| I have a big red flag that goes against what this post claims (I've written about this to a similar point https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/129673/58645 ) You do NOT want to START a course/topic by predisposing students negatively. Whether that is in relation to a topic, or inadvertently in terms of your perceived ability to teach it. You may think that "apologising" on behalf of a technology (or yourself) might attract sympathy and establish rapport, but typically it backfires and achieves the opposite. To make the example concrete, if you start the lecture with "why NaN sucks" in order to get students to sympathise and appreciate that you're showing them the pitfalls, is more than likely going to backfire and create a general feeling of resentment along the lines of "why are we even using it, why am I wasting my time here". Not to mention the risk of "great, I'm paying $Xk/y so that some random disgruntled guy can teach me hacks to circumvent shitty technology". There are much better ways to approach this subject (linguistically), which would make it far more interesting and scientifically engaging. Note, I'm not saying this person is "teaching it wrong" - it sounds like they've put a lot of thought in their work. But generally one should aim to refrain from 'negative' language. You could do exactly the same syllabus with positive, non-apologetic language. |
How is this going against what the post claims? It sounds like you are in violent agreement.
> As authors, we could try to head this off with "OK, this technology has a ton of problems... in fact, it's pretty bad, but here we go, let's learn it!" That sets the learner up for demotivation from the start... It's better to describe the good parts, then tell the learner that, unfortunately, ...