dsimcha wrote:
== Quote from Walter Bright (newshou...@digitalmars.com)'s article
Nick Sabalausky wrote:
If there's one thing my
school experience taught me, it's that teachers are only interested in
focusing on the low-to-mid-range students.
That wasn't my college experience at all (Caltech). I was a
low-to-mid-range student there
...Which kind of proves the point that the way knowledge/learning in college is
measured is pretty flawed in that it doesn't predict who will be successful
afterword. I just finished undergrad a couple years ago and I feel that the
kinds
of multiple choice exams you get in huge lecture-based classes are good at
testing
rote memorization and superficial understanding and the ability to get inside
the
professor's head, where as what's important is the ability to take your
knowledge
and apply it to something useful or use it to create more knowledge.
Yes, one gets the impression that those who do well in exams simply
store the stuff in another way in their head. Feels like they've
developed methods to store it for easy retrieval and rote memorization,
instead of ever trying to internalize the essence of it. (Sure, some
kids can manage both, but I wasn't one of them.)
But then, 20 years afterward, ask the three starry eyed ones, what the
price will be if there is first a 10% price hike and then you get a 10%
rebate. Since they can't remember the formula by heart anymore, they're
at a loss with this one. But what does it matter, they've got good
secure jobs, a nice family and a car as good as their neighbor.
OTOH, to make things really happen, we need the other kind of guys.
Those of us who want to understand. They're the ones who advance the
state of the art, and without that, we'd still be traveling on steam
trains. I just wish there were more schools and pedagogic knowledge (and
good teachers, of course) to make things interesting and fun for us
others. But without that, many students get by with so-so grades, having
invested only 10% of their effort into it. I know I did. What a waste.
