Good call,
I love to read. Read all the time. Just read your email and I'm going to
read a book.
- Ben
Christopher R. Merlo wrote:
On Wed, Apr 16, 2008 at 5:02 PM, David Krings <[EMAIL PROTECTED]
<mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>> wrote:
A university is supposed to train interested candidates in a field
of choice with the goal to make them subject matter experts in
that field.
That's actually not true, and your apparent belief in this untruth is
probably what has led to your seemingly very strongly felt distaste
for university education.
The purpose of a college or university is to provide the student with
an education, so that the student may go on to contribute back to
society. An education involves more than just learning a trade, or a
skill. Moreover, most experts in any field are usually well-versed in
some other field as well; this is what allows educated people to do
things like draw analogies, or relate to non-technical people.
Physicists must read the classics in English literature so that
non-physicists will talk to them at dinner parties; this helps with
things like professional networking. (Everyone who got your job
because you know the right non-IT person, raise your hands. David,
look at all those hands!) No one expects a physicist to be able to
prattle on about Huck Finn like a lit professor; but the physicist
shouldn't just stare open-mouthed, either. "Yes, Mark Twain was an
important figure in American Literature" will go a long, long way in
making friends and influencing people. And an English major should
take a lab science course for the exact same reason; in case he finds
himself at a dinner party populated mostly by physicists, knowing at
least that there's an inverse relationship between distance and
gravitational pull, even if the English major doesn't remember or
understand that it's an exponential relationship, can keep him in the
conversation long enough to not be embarrassed.
When my programming students complain (and they always do) about how
much of their grade is based on writing, I tell them two things.
First, when I worked in industry as a programmer, the pointy-haired
bosses kept coming to me for explanations, and eventually asked me to
join large inter-department teams to work on big special projects with
all the suits, and eventually would have asked me to lead those kinds
of special projects had I stayed with that company any longer; and the
reason they kept tapping me, over my colleagues, was that I was an
effective communicator, and I was able to translate plans to code, and
feature requests to timetables, but also code to English, and bug
hunts to revised timetables; and I didn't scare the suits away when I
talked to them. And I owe that to my liberal-arts undergrad
experience, taking a BA in CS, with a creative writing course and a
public speaking course and all the trimmings. I even made use of
something I learned in a phys ed course, when I was tutoring a
seventh-grader in math last school year. He really wanted to shoot
baskets more than do math problems, and so I gave him five minutes if
he got a few questions right. Of course he got those questions right,
and off we went to shoot baskets. But he had a great deal of trouble
passing me the basketball, and I taught him the bounce pass, the way I
learned it as a college junior. His mom kept hiring me back to tutor
him, because he really liked me after that (and the grades slowly went
up).
The other thing I tell my students is that out there in the real
world, where all you guys are, people judge other people's
intelligence, fairly or not, according to how effectively they
communicate, and that the only two things that make you a better
writer are 1) writing a lot, and 2) reading a lot.
So, anyway, I felt compelled to write, because I'm afraid that people
trying to choose whether to get a college education or not might be
misled into thinking it's something it's not. The service we provide
is not something you can get anywhere else, and for lots of people,
it's the difference between promotions or not.
$0.02,
-c
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_______________________________________________
New York PHP Community Talk Mailing List
http://lists.nyphp.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
NYPHPCon 2006 Presentations Online
http://www.nyphpcon.com
Show Your Participation in New York PHP
http://www.nyphp.org/show_participation.php
_______________________________________________
New York PHP Community Talk Mailing List
http://lists.nyphp.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
NYPHPCon 2006 Presentations Online
http://www.nyphpcon.com
Show Your Participation in New York PHP
http://www.nyphp.org/show_participation.php
