Andy Matuschak: belief

Transcript context

…I mean, especially today, the material is available. What the tutor is bringing is the inspiration and the motivation. Not exclusively but one of the large parts. That's right. They're not really responsible for instruction. I'll also say that I know lots of people who have postdoc tutors right now. These people, as graduate students, they're very pleased often to have a $60 an hour tutoring kind of commission. And that's a little sad. But, you know, the pool of available postdocs to hire as tutors is very large now compared to how it would have been 100 years ago. The pool being bigger doesn't mean that the top 1% are getting more though. So I think that's undecided. There is a question of, have teachers gotten better at their jobs over the last 50 years? And there are some ways in which maybe they have. There's been a bunch of projects of trying to disseminate certain research results, ways of instruction that are more effective in other ways. For instance it's better to interleave stuff than doing blocked units where it's like, “Okay, like, we're going to talk about the Civil War, and then we're going to talk about women's suffrage.” It's somewhat far apart but it's better to kind of weave these things into each other, not just in history, but in general. So that kind of dissemination has been happening more systematically in the last few decades. I'm unaware of any kind of studies or results trying to establish anything about the efficacy of teachers now versus long ago. Well, I'm sure you've seen the claim that one of the consequences of the very unforeseen circumstance of the mid-20th century, was that one of the very few occupations an intelligent woman could pursue was teaching. And now that other options are available, which is obviously hugely good, you know, there's other competition for the same very intelligent woman.…

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