Neema Salimi

It starts with students passing a prerequisite course without demonstrating sufficient mastery of the material. Then, the instructor of the next course discovers that students are struggling to learn the course material due to missing foundational knowledge. The only true remedy is to hold the students accountable for learning all the material in the course, including the prerequisite material that they are missing. But this requires the instructor to put forth a ton of effort supporting students through remedial assignments/assessments and help sessions while simultaneously "holding the line" in a hardcore way. And of course it requires a ton of effort from students because they have to put in the extra work to pay off their "learning debt," which is usually a rude awakening for them. So what usually ends up happening instead is everyone turns a blind eye and pushes the problem further down the line. The instructor just gives the usual lectures/assignments, curves (or otherwise inflates) the grades, students go along with it, and the problem is left for their next instructor to deal with (or not deal with).

One of my friends tutored Calculus 1 students at WashU last year, and there's so many crazy stories of educational dysfunction. Like one day, they were helping a student who was stuck on subtracting negative numbers. Yeah, a calculus student stuck on subtracting negatives. They were doing a problem that asked them to calculate a derivative, and the student couldn't do -27 minus 14. I mean, no wonder they had no idea what was going on in the class or how to choose what derivative rule to apply to each function or how to work with functions. Like, for crying out loud, they don't know how to do arithmetic! And just because you graduated doesn't mean you get to leave all that math you're supposed to learn behind cause everything builds on each other. Algebra builds on arithmetic. Calculus builds on algebra. You're never done with anything. It always comes back, and you gotta keep building on top of it. If you wanna solve calculus problems, it's not just the new stuff in calculus that you need to know. It's also all the foundational material from algebra and arithmetic, trigonometry, everything that is gonna come back and get exercised. And if you can't do it, you're gonna struggle until you refresh that knowledge. So when we're putting students into calculus who don't know middle school math, it's no surprise that they're completely underwater. This is playing out everywhere. Further reading: justinmath.com/the-fall-of-o…

Many students are sold a lie that learning should feel pleasurable, and when that's not their experience, the cognitive dissonance eats them alive. It's like someone signs up for strength & conditioning at a gym and the trainer tells them that they should feel pleasure doing pushups, sprints, deadlifts, etc. Or like a nutritionist saying "you should enjoy the taste of broccoli." Completely alienating. What a good trainer will say is "Yes, it feels taxing, and that's okay, that's normal. Our goal here is not pleasure, it's satisfaction -- making progress, doing things you weren't able to do before, feeling good about what you've accomplished, transforming yourself in ways that are beneficial for your future. You're here to work, so let's do work." People respect that, and there's a kind of comfort in knowing that we're all here to do serious work. Whether it's the gym or the classroom, that's what people need to hear.