The first person who complained about the bad habits and low standards of schoolkids probably wrote it down in cuneiform. All the same you can appreciate how manning the front lines can drive a serious instructor like Thoreau to distraction and whatever comes after that. If it will make him feel better, Chinese is not that hard to learn. Ching gay-wah pee-joe gets you a beer.
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Martin
The last generation of industrial progress was just-in-time shipping, production, etc. Given that education has always been build on industrial processes, nobody considered that just-in-time learning would result?
The teatards want education to be more efficient. The problem is that efficient education tends toward uninteresting eduction. These students are increasingly uncurious. They’re good students – very good students, in fact, but they have no concern whatsoever for what’s not on the test. 12 years of conditioning will do that.
MikeJ
You really shouldn’t offer a blow job to *every* bartender.
Omnes Omnibus
@MikeJ: Who are you to judge?
Joel
I like the idea of writing random comments on students’ papers.
Anne Laurie
From the title, I thought you’d be linking to the NYT’s Resident Old Grouch phumphing about kids these days and their narcissistic song lyrics. Should’ve known some front-pagers are too intellectually
snobbishsophisticated to go for the low-hanging fruit…Morat20
*shrug*. I can’t remember basic math. Heck, I had to do some basic algebra for a weird job screening and was shocked at how much I struggled.
But then, I’ve been out of school for a long time and I don’t use it. Plus, I’ve been trained (by my job and my group’s general approach) to take a ‘look it up’ approach to details and focus on general skills.
So I can’t remember, offhand, what the “internal” keyword signifies in C# (but I’m pretty solid on private, public, and protected). But I can show you how to construct a binary tree using OOD in any OO language. I can tell you which data structures are best for what, I can tell you how they’re formed, and if you give me a problem I can give you the best one to use — and where your problems will be.
I can’t do algebra, but I can take a look at your boolean expressions and fix them. And then call you an idiot and rewrite the whole thing because if you have a forty three freaking boolean expressions evaluating in a single IF, you almost certainly did it wrong.
I can’t remember the Big O notation for anything. But I can tell you that double loop will evaluate as roughly the square, and that you really don’t have a choice on it. And that what you just asked me to do will take effectively FOREVER, because it’s really the travelling salesman, so how about we find a fast way to get you an 85% optimal solution instead of the time remaining before the heat death of the universe to get you a 100% one.
In short — people remember what interests them as kids, and what they use daily as adults. Everything else atrophies. If I need algebra again, I’ll pick it up fast. It’s still there, in the back of my head. Just rusty. Same with the “internal” keyword or relational calculus.
Well, not relational calculus. The whole “proving this was a lossless change” in DB design is something Satan invented.
fhtagn
Actually, it’s more likely to get the roof-tile some congee. But never mind. You didn’t really want the beer, did you?
mclaren
But ordering won weh-hung gei gai gets you something entirely different and altogether unexpected.
fhtagn
@mclaren:
Yup. You get a dish. Not a daily dish, but then, we can’t have everything.
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
@Morat20: I’ve got no idea what your OOD stuff is, but I use algebra daily.
All the calculus and differential equations I had to learn for an engineering degree? Never used it since (hydrologist here). My dad (electrical) used Fourier transforms all the time.
Interestingly enough, all the papers I wrote for English Lit (more or less my minor) ended up being invaluable. Learning how to compose your thoughts and get them on paper turned out to be the rarest skill where I work.
TidyCat
@MikeJ:
Sorry @MikeJ – i read that to my (Taiwan born) girlfriend & she knew what it meant – “can i have a beer?” was exactly what she heard.
Triassic Sands
The first person who complained about the bad habits and low standards of
schoolkidsschool-age kids, couldn’t write, because writing hadn’t been invented yet (and school was on-the-job-training). In fact, I’d be willing to bet it was Homo habilis at the latest who recognized this basic fact. After all, surely no one needs more than five or six hundred cubic centimeters* of brain to see that kids are going straight to hell.(*Note: modern Republicans are getting by on a lot less and they figured out Obama was born in Kenya — it’s hard to argue with that kind of success. Of course, in the case of modern day Republicans, the actual physical size of their brains is much bigger than 600 cubic centimeters, it’s just that they’ve found that by devoting 2/3 of their brains to selfishness and greed they are better able to screw over their neighbors and maximize their own rewards in the big zero sum game
wethey call life.)Oh, I almost forgot. Donald Trump is a racist piece of shit. He wants attention, I say give it to him — twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year. Round the clock, non-stop attention. And all of it negative.
Morat20
Brother Shotgun:
OOD is object oriented design. It’s a programming thing that, sadly, many people don’t use properly — or, like anything else, will shoehorn into places it doesn’t belong.
Used properly, it makes software flexible, modular, and designed to allow major changes to be made without impacting everything else.
In, say, more concrete terms — it’s like designing your car in such a way that you can replace the engine with a fuel cell and as long as you have the same connections leading in and out, the rest of the car doesn’t have to change a bit.
Doing it right takes a certain sort of mental approach. It took me a lot longer to get right than I’d like to admit, but it saved me months worth of work on part of my thesis (went back to school on my company’s dime. No brainer!) because I’d done it properly to begin with, so when I had a brilliant idea and needed to rewrite the whole bottom level — everything just worked when I was done.
In terms of writing: I wish people would grasp that email needs to be well-written. It’s not a text message, and capitalization and punctuation are there for a reason. As are paragraphs. And complete sentences.
Of course, my spelling is awful. My wife claims it’s common in self-taught readers. I thank God every day for spell check.
Tim Connor
Of course these kids are the victims of a generation that thinks cutting taxes reduces the defecit.
Like father, like son.
fhtagn
@TidyCat:
But how do we know that isn’t the only thing she ever hears from you?
Document the linguistic atrocities!