Procrastination
483 karma · joined January 24, 2009
The first key change is that contemporary students, droves of them, attend university just to get a job. Job skills, as represented by so many facts, can be learned from books, worksheets, online tutorials, and prefab curricula. A good teacher might make it easier to learn the rudiments of compiler design or marketing principles, but is hardly essential.
Not so long ago, students, fewer of them, attended university to study rhetoric and philosophy and the other subjects of the trivium and quadrivium, in order, as they hoped, to become more civilized and humane, or at least to acquire the intellectual trappings of the elite classes. (At some point, of course, such students might take up professional studies in medicine, law, or theology.) Literature and philosophy are not just a set of facts, the way, say, the keywords or design patterns of C++ are. Appreciating literature or living a philosophy, at least doing it well, requires a community of practitioners. There are lone mathematical geniuses (Ramanujan), but rarely a lone genius of literary criticism (Harold Bloom probably spends many hours alone with his books, but he has never existed apart from a sophisticated milieu so far as I know -- not that he's a genius). The acquisition of independent thought, good taste, and even morality must be learned from those who are more adept at them. Such intangible goods represent humans' unsteady and imperfect climb to civilization, and have been handed over from person to person for ages. Books may have been part of the process, but it is humans who humanize humans.
But, I can hear you saying, even the most careerist education tries to nurture independent thought and requires apprenticeship to masters. Nobody can really become an expert at object oriented design without learning from an acknowledged expert -- such design takes experience and taste and sensitivity to nuance, not simple formulas and rote memorization. But really, I would respond, no employer gives a fuck, because a moderate degree of cleverness, ample supply of facts, and ability to research more facts, is more than enough for a new hire. Intellectual sophistication, morality, the dawning of wisdom -- these things don't make money. Philosophy majors suck at following directions.
So the first key change, as I have said, is the careerist rather than humanist emphasis in education.
The second key change is that universities produce way more Ph.D.s than they can employ. Ph.D.s in some disciplines (statistics, molecular biology) can get professional jobs in their field outside of the academy, but Ph.D.s in many other disciplines cannot (Ph.D.s in classics can teach high school or serve french fries -- noble occupations both, but they don't require graduate school). By glutting the labor market with their own graduates, universities can bid down the wages, which they have done and will continue to do.
If students primarily want to learn just the facts (job skillz), and most of their teachers are wage slaves -- overworked and not fully credentialed (no tenure) -- why wouldn't a university contract out curriculum design to for-profit enterprises? If the modern university, heir to hallowed traditions and one-time crucible of civilization, is going to enter its death throes anyway, some savvy entrepreneurs should make a few bucks off it. Otherwise it would be a complete waste.
I'm sure almost everyone has seen this anyway, but why not post.
It's an interesting article, and worth a repost.
For assembly I've had a good experience with K. Irvine's Assembly Language for Intel-Based Computers, available on Amazon here:
You should feel pain when unclear
I had to follow the link to find out what he meant by "when unclear." It's ambiguous between "express yourself unclearly" and "perceive something unclearly," which is a pretty big difference.
Actually, my first thought was the character in some Woody Allen (?) movie who just won't come into focus. It jeopardizes his career as an actor.
At the center where I graded, only 1 in 14 essays were read by a second scorer for verification. "Calibration" consisted of a half-hour of reading pre-scored essays and taking a test that required a passing rate (being within some margin of the "true" score) of only 80%.
There were ridiculous formulas about the number of adjectives, etc., required for a certain score. Imaginative writing suffered the most; cookie-cutter writing was rewarded the most.
Scorers worked eight hour shifts. Sometime after my morning coffee I was the most generous, and in my afternoon lull, when I could hardly keep my eyes open, I'm pretty sure I graded the hardest.
I remember one of my colleagues had, sadly, suffered brain injury in a car wreck. His scores were all over the place, as I could tell when he asked my opinion on the essays he was scoring. Others had modest educational attainments -- people who had maybe gotten a bachelor's degree twenty years before, but not really been engaged in mentally rigorous work in the mean time. Many of them couldn't reliably spot an adjective. They were amazed that I had an "accuracy rate" of 97%, the highest at my table by a good 15 percentage points.
We were grading fourth-graders' tests from Arizona. The previous cohort at my center (that I didn't belong to) had graded high school tests from, if memory serves, Minnesota. (This was late '90s). The tests were "high stakes" -- failure on the test kept the student from high school graduation. It later came to light that some large number of students who had failed the test and been denied graduation, had later challenged their scores and successfully shown that their tests had been severely mis-graded. They were allowed to graduate, half a year too late.
After the grading period ended, I stayed on a mailing list to hear about job openings the next summer in that city. However, some time during the spring I got a letter saying that there wouldn't be a grading center in our city that year. Wonder why.
However, I will gripe about his messianic tone. As far as I can tell from his blog post, he's taught only one class! Even if he taught a few others as a grad student, my point holds.
When I first started teaching nine years ago, as a grad student, I had miraculous success with my classes. I didn't have any grand scheme like btilly did; all I had were some commonsense observations from my father, a lifelong teacher.
But as a new teacher, I was really learning the material for the first time (that's the case with virtually all new teachers -- it has to do with the process of teaching), and so I could carefully observe the students' progress at every step. If they stepped into a pothole, I stepped into it with them: I felt that I had failed to explain something clearly if the students didn't get it. (btilly says the same.) The students loved the class, they became very competent, and their enthusiasm for the subject attracted attention. I was a star teacher.
However, as the years have ground on, I have taught the same subjects over and over again. I'm no longer on a journey of discovery along with the students. Instead, I know where every curve and pitfall lies. I can see a pothole a mile before we get there. You might think that this makes me a more effective teacher, because I can make the journey a smooth arc from beginning to end. But it doesn't: intellectual discovery is about stepping into potholes, not sailing by on a cruise ship.
I'm still sort of a star teacher (evals are very high, and my classes are always full, in part because word gets around), but I've never had a class with the same enthusiasm and brilliance as that first one.
(I'm an adjunct professor, so I get paid shit wages, and I have no incentive to do a good job, but that's a different story.)
So I gripe about the messianic tone in btilly's post because it sounds like precisely the sort of thing a successful new teacher would say. (BTW, not all new teachers are successful.) I wonder if with a decade of teaching experience he would see his miraculous method as the distinguishing factor in his early success. In fact, his early success may have been due primarily to the advantages of a neophyte, which are hard to sustain.
But after a good 25 minutes of research, including a perusal of an AARP guide to the process, whose URL is at the bottom of this post (or Google "drug names medicare plans"), the relevant variables seem to be these:
1. geographical location (zip code)
2. each drug in the person's drug list
a. dosage -- frequency and amount
b. generic available?
c. lower cost brand-name drug of same therapeutic value available?
a. local pharmacy
b. mail-order pharmacy
a. annual deductible
b. monthly drug premium
c. how much your drug copays cost at four different levels of coverage:
i. before deductible is met
ii. after deductible is met, but before limit of $2700 is reached (beginning of doughnut hole)
iii. in doughnut hole, when recipient pays 100% of costs
iv. after catastrophic stage is reached ($4350, end of doughnut hole), and government/plan again helps out.
a. plan ratings (how good customer service is, based on customer feedback, etc.)
b. tiers, ranging from lowest copay (1) to highest copay (4 or 5). Each drug falls into a particular tier; some drugs may have alternatives in cheaper tiers. Some plans don't use tiers.
c. restrictions on certain drugs
From what I can tell, the question is often not 'does plan a cover drug z', but rather 'given that I'm taking drugs w, x, y and z, will my costs be lowest with plan a, b or c.' This is precisely the sort of computation that software should help out with, but, as I said above, it looks messy. Also, if you dispense inaccurate information, you could really be inflicting harm on someone.
However, I feel uneasy about handing over to Google large helpings personal information, even though most of it is mundane.
Still, I wonder about this company.
It has some connection to the NSA, as advertised on their web page and elsewhere. Does anyone know more details about this relationship? In particular, what does the NSA aim to get out of it?
I've been objecting to that usage for a long time.
I learned something here.
On a pedantic note, sinusoid is at best half Greek. -oid is Greek ("form of"), but sinus is Latin, referring to, among other things, the fold of a toga. The English word 'sine', by the way, is rooted in mistranslation from Arabic:
"Extracting Meaning from Millions of Pages: University of Washington software pulls facts from 500 million Web pages."
On the other hand, written expression is like the programming interface for the world most of us live in: from the money we make to the business relationships we form to the thoughts we develop, written expression is almost always an essential means to reaching the goal. Those who can't be bothered to adhere to arbitrary grammatical conventions often find the grander and more abstract challenges of life inscrutable.
The Romans had an expression: "Qualis oratio, talis vir", as is the speech, so is the man. (Seneca, Epistulae Morales 19.114.1, attributes the expressions to the Greeks: "Hoc quod audire vulgo soles, quod apud Graecos in proverbium cessit: talis hominibus fuit oratio qualis vita.") http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/sen/seneca.ep19.shtml
Despite the Latin slogan, I'm reluctant to reach a conclusion about the tutoring proprietor based on his use of language. Maybe he had a rhetorical reason for lapsing into grammatically half-baked jargon: he's suggesting he's too stupid or careless to be guilty of a premeditated logo theft. I don't know.
But...
Can you really write "If someONE would judge..., I wouldn't want to associate with THEM..." without cringing? I've been guilty of worse, I readily admit, but is it too fastidious and pointless to balk at such a construction?
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text.jsp?doc=Aristot.+Rh...
Or at least, this passage is the earliest attested formulation of this sort. Aristotle may have been codifying a system developed by others.
http://www.amazon.com/Victorian-Internet-Remarkable-Nineteen...
Considering the great variety of patterns they offer, I wonder if they should add aperiodic tilings!
As Socrates relates it, the Egyptian god Theuth describes various inventions to the king Thamus:
"But when they came to letters, This, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit. Thamus replied: O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality."
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text.jsp?doc=Perseus:tex...