[rKarpinski]

> But every year a small handful of dum-dums made it all the way to exam without having connected two dots, and I have to fail them and tell them that the three semesters they have wasted so far without any teachers calling their bullshit is a waste of life

Wow.

[paulluuk]

Yeah, I've had teachers like that, who tell you that you're a "waste of life" and "what are you doing here?" and "you're dumb", so motivational.

I guess this "tough love" attitude helps for some people? But I think mostly it's just that people think it works for _other_ people, but rarely people think that this works when applied to themselves.

Like, imagine the school administration walking up to this teacher and saying "hey dum dum, you're failing too many students and the time you've spent teaching them is a waste of life."

Many teachers seem to think that students go to school/university because they're genuinely interested in motivated. But more often then not, they're there because of societal pressure, because they know they need a degree to have any kind of decent living standard, and because their parents told them to. Yeah you can call them names, call them lazy or whatever, but that's kinda like pointing at poor people and saying they should invest more.

[noisy_boy]

> Yeah, I've had teachers like that, who tell you that you're a "waste of life" and "what are you doing here?" and "you're dumb", so motivational.

I'm sure GP isn't calling them dum-dum to their face. If they can't even do basic stuff, which seems to be their criteria here for the name calling, maybe a politely given reality-check isn't that bad. Some will wake up to the gravity of their situation and put in the hard work and surprise their teacher.

> Yeah you can call them names, call them lazy or whatever, but that's kinda like pointing at poor people and saying they should invest more.

They _should_ invest more because in this case, the "investment' is something that the curriculum simply demands - dedication and effort. I mean unless one is a genius, since when that demand is unreasonable? You want to work with people who got their degree without knowing their shit? (not saying that everyone who doesn't have a degree isn't knowledgeable - I've worked with very smart self-taught people).

[sshine]

> I'm sure GP isn't calling them dum-dum to their face. If they can't even do basic stuff, which seems to be their criteria here for the name calling, maybe a politely given reality-check isn't that bad. Some will wake up to the gravity of their situation and put in the hard work and surprise their teacher.

I certainly am not out to hurt anyone. I have a great deal of sympathy for someone who spent 18 months learning absolutely nothing, hiding behind their study group, making the LLM do the work, and apathetic teachers on prior semesters who could have caught this behavior.

But I will be blunt with them and say: "You have a very limited time before your studies end, and you have so far not learned basic programming. This means you will not be able to use your certificate for anything."

And then I will send an email to them, the teacher they will have on the next semester, and the study councillor, and say that this person urgently needs a better group and extra help. And I'll personally follow up after some weeks to see if they're actually preparing for their re-exam in a constructive way.

It usually came this far because giving a poor student the lowest grade rather than failing them resolves the teacher of paperwork and re-exams, which means they might get a day off.

Being blunt is being kind.

[noisy_boy]

When I was a student, my teachers basically didn't care; I may have not liked it then due to immaturity, but a blunt teacher would have been more beneficial to me than the apathetic ones I got.

[chasd00]

I have a hard time sympathizing with a student who cheated for 3 semesters then hit a brick wall when they finally can’t cheat. A student struggling with the material is one thing but a student finally getting caught after cheating through three semesters is another. “Dum dum” is being kind IMO.

[sshine]

I'm not using the word dum-dum to their face.

And when you see them several times a week for a semester, the sympathy grows on me at least. The people who don't show up before the exam and fail miserably, they're a little harder to sympathise with.

[simoncion]

In response to the statement

> ...I have to fail them and tell them that the three semesters they have wasted so far without any teachers calling their bullshit is a waste of life

you said:

> Yeah, I've had teachers like that, who tell you that you're a "waste of life"...

You'd do well to slow down and re-read more carefully whenever you find something that offends you. You've failed to correctly identify the target of the "waste of life" commentary.

Moreover, were I paying tens of thousands of dollars a year for a self-improvement product, I'd be furious if the folks operating that product failed to notify me until three years into a four year program that I'd been getting next-to-nothing from the program. That's the sort of information you need right away, rather than thirty, sixty, (or more) thousand dollars in.

[mwigdahl]

You are misrepresenting what the original poster said. He did not say that he actually called kids "dum-dums" or that the kids were, themselves, a waste of life. He said that using AI to blast through assignments without learning anything from them was a waste of life.

Frankly I applaud that approach. Classes are to convey knowledge, even if the student only gives a shit about the diploma at the end of the road. At least someone cares enough to tell these students the truth about where that approach is going to take them in life.