Coherence rant

I'm up, and I'm pissed. I'm going to sleep yet again on a night where I have a homework due, and I'm not finished with it. I'm not finished with it for a lot of reasons. One is that I'm constantly tired because my body is stupid, defective, and refuses to a) fall asleep, and b) actually sleep through the night once it does fall asleep. Another is that I have to do scads of menial grading for the class I'm TAing.

But the third is because I don't (completely) understand the homework. And after years of learning stuff, I've come to realize (and had the self-confidence to realize) that it's not because I'm stupid. It's because there are a lot of people out there who are fundamentally fucking incapable of expressing an idea coherently.

Theoreticians are the worst offenders. The problem is that theoreticians, in order to be good at theory, have to have brains that don't function like other people's brains. Consequently, they are fundamentally incapable of thinking like other people, and thus they can't even conceive of the kinds of confusion that us normal mortals experience. Some of them know this. Others don't and operate under the infuriating illusion that they are competent presenters. They aren't. Trust me. (Donald Knuth comes to mind as a canonical example. I remember hearing a story about Knuth along the lines of the fact that he locks himself away in a mountain cabin periodically so that he can "digest complicated mathematical concepts into pieces suitable for general consumption," or something along those lines. [Actually, I just dug up the reference] If you've ever tried to read anything the man has written, you know that is arrogant, unmitigated horse shit. Everything he produces is still dense, impenetrable crap.)

But it's not even limited to theoreticians. I don't know what it is. Maybe to become a figure of sufficient authority to be given the opportunity to teach complicated concepts, you have to have a certain level of ego that precludes the empathy necessary to relate to the problems your students experience. Or maybe it's just that such people are, again, fundamentally incapable of constructing a pedagogical narrative out of such complicated concepts. And, that really is the key: in order to teach something, you really have to construct a story out of it, and you have to create a mental image of what you're talking about in your students' minds. For instance, compare:

"There was a lamp. It had a lightbulb.
There was wood. Wood made up the floors. And the beams.
And there was a closet.
The people had clothes.
Sometimes the clothes were on the floor, which you'll remember was made of wood.
You had to have light to see the clothes.
Ideally...remember the closet?...the clothes should go in the closet.
But underneath all that was a kitchen, which had plumbing. But, you couldn't see the plumbing."

...to:

"Imagine you have a family. To protect your family from the weather (rain, snow, heat, etc.), you have a house. When you walk into the house, you'll notice there is a kitchen to your left, a living room in front of you, and a bedroom upstairs. You need something to stand on in all of these rooms, so each has a floor made of wood. Similarly, you'll want something to keep the ceiling up, so you have pillars, which are also made of wood. If you continue upstairs to the bedroom and spend some time there, you'll quickly realize that you need some kind of light to be able to see things. Thus, on the bed table, you'll find a light. As soon as you have light in the room, you'll notice that you have a lot of possessions, and ideally, you'd want a place to put them. This is where the closet comes in."

The first one leave you confused. You have no idea why you're learning the facts, how they fit together, what's important, etc. The second one strings all of those facts together into a coherent story, and, to some degree, one fact leads logically to the next.

Sadly, the vast majority of teachers I've had employ the first model of teach: throw scattered facts at you and hope you absorb them. No structure. No conceptual glue. No progression. Just a brain dump. And it's a truly infuriating experience.

Best teacher I've ever had: Jonathan Zittrain at Harvard Law School.

Worst teacher I've ever had: H.T. Kung in the Harvard CS department. That man should never be allowed to teach anything. Ever.