Hello David, This makes so much sense it's scary. Except I don't know how to explain myself. I was a deprived city-slicker who did not know how to work. College woke me up. But to be brutally honest, I didn't have anything else to do but go to college, and I had no other area of strength besides mathematics, so that's where I started. Not typical, I suppose. But I totally agree - the work ethic is diminishing. But if we can "wake some up" like I was awakened, we can grab a few good ones, no?
Now that you mention it, we took special pains to teach our children to work (without a farm - they had to earn what they got). My son is now a stellar Ph.D. candidate in M.E. at U. of Mich. My daughter is a devoted mother of two and a culinary artist. Food for thought (sic). As an interesting data point, most of our students are older and/or married and/or working, so we're doing okay there. It's getting them into the program in the first place that's the problem. But I'm sure that across the country many bail because of the work issue. Good insight. Wednesday, October 12, 2005, 9:45:02 PM, you wrote: DH> On Wed, Oct 12, 2005 at 08:25:56PM -0600, Chuck Allison wrote: >> Hello EDU-SIG, >> >> CS enrollments seem to be dropping drastically everywhere. Many >> factors probably are at fault (dot-com bust, off-shoring hype), but >> there seem to be others. One in particular is that so few HS >> graduates seem ready analytically to join in. >> DH> ... >> >> Honestly, I can't imagine a field that better combines both sides of >> the brain with a service ethic and a dimension of fun than CS. But >> it looks like so much nerd-ness or drivel to the uninitiated. >> >> Any ideas would be appreciated. DH> I noticed a profound shift occur at Glencoe High School in Hillsboro, Oregon DH> between 1985 (when I graduated from there) and 1995-1998 when I visited DH> there to give talks for national engineering week. In one memorable DH> experience, I spoke to the Biochemistry students, in the same classroom DH> where I had taken that same class a decade earlier. These were the top 20 DH> math and science students in the school. I asked how many of them wanted to DH> become engineers. I got zero responses. I was floored. Based on my DH> experience of the past, I had expected least a handful! I said "engineering DH> is a good career, it pays good money, why are you not interested?" One kid DH> raised his hand and said "It's too hard." Another volunteered, "Yeah, I have DH> a friend who is an engineering student and he has to work all the time." I DH> was dumbfounded. It appeared as if these kids thought there was a hard road DH> to success and an easy road to the same success, so planned to take the easy DH> road. DH> Chuck, we are up against a more difficult problem than just making CS look DH> cool. CS is fun, of course, but it is also hard work, there is no disguising DH> that. If the rising generation doesn't have the work ethic, there is really DH> no substitute. DH> In my experience, I noticed that among the successful American-born DH> engineering students, a significant number of them had been raised on farms, DH> where they had to get up at 5am every morning to milk the cows. In other DH> words, they knew how to work. So what did I do? When I lived back in DH> Oregon, we moved out to the country and we had goats and chickens, and my DH> boys went out with me morning and evening to milk the goats. Now that we DH> live in a different environment in North Carolina, I have taken a different DH> route and have the boys help me in our home publishing business. They have DH> gotten pretty good at binding books. (Just a little plug: anyone who buys my DH> book is contributing to my children's education in multiple ways.) DH> David H -- Best regards, Chuck _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
