That is one of the failures of some engineering schools. The emphasis is so much on engineering that the graduates are not well rounded. An engineer needs to be able to write well, analyze problems other than engineering problems , and understand people too. If you are not an engineer, you need those skills even more.
Dan
That's what drove me out of engineering. At Mich. State in the mid-'60s we even had our own English classes within the engineering department, and they were awful.
-- Ed Huntress
Ha Ha! I had a pair of two credit hour classes at UofM - both taught in classrooms is East Engineering. Shakespeare and Greek Classics. There was also Econ 101 which was actually part of the LS&A college. That was it out of a total of aprox. 140 hours total. I don't think the faculty wanted us to discover women or something. We did.
The university had a five year compressed ciriculum for medical students, however. MD's with engineering degrees were being promoted and sought after at the time and I think the few of those that there were had to learn how to read. We always eyed those people with a certain amount of suspicion. LOL
#2 son completes his 4 month course in Autocad and Architectural Desktop with an Intro to Solidworks.
4 months and $9K invested in tuition. 1 month into the course, he got a job working part time on CAD files, as a contractor.Reputable companies will pay tuition for employees they want to retain.
If you are stuck in the " 4 year education at an accredited university" mindset, you may not be thinking of all the options in today's educational market.
Damn shame to sink 4 years into an "education" only to find out that it's not what you want to do when you grow up. Oh yeah and that's a LOT of debt to incur for a mistake of that magnitude.
If you want a growth industry, study arabic and other rag-head languages. Be an interpreter. betcha get hired pretty darn quick.
Mark (it's a rapidly changing marketplace out there) Dunning
Well, as a UofM student, you know what it was like at Moo U., right? The thing that finally drove me over the edge was walking down the hall of an engineering building, watching two upperclassmen looking like Gary Cooper in "High Noon," and then drawing their 14-inch log-log decitrig slide rules on each other.
I couldn't change majors fast enough.
-- Ed Huntress
I don't know, I think as an entire sector, the financial industry in the metro NY area has been incredibly good to a LOT of people over the last 25 years, not just the high stakes traders on the floor. Of course, I'm just seeing that now and wondering why I never considered it as a career when I was younger.
We had Iranian students and let me tell you, the broads were hot. Bush has the wrong idea about Iran.
My father was a 1947, IIRC, graduate of your Alma Mater Ed, and a physicist no less. Think about this and have yourself a laugh. My cousin Jim teaches, and is apparently a big deal, at Central. Educational psychology no less. He's certainly a big deal in his own mind. Frankly, I enjoyed his company infrequently but remember hin as a jovial, if inebriated, purveyor of delightful young ladies. In fact, he put together the Walden EDU distance learning center there. He's a complete nut case, or has become one in my humble opinion. Found "GOD" after years as a devout atheist. LOL Talks in tongues apparently and he's less jovial.
My uncle Wayne, God rest his soul, owned the restauraunt you have referred to in prior posts, at least for a short while. It turned out to be the lesson he needed to take a job with Michigan Producers, makers of fine dairy products. His wife, and my aunt, founded the Votec nursing school in Adrian.
LOL. You thought they were "AbyNormal" and, well, they were. Otherwise they'd have been at a real engineering school, not "Party Central". Hey, you didn't visit Western did you? Now there is a party school.
My English class was taught by the English department. I thought it was awful. I never had an English class that taught how to write. All my classes just pointed out what was bad in my writing. Imagine trying to learn math that way. " No, that is not the right answer for the square root of 512. Your answer is too large."
Dan
Sure. I followed a girl home there once, woke up in the morning on the floor of an apartment God knows where, and I didn't recognize a single person there. I had no idea where my car was or what town I was in.
It was memorable.
-- Ed Huntress
There aren't many of them in existence, unless you're talented to begin with and you have the good fortune to have one of those rare teachers who can bring it out of you. If you're starting from scratch in that regard, it can seem hopeless.
Yeah, that's about how it works. The only sure way is to write for five or ten years. Then you may get it -- or maybe not. Dismal, isn't it?
Think of it this way: Writing competently is like being able to solve the basic differential equations. How many years of working out math problems does it take to get there?
Of course, that's the appeal of math and sciences for many people. Some people aren't comfortable with anything for which you can't be confident there is a solution and a systematic way to get there. There aren't always solutions in writing. It can be more systematic than we typically learn, but being systematic about it requires an organized and consistent program of teaching that goes on for years. Unlike math, most writing teachers don't agree on what the system should be. So we never learn how to get from here to where we want to go.
-- Ed Huntress
" snipped-for-privacy@krl.org" wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@22g2000hsm.googlegroups.com:
Tell me about it, a standing joke among my tech friends is that the colleges schedule lobotomies the day after graduation for all Engineers.
Bill
Until the schools start hiring H1-Bs ;)
Free men own guns - www(dot)geocities(dot)com/CapitolHill/5357/
. It can be more systematic than we typically learn, but
Not all the math teachers agree on how to teach. There has been some efforts to make math instruction more like English instruction. That is to just present problems and give credit to kids that come up with a method even though they don't get the correct answer.
One of the goals of having uniform testing is schools is to find which system produces the best results. I am not sure how effective this will be. Teachers are very resistant to changing how they teach and a lot of them have tenure.
Dan
Until you reach fairly high levels of applied math, I think that's a mistake. I can see why they do it but I think there are better ways to show them the process of discovery in math. And it's important, IMO, for students to know there are well-beaten paths to reaching solutions.
The value of letting them finding their own way is not to have them rediscover the wheel, but to force them to think of what the problem is about, and what processes and relationships may be promising to solve the problem. That assumes a fairly intense involvement in thinking about math and a willingness to fail without getting discouraged -- a good thing, but also something that will prematurely turn off a lot of students.
It could only be effective if there truly were different systems and if the experiment could be controlled for some huge variables. As it is, (and this again is just my opinion), the result is mostly to force teachers to teach to the test in order to score well, for the teacher and the school, rather than for the students. That produces a result opposite to the one you allude to in the paragraph above: discovery is just about shut off.
Being married to one and having a lot of interaction with public-school teachers, I disagree. Certainly many of them are resistant and there are a lot of drones with tenure. But serious teachers -- and most of the ones I know are serious -- would be happy to try new things if new things were allowed by state boards of education and so on. The way results are measured constrains the process quite a lot.
That's not to say that going back to some old system would be better. And it's not to claim that imposing competition, through charter schools or other schemes of public-pay privatization (such as they have in The Netherlands, Sweden, and soon the UK) wouldn't generate promising experiments.
It is to say that the system is so hamstrung by regulations and budget rules that truly revolutionary experiments are strongly discouraged. And the system needs a revolution. There are a lot of things that force education to follow conservative paths, but attempts to remedy the situation, such as No Child Left Behind, appear to me to be making things worse rather than better.
-- Ed Huntress
Education is like most other fields where fads come and fads go, and the Hawthorn effect is alive and well. The older [tenured] teachers have seen the entire cycle of pedagogical BS blow through and know that it is largely a waste of time and effort.
Consider the huge amount of money that has been spent on education research, and there is still no basic and fundamental agreement on what students should know at various stages, and what is the best way to teach this. Whatever you propose, I can come up with a number of impeccable, peer-reviewed taxpayer funded studies that say the exact opposite. ==> The problem seems to be that there is no one best teaching "system" because there are no standard learners.
them the process of discovery in math. And it's important, IMO, >for students to know there are well-beaten paths to reaching solutions. I agree. There are things that should just be memorized and things that should have the method taught. I think that word problems are important as they force some thinking of what the problem is and also why learning the math is a good thing.
Teaching to the test is always brought up. If the method that the teachers want to use really promotes a well educated child, then there is no reason to teach to the test. However much of the time the way things are taught does not end up with the children actually learning.
At the local high school, the normal physics class does not teach anything about electricity. That is only taught in the advanced placement physics. That is hard for me to imagine, but true.
Washington State students are scoring pretty low on the math sections of the tests. At least No child left behind has forced this to be noticed. Teaching to the test at least in math will mean that kids will be able to do basic math. Something that they can not do now.
I want to scorch one of these:
Cheers! Rich
Free women, too. ;-)
Cheers! Rich
Ask those tens...or make it hundreds of thousands of financial workers who are being RIFed because of the housing bust...with more to follow.
They have mortgages to pay every month...and educational loans to repay...just like everyone else.
TMT
I'm thinking of higher level employees- I don't doubt that many of them are overextended but they had a really good run and should have had some pretty decent equity built up.
Well, the reason is that the test results are now the basis for some of a school's funding, and more. It defines "well educated," in the minds of those who favor it. Not in my mind.
I have no objection to standardized tests but the emphasis on them is too strong, IMO. They're a helpful gauge but placing too much emphasis on them is not helpful.
I was disappointed in my son's physics class a few years ago. It was almost the same as mine, 42 years ago. But we (and he) did cover some electronics.
Probably because it's the natural subject for people with the interests of this NG, high school physics looks to us like a piece of cake and a very easy subject to teach. (By the time I took physics I had been a ham radio operator for six years.) It always strikes me funny that it's so hard to find physics teachers. Personally, I think that chemisty and biology, at least the way they were taught in my son's AP classes (two biology, one chemistry) are far harder to teach. But they have a little less trouble finding those teachers.
OK, that's the basic case in favor of it. The "getting noticed" part is good. But, again, the process of teaching to get good results on a standardized test is the exact opposite of that self-discovery business that you favored in an earlier post.
I'm on the fence about standardized testing for math. As I said, I think that most students will benefit from knowing the standard routines for finding solutions. Exceptional students would do better if they found the routines on their own, given a basic toolbox of relationships to work with. But most students are not exceptional by definition.
From what I've been able to see of standardized English tests, they measure maturity of thinking and familiarity with good writing. They favor the students who read a lot, and it requires a lot of reading that goes beyond school assignments. I don't know how the results actually relate to teaching. Maybe they do, but I'm suspicious. Being a good reader is mostly a matter of choosing your parents well, IMO.
-- Ed Huntress
PolyTech Forum website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.