Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
Georg Wrede wrote:
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.
I don't buy 10% of this, after another 10% rebate. I'm not sure you
meant it that way, but it looks quite narcissistic. Not only the kind of
people who operate like you push humankind towards progress.
We all know stories of lousy-student rise to genius. John Backus, Thomas
Alva Edison, Einstein... You know why? Because they're spectacular
stories. There have been plenty of geniuses who also happened to be good
students, but nobody cares for that detail because it's expected and
therefore uninformative.
And if anyone is pissed about the quality of higher education in the US,
they'll have to move to Mars. US has the best in the world.
I was talking about lower education. Finland may top the world today in
lower education quality, but it sure wasn't like that where I went to
school (45 years ago).
But I agree, higher education in the US is the top, no question.
