Students learn from people they love

I used to do IT support for a whole building when I was a undergrad student. One of the professors once had a quote stuck on her door:<p>&quot;People may forget what you say. They may forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.&quot;<p>I was a drop-out college student who attended that small, cheap public university in the middle of nowhere as a last resort because I ran out of options in my country. Studying there was nothing short of life-changing. Long story short, 11 years later, I just earned my doctorate degree not so long ago and working my dream job.<p>By the way, after graduating from the small state school, I got accepted in a much larger research university that gave me a free ride. But it was that little school that I had to work my ass 20 hours a week for 4 years that feel I owe my big gratitude for. That little school was the one that gave me hope that I could change my life and had professors and faculties that went out of their way to help a no-name international student. The other day, I was offered an internship in a very good place. The international student office told me I couldn&#x27;t accept it because of the laws or whatever. There came a professor whom I barely talked to. She was then the head of the business school - one of the departments I did IT support for. She offered to go with me to that office to argue with the director of the international office on behalf of me. And she did. And she won. I didn&#x27;t have to say a word.<p>I think it was how you make them feel that makes them remember what you did, not the other way around.

This is why I believe that MOOCS will not “disrupt” traditional education in any meaningful way. Learning is fundamentally a social phenomenon. Apart from a few genius auto didacts the vast majority of people learn in social settings. Even some of the geniuses were helped by social settings and peer groups that served as a constant source of ideas and feedback.<p>For years I’d tried to learn algorithms to clear big 4 style interviews. But for reasons ranging from subject matter difficulty to motivation I’d fail again and again. When I got an interview call I had a competitive programmer teach me over chat every night one problem at a time explaining his thinking.<p>I improved by leaps and bounds within weeks and also cleared the interview.<p>What’s being imparted isn’t just mere knowledge but an enthusiasm for the subject. The fact that it can be a lot of fun to work on such problems even though they’re not of any “practical” use. The journey of the instructor and how they themselves learned to overcome difficult topics. The multiple ways they have learned to look at a topic which are too long for a textbook to cover.<p>Customized feedback on how to improve, the right problems to work on, motivation when you’re losing interest. It’s very difficult to replace all of this.<p>Now to be fair a lot of real life teachers fail this bar and MOOCS can probably replace them but both are incomplete in any case.<p>This showed me once and for all that if you’re chasing true expertise then mere reading books or watching videos will never get you as far as people learning the subject from each other in a social setting with motivational instructors and incentives.

I teach underpriviledged kids programming for the last 5 years and this rings very true to me. It&#x27;s more important to teach them self efficacy and to believe in them than to teach them C++.<p>I think this is also true more generally than just for students. I&#x27;ve given a keynote presentation about it at a conference this year if anyone finds that interesting: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Lckris5U5iw" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Lckris5U5iw</a>

It&#x27;s actually very true for me. If I don&#x27;t feel sincerity of the instructor, or they&#x27;re cold &amp; rude against the class; my grades for that particular class doesn&#x27;t go up much.<p>However, if the instructor is sincere, likes what he&#x2F;she&#x27;s doing, or I&#x27;m not being emotionally or wordly punished for my mistakes, my grades can easily compete with the top three.<p>It&#x27;s a response to perceived hostility &#x2F; cooperation. I need to feel that we&#x27;re on the same side. If I feel otherwise, I just study enough to pass the class, because my life is more important than a petty hostility in a class. The bad thing is, when I feel that cooperation, I study even less and get much higher grades, because I can listen and learn in class, since I don&#x27;t spend any effort to protect myself from the instructor, and concentrate instead.

A lot of human existence is emotional transfer underneath.<p>ps: to elaborate, we want to share things with other beings, when we bond over positive emotions, our mind get engaged, motivated, open, happy. As an example, my college math class was mostly the bottom of the barrel (me included). Our teacher though, was very invested both in the topic and in making us understand. Nobody cared at first, but with time, even the most uninterested of us ended coming on optional weekend classes. Why ? He cared. There are other similar stories about management. Dehumanized management creates more problems, a simple honest&#x2F;respectful manager, even if harsh, will get 10x more results.

Flip side of this: if there is a teacher &#x2F; professor who&#x27;s made a difference in your life, and you have the means &amp; the opportunity to do so, drop by and say hi. As someone who&#x27;s been teaching for a little while, it is truly gratifying to get a visit from a former student. It matters very little to me whether the student was a &quot;good&quot; student (i.e., got a good grade), or whether they&#x27;ve found what I taught them of any use. Just good to see how people have grown, and done different (and almost always interesting and productive) things with their lives.

Mildly interesting article, though sadly at no point it actually expands on the title. There&#x27;s nothing about how or why &quot;students learn from the people they love&quot;.<p>Slightly related: students learn a lot because of having a crush on someone. I&#x27;ve learned a bunch of things this way too. It&#x27;s not something that can be structurally exploited, though.

Cue this ol&#x27; good read: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theatlantic.com&#x2F;education&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2016&#x2F;01&#x2F;what-classrooms-can-learn-from-magic&#x2F;425100&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theatlantic.com&#x2F;education&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2016&#x2F;01&#x2F;what-c...</a>.

Very well done piece. I&#x27;d just add that students can also learn a lot from a person they don&#x27;t love, if that person happens to be very good at something the student is <i>internally motivated</i> to learn more about.<p>Someone <i>driven to know more about something</i> will somehow manage to overlook teacher&#x27;s humanity.<p>First principle: It&#x27;s a lot easier to teach someone something once they understand <i>why</i> it&#x27;s important <i>to them</i>.

Same can be said about people students hate. If a child hates his or her parents, the child will learn everything to be nothing like their parents. I think the article is a fluff piece. School was a complete waste of time for myself. The only benefit was for social connections. Everything useful I learned &quot;career wise&quot; was from online and where I found good C++ videos that got me into programming. I doubt much has changed and even expect it&#x27;s becoming even more dominate where you have a better chance of succeeding if you&#x27;re a self learner who can navigate online to whatever is needed to be learned.

This is why the future of education is in the hands of educators - it will be less about where you go to school (Harvard) and more about WHO your professor was for a given topic. Think Seth Godin’s altMBA

This is all well and good but the headline is a <i>bit</i> awkward when you consider the author’s recent personal life:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;reliable-source&#x2F;wp&#x2F;2017&#x2F;04&#x2F;30&#x2F;new-york-times-columnist-david-brooks-weds-his-former-researcher-anne-snyder&#x2F;?utm_term=.2908af0e5f5d" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;reliable-source&#x2F;wp&#x2F;2017&#x2F;...</a>

Interesting article, but it fails to address the idea that causal link could go the other way. So for example I might connect better with teachers who have some pedagogical skill&#x2F;training, or teachers who put some effort into their lessons.<p>I can confirm that I dislike teachers who can&#x27;t be bothered to properly prepare their lecture. I also find it easier to make connections with teachers that do put effort in.

<i>...that emotion is not the opposite of reason; it’s essential to reason.</i><p>I believe reason is informed by emotion to a degree that&#x27;s difficult to appreciate until it has been tested.<p>That&#x27;s why it&#x27;s so disturbing to see issues such as basic economic security largely ignored in what are generally &quot;good times&quot;.

It really depends on the student. If one has great work ethics, the connection to the teacher doesn&#x27;t really matter because one would learn regardless. Similarly, the student can also &quot;just&quot; respect the teacher in his position and for his knowledge and be animated to learn because of that.<p>Also, since the article mentions it...fear can have a really positive effect when it comes to learning something. One year, we had a teacher who made us stand up in the beginning of the class and he would then ask for vocabulary. You had only little time to answer and if you got it correct, you were allowed to sit down. Obviously, no one wanted to be the last one standing, especially in a class of 31. It was the best class I&#x27;ve ever had and I learned a lot.

In the book, The Secret of our Success, Joseph Henrich offers a perspective of cultural inheritance from evolutionary biology.<p>How do children determine who to pay attention to? who to learn from? 1. Skill &#x2F; Competence (&quot;whose arrows hit the target?&quot;) 2. Success (&quot;who brings back the big prey?&quot;) 3. Prestige (cues of attention, deference) - use what other people are doing - they are worthy of paying attention to 4. Age (ie, scaffold to incrementally experience) 5. Self-similarity - what might be useful to you later? - males copy males, females copy females, etc<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;jaoQh6BoH3c?t=1162" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;jaoQh6BoH3c?t=1162</a> (19:22)

Well established endocrinology of the brain. Hormones have demonstrable positive outcomes on memory, cognition, neuroplasticity. Despite recent trends for de-personalized and distance education. It will be exciting to see what light neuroscience can shed on learning.<p>Tangential to this is what I consider an absolutely extraordinary phenomenon. The unexpected explosion of creativity that occurs in a subject subsumed in the throes of new romantic love ;)

The title is everything, and kind of blew my mind as soon as I read it.<p>I had never for a moment considered this a reason why whenever I was asked as a kid &quot;who is your favorite teacher&quot; without hesitation my answer was always &quot;my brother&quot; and never any of my actual school teachers.

The article rings true, but it&#x27;s also true that some people do sometimes learn things from books, videos, or practice on their own. Certainly this happens with computer programming. It seems that face-to-face isn&#x27;t the only way to make a connection?

I wonder what the effect is in cultures where teachers are respected more. Not because those cultures are &quot;better,&quot; but because learning more is usually better than learning less, and I&#x27;d like to know what my personal &quot;defaults&quot; are.

Yes, its because they feel comfortable with that person. As a teacher, I also saw that students love those teachers who are more friendly and easy to discuss about their problem.

It’s hard to work through difficulty if your emotions aren’t engaged.-This is actually true.

Cue the extreme cynics suggesting that therefore we should only hire physically attractive teachers.

I can confirm the opposite is true. My most favorite subject was taught by a teacher I hated (psychology of game-design). I passed with a 75% mark and I felt ashamed since I was actively trying to get a 55% (i.e. barely passing).<p>Edit:<p>For downvoters, I&#x27;d like you to email me. I&#x27;d like to have the feedback why this isn&#x27;t an interesting observation to make (that hating a teacher may produce opposite results).