A
Al Borowski
Guest
[...]As many here know, I interview high school students as part of the
admission process to MIT. The competency level is dropping like a
rock. It is down-right scary how little students know anymore.
Thousands of Pinnell-dweebs.
I did determine, though, where people can get employment if they're
too dumb to flip burgers... Fryes Electronics ;-)
Wow, are you being serious?its scary, isnt it. I tutor electronics at the local high school (for free -
payback for my old high school physics teacher who ran an after-school
electronics club, in his own time and with his own money, for which I was
profoundly ungrateful at the time, but have since learned to appreciate).
These kids are in their last year of high school, and NONE of them can do
enough algebra to re-arrange Ohms law.
IF you are not exaggerating, that amazes me. I only finished high school
myself 4 years ago - and I bet 98% of my class could do ohms law at
least. Is education really that bad where you are?
For my last year of physics at high school, everyone was required to
make a working electric motor for one of the assignments. That was alot
of fun, and *everyone* managed to get one working. Sure one or 2 people
got their parents to do most of the work, but the majority of people got
theirs working fine by themselves.
Most motors were the conventional brushed type but there were a few
brushless ones to make things interesting.
I think 'hand on' things like that go a long way to reinforcing concepts.
Hell, they cant even find the
I find this difficult to believe. Surely they aren't *that* thick?reciprocal button on their calculators! All I have done this year is algebra
tutorials - without it, they are completely lost. Why have they not been
taught the grammar and syntax of mathematics? As for calculus, forget it!
Clearly the US is not the only country producing students who are far
stupider than earlier generations.
Sadly I can believe this :-(we talked a bit, and sure enough, he has
learnt 4/5 of 5/8 of fuck all at uni.
Of course not. Arithmetic is not mathematics. Most calculators only doThey werent allowed to use
calculators, and were completely lost. I think that proves conclusively that
teaching students to use calculators does exactly that - it does NOT teach
them mathematics.
the former (The high end ones do symbolic stuff... think of Maple in the
palm of your hand).
Another HP fanI personally do all my rgh design calc's by hand, to get the order of
magnitude of my answer (alas, I missed slide rules , and a rough hack at
the right value, before flopping out my HP28S.
Agreed.Many thanks to ALL the experts (Win, Jim, Peter, activ8, genome, the list
goes on) who post really useful info on SED - I have certainly learned a lot
in my time here.
cheers,
Al
Cheers from Aotearoa, New Zealand,
Terry