Post by J. ClarkeOn Mon, 5 Mar 2018 22:11:26 -0500, "Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)"
Post by Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)Post by J. ClarkeOn Sun, 4 Mar 2018 01:30:45 -0500, "Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)"
Post by Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)Post by J. ClarkeOn Sat, 3 Mar 2018 16:00:27 -0600, "Michael F. Stemper"
Post by Michael F. StemperPost by J. ClarkeOn Fri, 2 Mar 2018 13:44:43 -0800 (PST), Robert Carnegie
Post by Robert CarnegieOf course, working together and trusting each other
is fag commie talk. :-) But also included in some
versions of religion; others are a competition in
piety. For instance if only 144,000 people go to heaven
in the end but the church is already larger than that...
Also included in something called "team sports" and something called
"the military".
The commie pinko idea promulgated by the commie pinko schoolteachers
and university professors is the insidious one--"do your own work or
come to the teacher, don't help each other".
That's certainly how it was in my undergrad days. However, something has
changed in the intervening four decades.
I'm back in school. Every class so far, the professor or instructor has
You can help each other if you want, but if you do so, say on your
homework who helped you and on which parts. What you hand in must be
your own product.
Maybe the idiots are starting to grow up.
At work nobody in management cares if you "did your own work", just
that the work got done.
At work no one is training you so that you can go out and "get the work
done" regardless of whether you HAVE functional partners or not.
They aren't training you to do that in school either. They are
teaching a bunch of mostly irrelevant bullshit that they, having never
actually held jobs in their entire lives, _think_ is important.
I learned more in my first month on the job than I did in 8 years of
school.
For some people it's like that. For others, it's not. I didn't learn
too much from any job I had until I was in my 40s. Admittedly, I didn't
learn much from school either, but that's because I was freakishly good
at reading, remembering, and test-taking, and also really good most of
the time at convincing teachers to take MY view of things.
What was your first job? What did you do until you were 40? If you
didn't have work that made you learn new things I pity you.
My first job? Paperboy. Then cart-pusher and register guy at a
supermarket. Tried the military, didn't make it through. Back to school
for several years. Worked at Borders Books for about six, seven years.
Worked in a small publishing company. I suppose in all of those I
learned SOMETHING -- how to deliver papers, how to push carts in all
weather and run a register, how to shelve books, etc., but none of it
seemed to be, so to speak, educational. It just was "this is what you do
in order to do this job.
I got to read a lot of stuff at the one small publisher. And there was
the small company that had the CEO go slowly nuts and take the company
down with him, cratering just in time to make me unemployed right after
9/11.
Post by J. ClarkePost by Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)A lot of other people actually did learn stuff in school.
Post by J. ClarkePost by Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)There
is a huge difference between education and "doing your work" in an
employment field.
Yes, in the one case you have to sit in a classroom and regurgitate
textbook answers on demand. In the other you have to actually make
things happen.
If you can't even remember basic facts and procedures, you're not going
to be able to do work, either.
School didn't teach me much in the way of "basic facts and procedures"
that I have actually used anywhere. Some of what I learned 40 years
ago would be useful to me now in my new career but I have forgotten
most of it.
Post by Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)True, I wish schools taught some
different things, and taught some things differently, but it's not the
useless setup you seem to want it to be.
I don't _want_ it to be useless, I just find it so.
And many others do not.
Post by J. ClarkePost by Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)Stats show that people who
DON'T get schooling generally do more poorly. (naturally there are
outliers that don't fit the curve, but on average, having more education
helps)
There are many occupations for which a piece of paper is required by
the employer. That doesn't mean that the skills associated with that
piece of paper are necessarily relevant to the job.
Post by Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)Post by J. ClarkePost by Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)In education, the idea is to see if *each individual
student* has learned the lessons and is able to apply them properly, not
whether they can find someone in the class to help them do so.
Whereas at work the most important skill one can have is knowing who
to ask.
No. That's *AN* important skill. But depending on your particular job,
the MOST important skill could be one of hundreds of others. The most
important skill *I* have had in my professional career was being able to
write clearly, coherently, regularly, and productively. The second most
important skill (by a hair) was and is the ability to read quickly,
extract meaning accurately from what I read, and apply what I learn from
what I read to the particular problem at hand.
So what do you do for a living?
R&D Coordinator at a small company. This mostly entails writing grant
proposals and, if they're won, overseeing the work and writing the
reports and such.If new innovations are sufficiently interesting, I
usually write the patents (at least the first version thereof before a
lawyer goes through and writes the detailed claims).
And of course I write SF/F.
Post by J. ClarkePost by Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)Of course if you've only worked at tiny little companies with
Post by J. Clarketiny little products that one person can understand in their entirety
with a few minutes effort, you might not be able to understand the
importance of that skill. And if you are some teacher who has never
had a job, well . . .
If you think that "being a teacher" is "never had a job", you have
absolutely no clue. Teachers have a very demanding job which most people
who sneer at them probably couldn't do.
I'm sorry, but nothing one does in a classroom is a "job" in my
opinion.
Then your opinion is barely worth the electrons spent to transmit it.
My father and my mother were both teachers -- my father at Albany
Medical College and later at Albany College of Pharmacy, and my mother
at several of the local public schools over the decades, teaching
English, Spanish, and sometimes running the library. Between them they
taught many thousands of students, and both of them affected their
students sufficiently that even today, decades after they stopped
working and more than a decade after both of them died, I still get
contacted by people who tell me how much my mom or my dad helped them in
one way or another through their teaching.
I got to see how much work, how much thought, was put into their work.
It's not only a job, it's a very demanding job.
I have taught at several levels, been paid for it, I agree
Post by J. Clarkethat there is a certain amount of effort involved, but compared to the
kind of work where you have a concrete result to produce at the end of
the day, it is not the same as working in a business.
Most businesses aren't producing anything nearly as important and a lot
of them these days aren't producing anything concrete.
Post by J. ClarkePost by Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)Post by J. ClarkePost by Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)Yes, it's
fine for them to talk together and so on, but if the assignment is
"write a 25 page paper about {topic}", it doesn't give me, as an
instructor, much insight to Joe Student's capabilities in the matter if
five people work on the paper.
If the assignment is "write a 25 page paper on x topic" the class is
likely of little relevance anyway.
You're not going to graduate from any decent school without doing some
research papers on SOMETHING, especially not in a STEM field.
I believe that Georgia Tech qualfies as "any decent school", and we
were not required to write papers. Writing papers is what the fuzzy
studies people do. Engineers make stuff, we don't write about making
stuff.
Maybe engineers don't, but scientists do, and there's nothing fuzzy
about physics, math, and chemistry. And if you're an engineer doing
innovative work and you don't write a paper or three on it, you will be
sure SOMEONE will.
And I have no great opinion of an engineering college that doesn't
teach its students how to understand prior research, how to do their
own, and how to write clearly and coherently on that research.
Post by J. ClarkePost by Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)Post by J. ClarkePost by Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)At the least it gets really hard to
untangle, even if they tell me who did what -- especially since I then
have to decide how much I BELIEVE of what they tell me. Did all five of
them really do what they say, or did two of them do most of the work and
just distribute the credit more evenly so all five of them did well?
What subject do you teach?
I don't; it was an example. My parents were both teachers, though, and
so are people of my acquaintance. I spent many years not just in the
public school system, but also in multiple universities.
And you learned that they are useful?
Sure.
I spent many years in the same
Post by J. Clarkesituation and realized that I should have gotten out of the academic
world as soon as I had that piece of paper.
There are many days I wish I was STILL in the academic world.
--
Sea Wasp
/^\
;;;
Website: http://www.grandcentralarena.com Blog:
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