Having been on the other side of the table... there's a tactic students will sometimes use, where they don't understand the question but will simply attempt to regurgitate everything written on their notecard that is related in hopes that they'll accidentally say the right words. Sounds like you did understand it, but the volume perhaps made it look like you were just dumping. It is indeed annoying to grade.
Grading is boring, tedious, and quickly wears down one's enthusiasm. The words of M Bison come to mind: "For you, the day Bison graced your village was the most important day of your life. But for me, it was Tuesday."
Sure, we could speculate about his true unstated reasons for marking wrong my answer.
I highly doubt the science teacher marked me wrong for "dumping", though. He had every opportunity to explain that to me after I got my exam graded and I asked him about it. Then he had the opportunity to explain that face-to-face with my parents. He did not do so. He said that while I got the answer right, he was "mad", thus the mark against.
Besides, notecards were not allowed for any part of the exam, and I wrote my answer from memory. I think it was clear that I knew my stuff pretty well and was not "dumping" a bunch of bullshit onto the science teacher.
There was no indication before taking the exam that I would be punished for hurting his apparently-sensitive feelings while giving the correct answer (as he agreed I did). If there were, I certainly would have chosen a different medium for proving my command of the material.
Good experience to prepare you for the rest of your academic and working life where your performance rating will often be strongly influenced the evaluator's current mood or biases. Or the police officer's mood when you get pulled over. Or most other authority figures' feelings when they're making decisions that affect you. It's unfairness all the way until we die.
I used to write my undergrad history essays in rhymed couplets because I figured the grad assistant doing the grading would be grateful for a break in the monotony and it was faster and easier than writing an actual good essay. Probably wouldn't work in the LLM era, but it was very effective in the 90's.
If he murdered someone I would put him in jail and that will harm his family too.
There is a fine line between justice and compassion and if you never cross the line to enforce justice then you have corruption because nothing can be enforced because inevitably all enforcement leads to harm.
I want to apologize on behalf of the person whom you're responding to, as they misunderstood your point to an extent that makes it seem very unlikely that they'll be able to contribute to the discussion of where to draw that line.
To answer your question, let's note that holding a job in general — more so, a job which involves authority and power, and doubly so when it's over children — isn't a right, but a special privilege, which is given under certain assumptions, one of which is that the children entrusted into the instructors' power are to be treated fairly.
Consider that children's livelihoods depend on this assumption when they grow up, as grades affect which college they get into, which scholarships they get, which career they get to follow, how much money they make.
The teacher has violated this fundamental assumption; consequently, his teaching privileges must be revoked.
The damage to his family is out of scope; employment isn't a right, so starting a family is a risk that people take willfully.
Further, the teacher might be better off doing something that doesn't drive him mad. It's more healthy.
There's no mercy or compassion in keeping someone where they are miserable.
Side note: I changed my graduate advisor on my 5th year of graduate school, after trying for 3 years under someone who simply "didn't have the heart" to kick me out when it should've been clear we're not a fit for each other — something they had the experience to see, and I did not.
All "giving me a chance" for 3 years did was take 3 years out of my life, drag me into deep depression, and push me to almost dropping out of the graduate program.
After I started working with another advisor, I graduated in two years, writing a thesis we both were happy with (and getting a couple of publications out of it). I didn't stay in academia, but it was an option (I'm not tough enough for it, frankly, but that's a whole another conversation).
My point is: tolerating, out of compassion, an instructor who gets mad because their student understands the material very well may be similar to the compassion my first advisor had for me — which did more harm than anything else.
Being pushed out of a job one is miserable at, but can't quit on their own for whatever reason is, too, an act of compassion.
And I posit that this is what this "teacher" needs (aside from therapy).
I don't see this teacher ever being happy or excited to see a student that is so interested in the subject they teach that they understood something better than the teacher did.
But that's a prerequisite for being a teacher. Merely tolerating your students' excellence isn't enough — it's something, hopefully, a teacher should strive for.
We hope that a child taking a physics class at least has a chance of becoming a great physicist, i.e. a better physicist than their physics teacher.
But the chances of that are diminishing greatly if their physics teacher doesn't wish the same — i.e. doesn't hope that their students would shine brighter than they did.
And if that possibility drives them mad... to an extent where they'll willfully wrong the student in retribution...
...I can't imagine what it would take for them to do a 180 turn and end up being happy the next time they find themselves in this scenario.
>There's a certain irony in your outrage at his failure to control his emotions, even as your own rage leads you to dream of hurting his family.
Wow, what bad take.
Are you willfully misinterpreting the parent commenter, or would you need some help understanding it?
Assuming it's the latter, here it is.
First, there's no outrage or rage. That's something you ascribe to the parent comment, and that's unwarranted.
Second, there's no dreaming of hurting [the teacher's] family.
The message was: it is important that this person should be relieved of teaching duties, with the full understanding of the gravity of such an action, as being fired from one's job in the US puts the livelihood of the person being fired at risk.
See, the person you're responding to is empathetic, because they consider the impact of what they wish — the teacher being fired — on the teacher as well as others (the teacher's family), and don't take wishing something like that lightly.
Most people would stop at "bad job, fire him", without contemplating what it means for that person.
The parent commentor did, and is saying that, as grave as the consequences are for the teacher (and, potentially, his family, if the teacher is the sole breadwinner), it is still necessary to remove them from teaching because harm to children and violating the trust we put in instructors is unacceptable, and the damage they do in their position is far greater than the damage that would be done by firing them.
This is a compassionate and composed consideration.
Oh, and there'd be no irony about the parent's response even if they were raging, as they were not talking about the teacher's failure to control their emotions.
The issue is hurting children, which isn't something the parent commentor is decidedly NOT doing.
Townhouses with no intervening space would likely be an improvement. Browse Altadena in streetview and you'll see loads of houses with vegetation -- tinder -- stacked between them. Getting rid of those intervening spaces entirely would reduce the surface area exposed to embers while simultaneously depriving homeowners the temptation to store fuel in unwise places.
It totally depends on the type of vegetation. Some species, at least while alive, retain water and resist burning, acting as natural fire stops. Other species, including many imported to the area for aesthetic purposes, act as dry tinder.
I've heard sometimes landing gear is also involved..
We really need a placebo controlled double blind study to learn if landing gear is actually effective of just a cargo cult like parachutes..
[0] https://www.bmj.com/content/363/bmj.k5094
> 1.3 Pilot shall use extreme caution during carrying out final approach into RWY 01 or missed approach or departure for RWY 19 due to obstacle located east of extended RWY at approximately 2.1 NM from threshold of RWY 01.
Almost anything that is 500m causes an obstacle notice to exist. There are tons of them and most mean nothing unless you’re flying an overweight small plane in the dark desert heat.
This is very personal. I credit "fun" classroom conversations with scaring me off French for a decade. Anki on the other hand is great, it's a big dopamine hit when it lets me pick out a word in the wild for the first time, especially when it's something niche that I was dubious about learning.
If you can't even enjoy speaking the language in a controlled environment with other people who suck at speaking then you probably aren't going to learn anywhere. Same as this idea that Anki will magically somehow fix 8 years of complete inaction or whatever. Language learning isn't about knowing words, it's about speaking, reading, writing and listening. Anki is actually none of these things.
I've been satisfied with Anki for French over the last year or so.
The big schisms I see among other users tend to be sentence cards vs vocab cards, pre-existing decks vs build-your-own, and whether or not to include NL -> TL cards. Some people also favor cards with only TL and images. Personally I felt sentence cards did little for me, and I feel building my own deck is an important part of it.
From retrospectives from people abandoning anki, I get the impression that the most common problems are becoming too rigid (making it an exercise in memorizing the dictionary), and using Anki to the detriment of other forms of engagement with the language. I think that's one of the virtues of the build-your-own deck approach: it forces you to balance Anki with other forms of study.
