December 20, 2004

• 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.
  If the previous post appears as scrambled random characters, try
  setting your browser to display in Western (Windows-1252) or Chinese
  Traditional (Big5) character encoding.

  • 1:58 am
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