A Simple Guide to Student Mystification
University
professors are very busy people. More often than not, they have a
second job or a research to do besides their teaching job. So how do
they survive the tight schedule that the two jobs impose on them? A key
element is to make students as confused and hopeless as possible, to
the point that students give up on the idea of extracting coherent
and useful information from the professor. In the following week,
I will discuss some of the top techniques employed to that effect.
Note: some of the techniques work best when the professor has a decoy
(a.k.a. a tutor).
Recursive Jargon Recognition
A
simple technique. It consists of the use of jargon that normally only
people already "in the loop" can understand off hand. For example, when
teaching an Information System Security (ISS) course, the professor can
cleverly seed acronyms from the ISS field in his notes without ever
pointing them to their respective definitions. The notes would look
completely intelligible and coherent to an ISS expert, but
incomprehensible for students who don't already know the stuff. For
increased effect, repeatedly use terms that are really not so
important, such as "PTR RR" for "PoinTeR Resource Record", in order to
make students believe it is actually important and waste time figuring
out what they mean. This technique is analogous to, yet more powerful
and more subtle than the Latin-salting ("in camera", "inter alia", etc.) that you find in law-related documents.
Next issue: Invisible Context Switching
- SwordAngel
P.S.
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