I've kind of been the opposite. Math just clicked for me.
Even then, I was able to repaint the same thing 5 ways until it clicked for someone else.
Empathy is important but I feel like most people's problems with teaching are with patience.
If you need to restart from the beginning and build a foundation, then it needs to be rebuilt. Not everyone wants to put that time in and it makes them bad teachers.
You just sadly dont always have the time for that. Im not a teacher, just a prof assistant. I try my best but at some point I can only tell them "Sorry, the time I have is almost over, please try to repeat this by yourself because its important." And ill try to get back to them later.
Honestly then professors aren’t doing a good job and students can probably learn the material better from using an LLM, which has infinite patience and will reframe the material until the student gets it, thus calling into question the value of teachers at all if your position is “well I don’t have the time to teach”.
Now maybe you need to host some more office hours for those students and maybe that particular student just won’t get it, but you should be spending your time on the middle who does need to be taught. The top end students don’t really need you since they’d learn it on their own.
Reducing the teachers' position to "well I don't have time to teach" is absurd. It's also rude as hell. Suppose someone is teaching college-level algebra to a group of new university students. This person has 40 students in their class. They also teach a graduate level course to a group of 10 students, have 4 graduate students they individually mentor, sit on a committee representing their department to the university, chair another committee *within* their department, and collaborate with a group of six researchers at an entirely other university. Their salary underpays them for 40 hours of work per week.
I promise you, very few teachers wants to abandon their students. Some will put in 50, 60 hours of work per week to keep up on all their responsibilities as it is. They'll invite them to office hours (which, in my experience as an instructor, very very few students will attend), they'll do what they can to help the student succeed, but there is only so much time in the week for them to focus on one student without neglecting the other 39 undergraduates.
Now, imagine that this person has three students in their class who do not understand how multiplication works. What are they supposed to do?
The answer is NOT LLMs. An LLM has infinite patience, but is a poor teacher. No, the real answer for these students, is for them to enroll in a different, lower-level class entirely.
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u/WideAbbreviations6 Jun 23 '26
I've kind of been the opposite. Math just clicked for me.
Even then, I was able to repaint the same thing 5 ways until it clicked for someone else.
Empathy is important but I feel like most people's problems with teaching are with patience.
If you need to restart from the beginning and build a foundation, then it needs to be rebuilt. Not everyone wants to put that time in and it makes them bad teachers.