Dan's comment about gatekeeping in STEM and dismissing the problem as "some people just can't hack it" rings very true to me.
I remember tutoring undergrad math back in the day; it was a walk-in thing where students would tutor other students and the only qualification required to be a tutor was that you passed the class yourself with a 3.5 or whatever. I recall distinctly one evening helping a group of sophomores with their intro linear algebra homework. It was early in the semester, the deadline for dropping classes was a week or two away, and they just weren't getting it. More than likely they were going to just wash out.
As we were plugging away through an example exercise in the textbook, I said something like "so this is a vector and this is a matrix, so to multiply them you need to do this" and one of them said in exasperation, "well how'd you even know that's what they were??" and it finally clicked that no one had explained to them basic notational conventions. They didn't know that the bold and italic variables in the textbook actually meant something. This was compounded by professors using different notations on the blackboard during lectures - typically lowercase letters with overbars for vectors and poorly-rendered double-struck capital letters for matrices.
It took 5 minutes of listening to understand what the real problem was, and 5 minutes to fix it, but really it just took empathy. I don't know if those students ended up dropping the class - statistically they very well could have. But if they did I hope it was because they found something else to be passionate and curious about, and not because they were bullied out of it.
I think the industry has gotten a lot better, even at the educational level. The "you should already know this" attitude is no longer widely accepted IMO.
I feel a lot of people are overly judgmental and unwilling to provide education. It's still important to not being found out to be one of the dumb ones by making the unforgivable error of saying something stupid.
I'm shocked how many engineers, especially goods ones (ie ones you would benefit from hearing from the most) that simply refuse to inform people their mistakes and correct their misunderstandings. So not only are they judgmental, they're unwilling to do anything about it.
I understand some of the reasons this is hard, and am very understanding. There's time crunch, communication problems, and people have had negative experiences providing constructive feedback. People are damned proud of the way they operate and don't want to hear anything that would imply their way is not optimal, even if it'll help.
At the same time I think some people want this. They want to be judged superior, by virtue of others being deemed inferior, and want that status quo to continue.
> no one had explained to them basic notational conventions. They didn't know that the bold and italic variables in the textbook actually meant something. This was compounded by professors using different notations on the blackboard during lectures - typically lowercase letters with overbars for vectors and poorly-rendered double-struck capital letters for matrices.
That's a deeper issue than debugging or troubleshooting what went wrong.
I remember tutoring undergrad math back in the day; it was a walk-in thing where students would tutor other students and the only qualification required to be a tutor was that you passed the class yourself with a 3.5 or whatever. I recall distinctly one evening helping a group of sophomores with their intro linear algebra homework. It was early in the semester, the deadline for dropping classes was a week or two away, and they just weren't getting it. More than likely they were going to just wash out.
As we were plugging away through an example exercise in the textbook, I said something like "so this is a vector and this is a matrix, so to multiply them you need to do this" and one of them said in exasperation, "well how'd you even know that's what they were??" and it finally clicked that no one had explained to them basic notational conventions. They didn't know that the bold and italic variables in the textbook actually meant something. This was compounded by professors using different notations on the blackboard during lectures - typically lowercase letters with overbars for vectors and poorly-rendered double-struck capital letters for matrices.
It took 5 minutes of listening to understand what the real problem was, and 5 minutes to fix it, but really it just took empathy. I don't know if those students ended up dropping the class - statistically they very well could have. But if they did I hope it was because they found something else to be passionate and curious about, and not because they were bullied out of it.