[Edu-sig] Computer Hatred

[Shelley Walsh]

on 24/9/03 5:10 pm, Jason Cunliffe at jason.cunliffe at verizon.net wrote:

> Shelley,
> 
> Thank you, this is a very interesting post about an important topic..
> 
> Please can you tell us more context and who are your students -- school,
> socio-economic background, age, experience etc.

They are adults, mainly in their twenties, and in the US military stationed
in Europe. The backgrounds are fairly mixed. As to math level, they all knew
some algebra, but not a lot beyond that.
> 
> It sounds like they were so poorly educated and ill-prepared.
> Must have been terrifyting and humiliating for some of them.

It was not as bad as all that. I think their main problem was lack of
patience. 
 
> When you asked them to use Excel did you ever check if they know how to use
> it?
> Give any live demos/example yourself of what you wanted?
> Is access to the the software itself an issue? Is is even it installed? etc.

Basically they got *everything*, they got what plenty pay big bucks for, and
yet many still acted like it was a punishment.

My first experience specifically with Excel hatred was when I decided to
simply make homework count as more of their grade, because it seemed like
such a waste to make people go through the tedium required to do statistics
all by hand. The students in this class were mainly business majors who I
thought worked with Excel all the time, and already knew how to use it
better than I did, because previous classes had seemed to want to be able to
use it. But as it turned out, this class was considerably weaker, so then I
spend a whole lot of extra time giving them demonstrations in the computer
lab and working with them on their homework. I also made up templates on
everything we did so that they really could have got away with murder,
because most of the time they didn't even need to type anything in, just cut
and paste and change the numbers. And most of them did do all right with it
in the end, and appreciated it. But still all the way through it always
seemed like there was a lot of pulling teeth, and there were two in
particular that simply up and refused to have anything to do with it, and
coincidently were both black, and tried even to make a racial issue out of
it. I continually offered them help, but they wouldn't take it.

My next experience was in a distance education class again mainly business
students, like the other class, a class with really far too much and too
advanced material for the level of students where it seemed that giving them
a lot of Excel templates was the only way to make it do-able. As it turned
out these students were actually even less prepared than they were supposed
to be due to inadequate enforcement of pre-requisites for distance education
class, and this was certainly at least part of the problem. And again, it
wasn't a total failure, but the main thing that surprised me was the
timidity that they still had even after the whole 14 weeks of the class,
things like using my templates to check their calculator work, but
presenting the less accurate (due to round-off error) calculator answer when
the answers differed.

Then the next term I got to teach a class that can be used as a
pre-requisite for the statistics class. It is a kind of a substitute for a
an intermediate algebra class, and also one that actually has spreadsheet
use as part of its content. It's also a kind of a kitchen sink class that
has a lot of places where use of a spreadsheet can make the concepts
clearer, and I would have thought more fun. Now this time I was a lot more
aware of the difficulties students have with Excel, so I thought if I
devoted more time to it, it would really help them when they got to
statistics. So I found room to dedicate the whole first week to it, and gave
them a confidence building first assignment, and succeeded with it. And many
people found what I did with Excel in the class very interesting, and they
all succeeded in doing pretty much what I expected of them with it. But
still now as we are nearing the end of the class, I get a couple of students
saying they hate Excel, and not telling me what they hate about it. And I'm
inclined to think, was all the time I spent posting things using it to
explain things from the course a total waste of time for them?

> Was this shock in the first lesson and homework?
> Had you already covered some ground succesfully?
> How much variation is there in the students?

I think I've probably covered these. First assignment shock wouldn't
surprise me. Refusal to write a final exam on a spreadsheet after seeing
solutions to homeworks on the all term is what really surprises me. 13th
homework assignments using my templates, but with shown work calculations
where the simple insertion of = before the written out work would have
computed it, but instead they opted to press all the buttons a second time
on the calculator, that is the kind of thing that surprises me. And then
there were the face to face students who were allowed to use Excel on my
computer to check their work, but none did that made me think, "Was all my
time spent in the computer lab a total waste?"

> How many own their own or have good access to computers in their homes?

They all have computers at home, and also ones at work and in the computer
lab. I think many even work with computers at work, which in some cases is
part of the problem. When they go to class they want to get away from work.
Computers are in many ways becoming a bad word in our society as a whole.
They are nothing but spam, porn, and bad ergonomics.

I think my shock is not so much that all of the students had problems, but
that there are some who react even more violently against computers than
they do against math.

> Are they in any other classes whih use computers?

I don't know.

>If so have you discussed
> with those teachers?

No.

> How did you deal with this situation?

Mainly I spent a massive amount of my own time both in computer labs, and
online, and in some cases it still wasn't enough. But partly I know that at
least with the DE students, for many the problem is that these people simply
don't belong in DE classes, and our DE program is just having teething
problems that hopefully will eventually get worked out.

> What do the students themselves say about their efforts to simulte the
> expected result?

The DE students do what bad DE students do about all their other problems,
which is they tell the instructor they are lost, but refuse to give
specifics. They do the same thing as they do about other material they have
trouble, scream that the book is written in Greek, Chinese, and Swahili the
day before the homework is due after having not participated all week. These
are students that as a whole never pestered me enough, and I am not the only
one to have this experience with DE students. Good students can do well in
DE, but there are also a lot who seem to be practically trying to fail.

Most of the f2f students work with me on it, and really did do some nice
things with their homework. But it was just always more of a struggle than
it seemed it should have been.
> 
> If you knew then what you know now, how differently would you have approach
> this class?

I'm not really sure. I think mainly I am facing that change can't come too
quickly, and also that students need to be more hungry before they can
learn. They need to discover for themselves the need for computers. Let them
complain about pushing the same buttons on the calculator over and over, and
beg to be allowed to use a computer. No, that's just me feeling bitter and
unappreciated. But there is still some truth in it. I don't know the answer.
That's why I wrote about it.

In my present College Algebra class I show them some things on the computer,
but they do everything by hand, and it is going a *lot* better. I even come
up with sequences of calculator keystrokes for things that I would never use
a calculator for, and to me that seems like a waste. Personally I hate hand
held calculators, no record, and they breed errors. I would far rather make
a computation with Excel, Python, or my Pacific Tech software Graphing
Calculator. But they are happier being given keystroke sequences, and my
work is so much less that I finally have time to write something like this.
 
> I am very curious about many aspects of the story.

But maybe computer use needs to be taught from ground up integrated with
math, like teaching laboratory technique in science. But math is not thought
of that way. It is thought of as a kind of intelligence to have, a kind of
virtuosity where using computers is cheating and unnatural. Some people
still see calculators as cheating, but they have now for the most part made
the running shoes level of cheating when computers are still at the steroids
level. 
-- 
Shelley Walsh
shelley.walsh9 at ntlworld.com
http://homepage.mac.com/shelleywalsh