CODDLING
(Posted 2008-10-02 13:59:52 by ArchPaladin)

During my high school and undergrad years, I obviously took many exams. 
The week or so leading up to the exam, the professor would usually state
something like "all material before date X is fair game for the exam", and
that would be about all that was said.  There might be a couple of review
problems done in class, but usually no more than that.  I find it unusual
now that in the few community college classes I took, and now going through
my master's program, that whenever exams come up the professors will walk
through all the handouts and outline almost down to the bullet point the
exact material that you will have to know for the exam.

I find that to be an unusual amount of handholding for adult students.  I'm
sitting in a class with a group of people who are there to specialize in
_an entire field_, and yet they freak out at the possibility that a teacher
might not outline every single thing that would be on an exam.  For a very
long time I never had that.  I never even had classes where the professors
would give handouts of the material to be covered.  You were expected to
take your own notes.

I find such coddling a little upsetting.  Haven't graduate students learned
how to learn?

And then there's the interesting flipside at work.  All new hires are
paired with a mentor who is supposed to help answer questions, make sure
you learn the ropes, and don't cause some screwup at a client site.  The
unwritten part of the job description for a mentor, however, is that they
get to offload all their difficult and annoying problems onto their
mentees.  In some cases they will only offload the menial stuff, but in
other cases they will have a problem requiring an area of expertise that no
one in the company has any knowledge of and assign it out.  I find this to
be a form of anti-coddling, as they usually have this sadistic, gleeful
look in their eyes or constantly stifle maniacal laughter when assigning
such problems.

Haven't these mentors learned how to assign out problems correctly?

--------

There are no comments on this post.