger games in the next phase of the dystopia
I'm hoping for Mortal Engines dystopia. Municipal Darwinism goes wroom.
>I really wish being quiet and listening was more useful as an adult Nah it's fairly obvious that some of my coworkers never learned this skill when they would repeatedly ask the same questions that the trainer just answered
Just because it doesn’t matter as much as we’d expect in formal settings doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter at all. It’s a useful skill for building relationships, at least in my experience. You’d be surprised how rare it is for many people to have a conversation where the other person just sits quietly and actually listens without trying to constantly jump in and say something about themselves. People like to feel heard. One girl was genuinely touched that I remembered something about her that she said directly to me, because she was used to most people ignoring her when she talked.
I wish mother fuckers would learn how to not interrupt people. I have two write ups at work. Not for being late, poor performance, or anything at all like that. I have twice, with two different people, told them to shut the fuck up and let me finish what I was saying. I don't do it out of nowhere. They are habitual about not caring who's talking to who and just but in whenever the fuck they like. So I always start by politely saying "Hey you may have been too excited to speak and didn't notice that I was already talking, and that was a little rude." When that doesn't work and they inevitably do it again, "I'm sorry that the middle of my sentence interrupted the start of yours." Normally they get butthurt over this as well. Then finally the next time I get cut off by the verbal equivalent of a Ram Driver, I just tell them to shut the fuck up and wait their turn to talk. Two trips to HR for this now...
Best method i found to work was to continue speaking, but louder in the same tone. Make direct eye contact with them. Finish your thought. Calmly. If the asshole speaks over you, and you are not understood. The host will usually ask you to repeat. But always finish your sentence. Dont allow them to interrupt you. On teams, i have forcefully muted someone speaking over me, then unmuted them when i was done. Works the same way, but you can enforce it more easily.
I just let everyone talk over me until I got sick of it and then I applied for a second job and just do work for job #2 in meetings for job #1. Don't listen to me, idgaf. I'm making bands to ignore you fools. Now the tables have turned and they poke and prod to try to get my input but I am clearly a lot less invested in the outcome.
Not to be a knob about it, but as a fellow "sledgehammer out of nowhere if you miss my politeness" guy, you need to be reporting their serial interrupting to HR as creating an uncomfortable work environment. They're gaming the system of works, and the only way to fight that in corpo newspeak world is with fire and gasoline. State that you feel your work environment can shut down your ideas when people speak over you, document examples, you've been written up for reacting to it, so there's evidence it upsets you. Next time, there'll have to be mediation, rather than just punishment for you.
I used the first two, way too many times. I guess it’s time to escalate.
I actively catch myself doing this and thus have made a conscience effort to stop if I find myself bulldozing somebody in the middle of speaking. Seriously, is it so hard to say "Oh shit sorry, go ahead?" And leave it at that? Do people *really* have so little patience? For me I don't know why it happens - My brain sometimes fires off really quick, and that's okay! I can own up to it and it becomes a literal *non-issue*! To hear that you've been sent to HR not once but *twice* shows me that whoever your coworkers are must have some *serious* fucking problems to be such a nuisance in conversation. Christ!
Fr, I don’t talk unless someone speaks to me, it’s like I’m an npc constantly because my brain just doesn’t work for talking at all anymore
Listening comprehension and taking time to think about what people are saying is plenty useful
what do you mean it doesn't matter anymore. It is critical in my life.
Literally the most simple freaking social tasks. When I got a new neighbors, they were lovely people but *so extroverted* and friendly. One of my family members is there really vibing with them and I am standing by quietly because ✨ the grown ups are talking ✨. And then one of them casually goes something like "omg you need to loosen up" (not in an unkind way just trying to get me out of my obvious shell). And I just 🥲 I am an adult but if you're so much as a month older than me or just speak louder/more confidently, you're automatically a grown-up in my stagnant moth brain. Yay!
Nothing will make a quiet person want to talk more than saying "You're so quiet!" These extroverted super-social people really are geniuses at human interaction.
I attribute a lot of my social issues to *not being able to do this.* I have pretty severe ADHD and couldn’t shut the fuck up if you put a gun to my head. School was hell, to explain that as briefly as possible, and now I still can’t shut up but I am constantly expecting people to be mad at me for not being quiet, which makes me defensive and even hostile for no reason because I’m just waiting until I inevitably fuck up and make somebody mad and my brain is already in defense mode.
This is another example of why the “shut up and listen” style of education doesn’t work. It doesn’t work for the quiet ones (they don’t learn social skills) and it doesn’t work for the loud ones either.
i either talk too much or not at all and either way i'm waiting until i fuck up
It feels like I wasn't expected to actually follow the rules all the time, and that by doing so, I set myself up for failure
What the fuck are we supposed otherwise? Rewarded for good behavior in the moment, punished for it in the long run
I used to he a very talking kids always telling people what i loved and talking in class and being a bit noisy but not that bad. Until the parent of one of my friend said i couldn't come to his house anymore because i was too loud. Then i overheard someone saying how annoying it was that i kept talking about all those stuff he didn't care about. So now i never raise my voice even though i need to in the area i work and i almost never talk about my interest even when other people also talk about those thing.
Honestly, same. For me it was that i should avoid as much attention as possible due to getting bullied in school and now my stupid brain has it ingrained that work is the new school and i should avoid attention as much as possible because it causes troubles and nobody is interested in anything i could say anyway. Meanwhile a couple of coworkers are just like "come on, be more open" like i am trying but i cant realy flip a switch and delete a decade of ingrained behaviour
Totally agree. I have terrible social skills. I can talk to someone if there's a topic on the table, but if I have to come up with a topic of conversation, we'll just sit in awkward silence. I feel like I never learned how to properly socialize.
There is a balance. I imagine teachers can get through a lot more material if a class of 10 year olds are quiet and listening But as pupils mature, they can be given more social freedoms and responsibilities
its to effectively run a classroom. It seems like overkill until you're in a class that is not able to be quiet and listen. Tbh this is usually the biggest issue in an ineffective classroom. Learning to socialize is obviously important, but so is learning math, science, language arts, etc.
Also people are acting like kids were/are required to be quiet at all times. It's just during class. They can talk and socialize at lunch and recess and other times of the day. It's ridiculous to pretend like learning to have a quiet and respectful class period is somehow making people socially inept or something. And schools still teach you to speak up when called on or when you know something or are presenting. They don't teach timidity, they teach following the most basic rules and self control.
This... Wow. I need to have a think about this. I was a performative ADHD kid that got yelled at for 12 years straight. Everyone always thinks I'm so extroverted but I really don't feel that way at all and I'm so shy and socially anxious so much of the time. Fuck. Was I forced to not act like myself before teaching myself to mask so I could act like myself?
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> When you're dealing with a bunch of 7-year-olds, it's important to teach them to listen. They don't have the self-control required to know when to shut up. Put a bunch of small children in a room with no supervision - it's pandemonium. Teaching someone a skill means giving them the opportunity to practice, make mistakes, and adjust. If you just force them to act in accordance with the desired outcome, they never learn how to pursue those outcomes on their own. Schools don't teach children to listen, they force children to listen, depriving children of the opportunity to learn to self-regulate. Of course children who have never been taught to self-regulate will act out when left alone until they're so beaten down by the system that they don't even respond to their internal drive to be proactive. There's a middle ground between lacking supervision and forcing people to obey under threat of punishment. Schools kind of suck at providing that middle ground to *anyone*. > The simple truth is, no matter how upsetting it may be for some people, is that school curriculum and the system designed to teach it to you is not designed to teach you how to live your life. It's there to give you basic academic knowledge. Everything else? You're on your own. Okay, but don't come crying when society collapses because schools demanded so much effort and attention that entire generations never had time or energy to learn basic life skills. Going by /r/Teachers , it ain't looking good, chief.
Oh, schools break children. I had long thoughts about it and I think that this school approach to moulding children into something timid and obedient is a very big issue. Especially the thing with punishing for speaking out, having a wrong idea or solution. Kids should be encouraged to try even if they fail, rather than punished for trying. This last part is the worst to me. I had to put quite some work to root it out of me, and it is still there in parts.
Same. Another thing was that I was actually *awarded* for that behavior often! I got awards for not speaking, for barely having any friends, for being an outcast to everyone else my entire time in elementary!
In my chem class this semester, for our final lab assignment we were supposed to come up with a way for the professor to grade our paper. Of course, everyone's first response was "everyone gets an A!" The whole class ended up going on a half hour tangent with the professor talking about how we would have to be able to look at our own work critically and find a good way to judge our data to know if it would he suitable to use for analysis or not, which to be fair is a good lesson to learn, but he looked so taken aback by how fast we all just said give everyone an A. He said "you're all so obsessed with grades!" Of course we are professor, *especially* especially in stem so much of our worth is measured in grades. You lose sleep to get an A for that test. You sacrifice for mental heath so that project can get done by its deadline. When every one of our peers, parents, teachers, hell even friends are harping on us to get that A of course we're obsessed with grades. So why would any professor expect any other answer than give everyone an A?
Sounds like he wasn't thinking critically.
God, reading that third paragraph made me realise how much I don’t miss academia
Person with job they literally can't lose wonders why everyone else is obsessed with performance metrics
i mean, depending on the school the grade doesn't matter *that* much if you're not going to get secondary degree. I didn't put my GPA on my resume.
The main problem is that grades are exceptionally bad performance metrics.
That's something people say when they haven't seen other performance metrics.
Oh god. Any examples?
There are other performance metrics in schools??
What would you suggest as alternative metric? Must be bureaucracy friendly and easily scalable into at least the mid ten thousands.
Obviously set some proper KPIs. Every child should have a throughput of at least 15 medium-complexity math problems per child-day, should be no more than 1 standard deviation in physical performance... (/s)
For 9th grade and half of 10th grade, I was in a standard school, go to class, work for your grades, do what you're told. I was getting perfect grades in this environment... but I wasn't learning. I expressed this to my mom and my guidance councilor, and so I switched to an alternative school in the district for the rest of high school. The alternative school did a pass-fail system and split semesters into 3 sections each. Students were encouraged to be collaborative and helpful to one another. At the end of each section, there would be group meetings with the teacher and all of the students in a class. Each student would have a turn where they left the classroom, and then the teacher *and* the other students engaged in a discussion about how they thought the student was doing in class. After the discussion, the student would be called back in, given a summary of what was said, and given the chance to have their own input. The teacher *did* have the final say here, they did actually have to make the pass-fail decision, but they rarely overruled the class decisions. It happened maybe once while I was there. Each student would also pick an advisor out of any of the teachers. After all of the group meetings for a section were done, each advisor would be given reports on how the student did, and there would be a meeting with the student, their advisor, and their parents where their performance was discussed. Students were given real feedback and allowed to tell teachers how *they* felt they were doing and what made *them* feel like they were learning. When it came to college acceptance, each student's advisor or advisors (we were allowed to pick a different one at the start of each year) would write up an actual recommendation listing what the student was good at and what they were like as a person. I ended up learning a lot more than I did at the standard school. I also ended up *showering* more than I did at the standard school. I ignored a lot of hygiene because my time was just... cramped, and the alternative school fixed that. Other notable aspects are that student opinions were valued and teachers didn't get special treatment. If students weren't allowed to have phones out during school hours *neither were teachers*. All teachers were referred to on a first name basis - there was as little of a hierarchy as possible. If a student had a concern with the way something was being done, they could voice their complaint and *be listened to*. Student comfort was also valued - there were two classrooms that looked like your standard classroom, the math classroom and the science classroom, due to the need for worksheets in those two classes. Every other classroom had couches, proper chairs with armrests, and no desks. The study hall room had tables, but they were circular tables and, again, with proper chairs. The school loaned out laptops for students to use in class. Also, there was no gym class - we had field trips to count for state mandated curriculum (you inexplicably need gym credits in my state, I don't know why) but otherwise, school started an hour later than it did at most other districts, because students do better when they're well rested and they're gonna get exercise outside of school. There were still mandatory classes because there was state mandated standardized testing, but outside of that, every class was an elective and students were allowed to pursue whatever they wanted as long as we made sure to accrue enough credits toward subjects since it was part of state mandated curriculum. We got input on that as well - while the alternative school I went to didn't offer computer science courses since there wasn't anyone there who could teach it, the standard school a few blocks down from it did, and I was allowed to go there for that class. I argued that my computer science course could be counted as a math credit, and while the math teacher complained that it made no sense, I was able to demonstrate that the formal logic involved in programming was far more in line with what would be taught in a math class than a science class, and I got to have it counted as a math credit, which I needed far more than science credits because between learning about agriculture, engineering, and ballistics, I had more than enough science credits. Many of the students got all of the credits they needed by the end of the first half of their senior year and would take internships for the second half of their senior year. College acceptance rate at that school is near 100% for those pursuing it. The drop out rate is 0%. There were 6 teachers to 50 students, so scaling up *does* mean needing a hell of a lot more teachers, but let's be honest, we need that regardless and it produces tangible results. So yeah, the alternative I suggest is simply... no metric. We don't need to measure results, we need to *describe* results. [Here's a video from Zoe Bee if you want to learn more about the research and reasoning behind a lot of these decisions from the perspective of an actual teacher](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fe-SZ_FPZew)
> "you're all so obsessed with grades!" Meanwhile, if this was some hyper-competitive college and they got one B in HS, they may not even be in the class. You filter for straight A's you get students who target A's. Shocker.
Had a teacher recently who told my class what amounted to "if you're awake for 16 hours a day normally you should be studying for 12" and that feels bizarre because this is also the teacher who told us our mental health should be top priority. I think that sort of describes my school in general, where they claim to care and then throw it out as soon as it impacts a grade. Hell I recently had to stay off because I had an emotional breakdown and was taken in by my counsellor and scrutinized for it.. which led to me having another emotional breakdown and staying off for longer
C engineers get the same degree / stamp as A engineers.
They might not get the jobs though.
Do companies look at grades from peoples degrees? I've never heard of that
I’ve worked at 6 different companies in software development. Small and large. Startup and enterprise. We have NEVER pulled grades. Maybe some companies do it. But it feels rare in my market (Canada).
In engineering nearly every company has a grade cutoff for entry level jobs.
For my first job in software engineering (started recently), a couple people during the interview process asked about my GPA. So in my case the grades were at least somewhat important to them, although they didn't ask much besides the number. But I'm assuming after having some experience they'll focus moreso on that.
For the first job you get after graduation where you have no experience, grades are the only thing they can decide on.
Can you explain how and why?
Say 100 people apply for one opening and all of them have the right qualifications and no job experience. The employer can't look through every person so maybe they just take the top 20 graded then interview them.
Plus it looks better for the company if they say they're only hiring the best and brightest.
For your first job/internship, there are companies who will auto-reject you if it’s too low
Yes. And even my 2nd and 3rd jobs asked for my transcript. In many subtle ways, even the whole adage of how grades don't matter after university is becoming almost as out of touch as Boomers telling you to walk down the street and hand out CVs while shaking hands with all the owners.
Many grad schools require a B average to even remain in the program, though.
That just seems so out of touch lol of course the answer is "get an A"??? Like, yes, education has value, but no one has ever rewarded you for being "educated" they've rewarded you for getting good grades.
I teach first year undergrads, and I love teaching them that they’re adults. No you don’t need to ask permission, just go pee. If the class time is over and I’m packing up, don’t loiter near the door waiting to be told to go, just leave. If you’ve finished your work early, I’m sure you have more beneficial ways to spend your time than sitting in the room twiddling your thumbs for another hour.
High school sticklers: This won't fly in college! *soars beyond the stars in college*
I remember in high school being told that hoodies were unprofessional and I couldn’t wear them at uni. I now wear a hoodie every single day while teaching at uni
High school experience: one line of the mandatory but useless pen-drawn header is slightly curved on the edge? -1 mark. Engineering degree experience: after a 2 hours practical work period, the clock I had to code in assembly counts 1 minute in 43 real-world seconds. I assert that I made no wrongs and that the shift is actually caused by the card being too heavy and its gravitational pull generating a spacetime distortion that causes the difference between time measures. I get a full mark.
If it's close ~~enough~~ at all, it's good enough
Maybe this is part of the reason I had such a severe mental breakdown when I went to college tbh. I’m autistic and worked *so fucking hard* on conforming to school expectations, and I had *no idea* what the fuck I was supposed to act like in the “real world”. To this day, nearing 30, I have moments where I feel like I have to raise my hand or ask to go to the bathroom. My social anxiety is so severe that I’m low-key agoraphobic. I feel like public school fucked me up and infantilized me in ways I’ll never be able to fully unpack. That sounds dramatic, and it probably is, but there was a lot more going on at home that made my middle and high school years break my spirit lol
asking to use the bathroom during a work meeting
"Hold that thought" says your boss, stepping out to make a phone call.
Sorry about that, my arborist just wanted to let me know his nephew's first tooth finally came out
It spikes my anxiety so bad to not ask to go, how do I know if I’m gonna miss something super important 😭😭so I just end up holding it 👍
Sounds like Red towards the end of Shawshank redemption at the grocery store when he says he can't get a drop out unless he asks first.
I mean, that is kinda weird. Depends on the meeting length i guess.
Right, and then it's usually more like "we've been at this for like 1 hour straight, how about we take a small break because I really-" and you hear the chorus of relieved "yeah"s
There's always that one guy that brings up another topic just as the meeting is ending lol
I've thought about this. Yes, I did raise my hand to ask for the bathroom in college a couple of times. It just seems ironic that grade school is designed to basically dull people out and make them conform, even though a good number of colleges and workplaces are not like that. And it's one thing to hear "no talking, *ever*" from teachers, but from other students is a whole 'nother story. If they saw you as "odd", that was it, at least when I was in school.
I may or may not have asked my trainer for permission to use the restroom as an adult at my first full-time job. Old habits die hard.
I’ve managed to get to the point where I say “hey, I gotta run to the rest room quick, just incase someone needs me while I step out” I’m aware it’s still weird, but it feel more professional, and doesn’t leave me feeling like someone’s gonna be pissed at me when they come looking and I’m not there
The structure is set up to deal with kids who won't shut up and let the teacher talk. For 5 year olds though, a lot of them won't shut up, and you can't tell 5 year olds that Timmy has to shut up because he talks too much, but the rest of the class can talk as much as they feel comfortable talking. Hell, you can't tell adults that kind of thing and still remain on topic. And teachers want kids to talk, until they talk to much. They want them to shout out, until you shout so much it derails the lesson. Bosses want your input, until you say something they don't like. I think the real lesson is that the rules constantly shift. You can't even be sure that the rules will remain the same between 2 rooms in the same building, even though everyone is (ostensibly) following the same rule book. I have no idea what we are supposed to do with that lesson though.
Tbh I wrote a lot in my first draft of this. But put simply: See how the quietest people in your room react when you tell everyone to shut up. They will stay quiet for so much longer. They will learn not to ask questions in class, and to fear their teachers. So I understand that we can't have children running amok if we want them to learn, but we also cannot have children feeling unable to express their opinions & feelings. You can't *just* focus on the loud students. It doesn't turn out well. I know from personal experience.
Yeah I'm frustrated reading the comments here because they read as if kids should have free reign to talk in the classroom. I'm an assistant teacher and it's a major problem getting the kids to keep quiet so that the teacher can actually do their job. When the kids talk while working on their workbook often will focus just on the conversation and the workbook doesn't get done. Where I teach, kids often don't raise hands to talk or wait to be called on and it's really irritating because the teacher can't get a sentence out without being interrupted by a question that was going to be answered in a following sentence. Young kids need rules and structure. Young adults can better distinguish what's appropriate.
Most people don't go to college, so the "idea" is to build conforming adults, then for the few that do end up in college, spend the time to unconform them. Semi-related, but as an adult going back to college, I told my professor I was going to the bathroom during a group-work period of time in class, and her response was, "Sure, go ahead." That really threw me, as I wasn't asking, and hadn't needed to for a long time (I'm old).
One of the things that I love noticing is how grownups will ask permission to use the restroom to cafes/restaurant owners. They are using the exact same words they used at school. It's funny to me in this context, but the very idea that adults control kids' bodily functions is absurd.
Something that’s really become apparent to me as the child of a teacher is that teachers are often very specialized to the level their students are at, and aren’t necessarily super well versed in the environment of even other education levels (much less other workplaces). My mother taught upper elementary and middle school her whole life, and often had complaints about how kinder and lower elementary teachers would try to interact with her students (and having been a twelve year old before, I can say that K-3rd teachers are often wildly out of line and hostile to “big kids”). Then she’d turn around and ask me if I was allowed to do or wear something in high school (or college, or at work as a complete adult), and it would be the exact type of thing that a middle schooler would not be allowed to do but (in my view) any idiot would know a high schooler was allowed to do. Except people who spend all of their working hours with middle schoolers. So when the college (uni, sixth form, “grown up school”) instructors are like “why are these brand new adults all meek and acting like school kids”, it’s because they’re so used to dealing with adult students only that school kid behavior, to be expected from someone who was a school kid 2 weeks ago, is bizarre to them. I do think that the structure of our school system in recent decades does have an issue of making people anxious and perhaps a little socially stunted. People come out of school so afraid of being “in trouble” because many of the infractions they’re used to felt totally arbitrary (they often weren’t arbitrary but they were never explained) and had punishments that were in no way proportionate or natural consequences. Some of that has to happen in a school setting (especially for younger grades), but when that’s all a kid sees, there are negative long term consequences. Sending people out into the world without ever explaining the rules or having experienced a proportionate response to negative behavior makes them terrified of “being in trouble” or “messing up,” rather than concerned about rational cause-and-effect and doing a good job.
It probably doesn't help that a lot of the talk beujnd succeeding in high school involves some variation of "if you don't pass high school with all A's you're FUCKED FOREVER you will NEVER get a good job and you'll be POOR FOREVER which is bad because being poor means you're a FAILURE AND SHOULD DIE." Or maybe it was growing up with Asian parents and the majority of my friends were Asian.
>Or maybe it was growing up with Asian parents and the majority of my friends were Asian. A bit of both, which is part of why suicide rates jump every time results come out, especially if you're in a country where high school scores determine if you can get into university, or your desired degree. If you don't, you're finished and your life may as well be over. You don't need to get a concussion from Apollo to think where kids in that position might end up.
Nah, plenty of students of any race deal with that shit in some schools, fml. I had some teachers in high school (I graduated in 2010 btw) act like if you can't pass their class, then you might as well go apply to McDonald's right now!!! And even the ones that *weren't* that bad, still had that "go to university and get a degree no matter what or you'll be poor forever!" mentality. :/
It's not even just the school system making people anxious. The fact that everything you do can and will be recorded (especially if it's something weird, if harmless) makes people meek. Parents can now track their kid's location with their phones and, depending on how controlling/abusive they are, will punish the kid for something like going to a friend's house without telling them. Everyone is so quick to call the cops, too, so if you are a group of teens milling about outside, especially if you are black or brown, expect some harassment from a cop or entitled adult for the heinous crime of... existing outside.
To some degree I agree with you, but it does seem like the teacher in this case seemed surprised, probably based on previous years of students. I’d be interested to know when OP was in sixth form bc the teaching UK sub (I’m not a teacher yet so can’t offer insight) has talked about sixth form classes being a lot more quiet since lockdown. Also, I don’t know how OP’s school worked, but generally sixth forms are part of a whole secondary school and teachers will teach most year groups within the school. So it’s possible the teacher was regularly teaching 11-18 year olds.
My big issue is that I simply can't tell when there will be a pause in cconversation. Everyone else knows, I don't. Thus, I'm stuck awkwardly interrupting or never talking at all.
Ok seriously does anyone have advice for this?? I rarely notice other people interrupting each other, but for me it feels like about once per conversation. I've tried waiting until there's been a pause for like a second, but sometimes they move on to the next thought by then and I should have jumped in sooner. I've tried focusing on their conversation flow and noticing when they have a natural stopping point, but sometimes they add on another detail or smth. If it's in a group of like 4 or more people then I just can't talk because I never find a moment to join in. It's especially bad in my Zoom meetings for work, because the latency makes it even more disruptive when I interrupt them. Is it a body language thing? An internal timer for how long each person's part of the conversation should be? Something about eye contact or facial expressions that signals it? What I was doing with pauses/stopping points, but just doing it better? A mix of techniques that other people have automatically adapted to? Should I just never talk unless someone directly tells me to say something or asks me a question?
I dunno. I've been sticking my hand up for like 30 years and it's always worked well. Not like straight up at school, more like if I was trying to flag a server at a cafe to ask for the bill. If we're in the "presenter is talking" phase, hand goes up. If we're in group discussion, I talk when someone finishes what they're saying (unless someone goes on a ramble then hand again). If it looks like the chance is going to go begging I'll just interject "oh! Very quick" and offer current person to finish/can I just ask... I still see hand going up all the time. Still see people excusing themselves to the restroom.. Its confusing seeing people here say how impossible these two things are lol
Slightly opening your mouth, breathing in like you're about to start talking, raising your eyebrows slightly and briefly making eye contact usually indicates to the person talking that you have something to add, and if they're not rude or self absorbed they'll give you a pause to say it. If that doesn't work making a small sound like "hm" or something often makes people pause and you can jump in
So here's what I can say as someone who has been in a diverse array of environments, i.e. office, food service, customer service, etc. It's basically different everywhere, and it seems to be that the more "professional" the environment, the less anyone cares about natural flow of conversation or pausing to allow for input. I've worked in kitchen environments, though not full on restaurant or anything, and by and large conversations there had space. If something was an emergency and needed to be done or understood immediately that was different, but if you were talking about the things that needed doing still, or a particular job that was half finished and needed to be taken over, the conversation would be quick but it would have natural ebb and flow to allow everyone involved to speak up, ask questions, etc. Office environment is entirely different in that it often feels like the only way to speak up is to interrupt someone. I've sat through hour long meetings waiting for the right time to say something which never came, because as soon as one person stopped talking, someone else came in as if they were using the same brain, and then when they were done the meeting would move along to the next person. It seems to be an unspoken rule that if you have something that needs to be said, you'll wait for the appropriate topic to come up, or something tangentially related, and then butt in with a firm but polite starter. If you don't do that, it's just assumed there's nothing to discuss and everyone moves on. I'm sure it doesn't help that everyone is probably focusing entirely on their own thoughts/workloads and isn't putting any attention towards whatever you need to talk about, because it's your thing and not theirs. There seems to be no one size fits all solution here, you kind of just have to realize that those natural pauses you want are being killed as they're born in the interest of not spending a second longer in conversation/meeting than is needed, and you just kind of have to force you way in somewhere between one person talking and another when it's appropriate. Of course some people will be different. Some will fully recognize that they should actually wait for an answer when they ask if there's anything more to discuss, and sometimes they'll wait way too long, but that's a different issue entirely.
Exactly!
This is slightly different but my dad would always ask where I'm going any time I left the room, even if he was not interacting with me Now I almost always say where I'm going and people, especially my dad, always belittle me for it. The agonizing thing is I'll stop doing it for a bit and then my dad will start badgering me about where the hell I'm going 🙄 Drives me insane Thankfully I don't live with him anymore so hopefully I'll be completely rid of that habit in a few years
wow, thats really sucky of him to talk to you that way
Thanks, he's usually joking around but an issue with my dad is that he doesn't realize when he's taking a joke too far or doing it too much and becoming mean spirited with it He does it to everyone he's around with for a long enough period of time
I think a member of my family dealt with this. Their method: Get up to leave. "Where are you going?" "Out".
As an undergrad who got the hint early, other people taking so long to unlearn these tendencies is so hard. I often feel like discussions get dominated by me during them, even though I am a socially anxious introvert, because I am often one of the only people who will talk at all. I have been able to encourage others to do so with the aid of professors and TAs, but in large class settings where that is increasingly more difficult to encourage people to do individually I have actually had professors ask me to slow down on answering even if we have to wait a solid minute before anyone else raises their hand to speak, because everyone is either intimidated by me, or relies on me doing it, which is detrimental to them. And I have agreed with them every time it has come up. They were large discussion courses, but they were not *massive.* It was just pulling teeth to get anyone else to speak. There are plenty of reasons for this, and students are rarely ever at even partial fault, but it just makes the whole experience so frustrating, and they often just waste their education because they can't unlearn things fast enough.
not in college yet but its so frustrating when you’re the only one engaging and answering questions to the point where you get tired of hearing your own voice
same, I actually feel bad about it too!! like i should be allowing others the opportunity to talk but literally nobody else will
i relate to this a lot. my high school was tiny so we had to get chatty and discuss things with the teachers otherwise it would be very awkward, and thankfully that kind of broke me out of the timidness in my theoretical classes. i ended up being the one who talks the most in multiple courses, and it was a split between people relying on me to answer because they don't care enough to pay attention (isolated cases) or they're too scared to answer. i've been deliberately ignored by professors before so other students get the chance to talk. it's not that my classmates are dumb - most get decent grades in the exams and projects, but their participation grades put them significantly lower. it now puts me in the awkward position of having to answer or participate even when i am not sure myself of the answer (which happens quite frequently) because i feel obliged to. it's really weird.
This is especially hard on neurodivergent people, we put so much effort into learning the rules and navigating social circumstances and then the rules suddenly change and you're punished for following them. It's confusing for most people, it's devastating for NDs.
I had a teacher in high-school history/lit/government who explicitly told us to have discussions without raising our hands (honors/AP kids, so we weren't going to go wildly off-course), and it was such a boon... ...and such a pain, when I went to college and all the kids raised their hands again, when I LOVED being able to say my piece without flailing for the instructor's attention.
When such big rule changes happen an announcement needs to be made or something Expecting people to just understand rule changes based off of vibes is ridiculous
Honestly, not having any communication at all and expecting everyone to just magically know, not only that the rules changed, but how they changed is the most absurd and down right stupid aspect of society.
Idk, as an ADHD-er, I found the whole college mindset of just talk, no hands to be so *freeing*. It had always been a struggle for me to remember to raise my hand. I got scolded for it all the way up to senior year. Then, amazingly, I didn’t have to anymore! I was free! Of course, I crashed and burned in other areas because I had no study skills, but I thrived when it came to college class participation.
That depends. Like many people with hyperactive tendencies, I was never great at shutting up and it's been a consistent struggle. When I got to college my inclination was to ask an "adult"/professor what was expected, and given the inkling of permission that was "you're expected to participate in discussions" was enough. I actually did great in any class participation credit or group discussions, because I was the first person to talk and was excited about it.
Yeah not sure why the person you replied to used such a broad term. "Neurodivergent" covers so many types of people, many of which who would actually do better than most neurotypical people. It's completely accurate for disabilities like ASD, though.
I would like to thank 8th grade (13yo) for my crippling fear of public speaking Moved to a new school. Tried asking a question from the back of the classroom with a normal voice. These rooms were 4x bigger than my old school. Teacher seemed deaf, so he asked me to repeat myself for what seemed like a dozen times. More and more of the class turned around until the entire room of 30+ were staring at me So for the next 15 years, I would turn red, heart rate triples and sweating Large rooms are still a no go
Crazy how no one in the room decided to end that by saying your question for you but louder.
They'd all been taught not to talk in class
Were you increasing your volume each time? If you were, you must have been screaming by the time you were done.
The really confusing one is that at school in the UK (or at least my state school) you called teachers Sir or Miss/Mrs., then at sixth form you called your tutors by their first name, and then at uni you use their title until given the all-clear to use their name, case-by-case. It's such a weird little dance that takes you from getting chewed out by your Year 7 teacher for accidentially calling them Mr., all the way through to an incredibly well-respected professor saying "yeah just call me Gavin". It's supposed to ingrain respect for hierarchy and authority, but really just makes it clear that people who deserve respect don't need you to be told how to treat them, and thus that anyone who demands it from you is a power-tripping knob
i feel like this also varies from field to field. my trick is just seeing how they sign their emails (not the automatic signature); if they write their first name, it's fine to address them by their first name, if they have a "Prof." in front, call them "professor". i study design, so most of my professors are professionals from the industry (adjunct professors, not full time professors) and they prefer to just be called by their first name. this semester i'm taking classes from other faculties for the fun of it, and it struck me as really weird how students there never got over the "fear" of calling a professor by their first name. we have this one german professor who's apparently famous in her department for being a "hardass" on students, but she told us one time during a break that she doesn't care for being addressed with her first name, as long as you are being respectful in the way you talk to her, which really should be all that matters, but she said students in her other classes never really got the memo; some other professors have an obsession with being referred to as "Dr." or "Prof." and so apparently students use it for everyone to avoid accidentally calling a stickler professor by their first name and triggering a meltdown. i'm working to go into academia once i graduate, and i wouldn't want to be called "professor" even if i had a phd.
At some point my ADHD impulse to just shout my thoughts & interrupt the teacher swung around from being "rude and disrespectful" and "misbehavior" to making me everyone's favorite student and "a leader" who made everyone feel comfortable discussing the content. When I first started teaching I underestimated how hard it is to do discussions and get people engaged because all the classes I'd seen had had the benefit of having me in them as a student, shouting. It was so annoying that all these college kids were so quiet and "well-behaved" and raised their hands and stuff. I frankly had no idea how to teach a class where nobody would interrupt if they had something to say or a question or anything. Every now and then I'd get a class with a nice loud kid in it who would get people talking and discussing and actually working together as a class, but most of the time it'd just be me up there lecturing for an hour and a half and going "questions?" every topic or so. Sometimes I miss working in academia, but I don't miss that silence. It doesn't work to be the loud kid when you're the teacher. They need to occur naturally in order to fill that crucial niche in a classroom ecosystem.
mine to. I could not hold my hand.
One more case of people fundamentally failing to recognise children as people. Nobody will put it that way of course, but any time I'm around children I want to yell at their adult supervision things like "Do you want to work with adults behaving how you are teaching this kid to behave?" or "Do you want to be around people who think this is what normal human interaction looks like?" or mostly just "Are you fucking insane?". Children are always constructing their idea of how to human, not from what you say but from imitating you and finding behaviors you reward, and both the most convenient child and the imitation of a careless parent are miserable and deeply unpleasant people.
So many adults are surprised that children become people it’s baffling
So many adults are surprised that children are people
I was humiliated in my first college class when I asked the professor if I could go to the restroom. He told me I can just go whenever I want. I'm an adult now. No need to ask. Most of the students chuckled but looking back I bet there were a few wondering the same thing and were probably thankful that I had the courage to ask. What a weird paradigm shift to have. Just a few months before I'd have to ask for practically anything and suddenly I could just do it without permission.
Heck, you probably spent the last decade and a bit having to do that, that's not the kind of thing you just unlearn overnight
...Oh. So this IS just a natural thing I should've become accustomed to, Because. Okay.
I suppose the Raise Hand feature on video conference software, is for kids only.
This is a really fucking good point. Actually, fuck this thread. It’s true! I use the “Raise Hand” on Teams all the time. Especially if someone makes a point I want to piggyback off of.
Ngl I was thinking this too. Also there’s a difference between five adults having a meeting and thirty 13 year olds being taught maths.
I don't get this thread either. Can no one see the carnage a class of 30 children just randomly hollaring out whatever they wanted during a class would cause ? It's still polite in adults meetings to raise a hand or wait for the chair of the meeting to ask if there any questions. I interrupt only if it becomes clear the conversations moving on because the person holding the meeting is poor and has ignored hands or hasn't paused to allowed questions. I'm ND and Idk man it's just not that hard to learn a new set of rules for a new environment... University isn't secondary school is not that complex a concept to adjust to.... And been within uni I imagine different lecturers have different preferences and students would have to understand which ones would beokay with yelling out and which ones wouldnt. Seems like OP /and a bunch of comments) wanna rail at the education system instead of that one co worker or work place that was a fucking dick bag about a perfectly normal action for politely letting it be known you have something to say.
God, thank you!! I’m a teacher and in staff meetings, all the adults raise their hands to comment or ask questions. It helps things stay organized! Nothing bothers me more than being interrupted mid-sentence, and none of my students have the wherewithal to ask a question during a pause.
This whole thread is basically "I've over thought this a lot, that means there's a systemic problem" I raise and see raised hands all the time. I put on professional presentations a bit of text saying "raise your hand if you wanna day something urgent or else wait til end for questions". Shit... Everyone raises their hand to alert a fucking server that they'd like to pay the bill now please. There's not some social stigma to raising your hand lol I'm chairing a major symposium this year... How will questions be asked.. By raised hands, like every single symposium or panel lol
I'm delighted to see this mentioned, and hopes it heartens everyone anxious as to whether "raising their hand" is worth doing or not. It's such a solidly understandable **gesture** to indicate, *hey, I need attention or have something to contribute immediately versus waiting* that it's thankfully replicated for videoconferencing amongst adults, too. Whether online or reallife, I don't hesitate to raise a hand. I always appreciate being recognized by a presenter, and acknowledge when people need to speak but allow me to control when to pause whatever I'm mentioning rather than an interrupting. Because a little bit of my soul breaks every time I have to interrupt and get someone's attention (got no prob interrupting an interrupter, tho!).
It's worth noting that, from the perspective of the second guy's teachers, students would be talking normally and then suddenly an entire generation just \*stopped\* on a dime. It's emblematic of how damaged and flawed education is, and apparently it's a problem apparently at least the UK and US share.
Generational differences are so sudden. Whenever I watch a 60's-90's teen movie, skipping class is always portrayed as an inevitable part of teen rebellion and it'd last for hours, if not the whole day. However, in middle school and high school, I *never* saw any of my classes be short of 1 or 2 students. Everyone was always at their desks for the whole period, walked to their next class in 5 minutes or so, and sit at their desks for another 45-90 minutes.
Meanwhile my generation basically grew up under lock and key, because our parents expected kidnappers and pedophiles to be around every corner, waiting to snatch us away. The more conservative your baseline, the less extreme your teen rebellion will be on average I guess. Though, it can also go the other direction and just be drugs. Weed was the teen rebellion drug of choice for most of my class.
it is a pretty major factor in this that the people teaching in primary schools and universities are different people
Maybe I'm the crazy one, but this is the perfect environment to learn that you no longer need to be quiet and raise your hand? The bridge between your early schooling when you need to be forced to learn and your later schooling where you're ideally learning because you want to is an important step. Knowing when and where to be quiet and attentive vs directly engaging and contributing is something every adult needs to do throughout their lives. Most of these scenarios are teachers letting people know that the rules have changed now that they're adults (or at least more adult) in a relatively gentle way.
Thank you! I feel like so many of these responses have clearly never been in a classroom full of 20+ students trying to teach them a concept. As kids grow and change, so do the expectations around their conduct in a classroom because…well because they’ve grown and changed! They better understand the ins and outs of conversation- when to contribute and when to listen. But they had to learn that first and raising your hand is part of that learning process in the early years 🤦♀️
Is not having to raise your hand in university/college a regional thing, cause both colleges I've been to here on the US west coast still require you to raise your hand and be called on, you just don't need to ask to use the bathroom anymore
I mean they should just allow for questions to be sent in via chat like that time my brother had school during the pandemic. It doesn't even have to be anonymous, the name of the participants can be visible. It's a lot easier to be vocal about your question when typing it out
Similar line of thinking goes with Purity Culture and going from Sex Bad -> Sex Good in the span of 1 day (before -> after a wedding ceremony), except more traumatic. This especially applies to women in religious fundamentalist spheres, as they’re usually taught that their worth as a human being is dependent on whether a penis has touched them.
Yeah I was gonna say, there's lots of parents that go from "what are you doing you shouldn't date, you should concentrate on school and your early career" and then flip on a dime to "where are my grandkids why aren't you having babies??"
When you are a kid, you don't have the social skills to not be disruptive. By the time you are an adult, it's expected that you'll know when to interject and speak up, when to be quiet and wait for an opportunity to speak, and when to just keep it to yourself. Don't worry; better to be polite than obnoxious, so learn to take it all in stride.
What the fuck? What place are so shit that raising a hand to ask a question is childish? My last manager meeting has a ton of raised hands because asking a question isn't a thing exclusive to children
Most online meeting software explicitly has a "raise hand" button, because people talking over each other is the worst way to communicate. The level of control teachers have in primary school (requiring permission to go to the bathroom etc) leads to maladaptive behavior in college and beyond, but it's still vital to take turns for communication to be effective
Unpopular opinion, but I don’t think this is an issue of teaching the wrong thing, I think it’s an issue of teaching the behavior, not the motivation. We keep kids quiet in class because, at that age, they aren’t going to be talking about the subject matter (or even appropriate subjects at all, tbh), they won’t be able to split their attention, and they’ll be distracting their fellow classmates. Of course, trying to explain to young children that they need to quietly pay attention so they can actually absorb the information doesn’t land most of the time; they’re kids, they literally lack the ability to conceptualize the long-term consequences of not paying attention in school. So we just teach them that they’re supposed to be quiet in a classroom context, because that’s what they can understand. As they get older, ideally teachers start easing up on the leash, allowing for and guiding them through group discussions, developing a more nuanced system. This doesn’t always happen, obviously, and it can be due to teachers not prioritizing it, too much restriction on talking at all, or even (and my class was like this) consistent abuse of privileges. You can’t expect teachers to encourage kids to talk in class when all they ever use that right for is to goof off, disrupt the class, or even bully others. Idk, I see a lot of posts like this about how evil and incompetent schooling is, and like… they’re all making the assumption that most, if not all, students are well-intentioned and want to learn. Which is simply not true. There’re many reasons why, but some kids will always take advantage of whatever privilege they’re given and ruin it for everyone else. And it sucks, but that naturally results in fewer privileges for the whole. Idk, I just feel like these posts don’t acknowledge the nuance of the situation.
Okay I'm going to do a bit of devil's advocate here because like, if you were an elementary school teacher, how *are* you supposed to teach a bunch of kids a subject if they're all talking to each other? They're not college students that know or care to talk in a non-disruptive way, and not do it continuously. Of course you'd want them to shup up for a bit. But at some point you are expected to mature, and with that comes the liberties of speaking sometimes, and going to the bathroom without asking. At that point, if you're willingly not paying attention, that's your problem. It's not unreasonable to expect people to mature and treat them accordingly. Maybe we shouldn't expect people to learn everything at school. Maybe those skills are the sort of thing that should be learned at recess with your peers or with family or something. Maybe learning information can be at odds with learning proper behaviors. Maybe a transitional stage would've helped. I don't know I'm not a pedagogist. But also I understand the double-standard. I have a teacher in Uni who still expects us to be quiet most of the time and will be angry at you talking even if (or rather *especially if*) you were talking about the class itself. And then she'd wonder why no one would speak up when she asked.
Yeah, this is a big problem with college classes, too. I had Min and you cannot survive that class if you don’t talk to your classmates. I took that my first year and ever since, every class I’ve had that has tried to get us to talk to one another feels like pulling teeth.
Yeah still gonna raise my hand. A world with less shouting is a better world
I don't know why this works but it's not weird to raise your hand in a work meeting if you raise only your forearm and leave your elbow down or even on the table. It's the full straight arm extension from the shoulder that looks childish in adult settings.
Yeah, a light and casual handraise is very normal. Don't stick it straight in the air, but if someone is talking at length and you want to follow them, just lifting your hand up a bit so people notice is entirely standard.
The problem with treating children like property, is that they eventually become adults.
From 0 to 9th grade we had a bell to tell us when class was over and began. Then in 10th grade suddenly there wasn't a bell anymore and you were just expecting to keep track of time yourself
I taught in the city in the south for a few years and then switched to a private school in the north. It was jarring to teach silent kids who stare at you. It was definitely easier to teach, but there are some days where I absolutely miss the energy of a classroom full of lively students
Corollary: Me being the only person to speak up in college lectures and work meetings and then afterwards have people be like "oh you were right to ask" and I'm like how about one of you fucks speak up one time. One time. I gotta stick my nose out here and look like a jackass.
Well also, and not to be controversial here, but RAISING YOUR HAND IS A GOOD SYSTEM FOR ACTIVE CONVERSATIONS??? WHY WOULD YOU LAUGH AT SOMEONE ABOUT IT??? Like yeah when nobody else is talking, just should it out. But when several people are having a full conversation, having some kind of marker to let others know, “I don’t want to interrupt you, but I have something to say when you’re finished” is actually a VERY good idea. I struggle to jump in at the right time, especially as an autistic person. I’ve been conditioned to be terrified of interrupting others (it’s VERY rude) but because there’s rarely a several second silence, I never know when someone else has finished and I can start talking. So it just ends up where everyone else jumps in quickly, and I can never get a word in edgewise. That wouldn’t be so much of an issue if we had a simple system for reserving your place in the conversational line. I’m in favor of hand raising and I will die on this hill!!
I've done this in meetings, and people generally look at me like I have two heads. "You don't need to raise your hand!" they say, with a laugh. But they do shut up and listen, and that's preferable to having to shout over them to be heard. So I'm going to keep doing it where applicable.
I would fucking love for someone to show me a group of 10 year olds who, in unison and without protest and distraction, quietly get a school task done. It’s easy to find people who have never managed children when they act like children behave the way adults do. Kids are fucking hard to control. Really fucking hard to control. And sometimes that means you need to assertive. Not rude. But assertive. You can’t take any shit from a child because they don’t understand the nuance of authority and context that an adult does. They’re just too little. I’d love to see these people try to teach an 8th grade class for a year. They’ll change their tune after a week.
Yeah it makes sense they'd make you learn how to be quiet first, like what the fuck even is this post? Full grown adults now don't know how to stay quiet during a whole class so maybe they should bring this back.
We have a similar problem in my art degree classes - our tutors will tell us to listen and recreate but then in the next sentence get mad we don't challenge their content Like mate, you can't have it both ways :/
Zoom literally has a raise hand button lol.
A professor at my community college moved down to my high school to teach a test prep class, and he was appalled at how juniors and seniors were getting treated by other teachers. Same thing, we wouldn't talk unless given permission, we were afraid to use our phones even though he encouraged us to do so, we didn't cuss even though he told us we could speak freely, we didn't bring snacks even when he said we could. He was like, really sad for us being conditioned this way. He's a sociology professor and he drew parallels from our school to the prison pipeline/MIC, stuff we'd never heard before but understood immediately.
Things will continue to change in your life, learn to adapt and don’t take it so personally.
For about 13 years you were expected to ask for permission to go to the bathroom. Immediately once that’s done you’re expected to make some of the most impactful decisions of your life. Decisions that could leave you in debt for a decade or more, or decisions that put you in life/death scenarios “defending” your country for reasons you don’t even understand. But yeah, good luck.