Worse, many parents are openly hostile to teachers who make any attempt at discipline. I can't tell you how many times I've heard irate and indignant parents say, "How dare that teacher discipline my kid!". That's a clear message to the kid he has no reason to respect another adult's authority. This is just absurd. Unfortunately, this stripping of a authority has become institutionalized and is the basis of so much of what's wrong with the last couple generations.
nb
The cost of running 2 or more "shops" is likely equal to the entire budget of the rest of the school. Regional schools, tech and community colleges have taken over. Too bad too. At the high school level, at least a kid got a taste of a variety of processes and was better equiped to make their choices of interest sooner.
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True -- I wasn't advocating teachers should be unable to discipline, but merely pointing out they should not be called to act in place of parental responsibility.
Full disclosure - my wife is a high school English teacher.
It's crazy as, even if you're only interested in high tech as a society (which is insane), industrial arts should still be required for anyone doing engineering. Engineers (and I'm one) need to know how to design, draw, and build.
The very best design engineers spent their first year or more in Manufacturing - the place where you find out that using 15 different types of screw is not necessarily a Good Idea.
-------------------------------------------- Those places exist, they are called Co-Op schools.
I went to one.
Lew
Scatter wrote: ...
'Pends on what _KIND_ of engineer one is (and I'm one, too :) ).
Spent nearly 40 years in engineering (nuclear and fossil utilities, nuclear-based analyzer instruments for coal producers/prep plants and power plants, robotics and controls, instrumentation, ...) and never drew or directly built a thing in my entire career. I was/am a physics/math/solver type...designers were for designing and the manufacturing guys built the stuff... :)
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The rule is always proven by the exception?
Pure analysis/math kind of engineering jobs aren't exactly the most common out there (although academia or particular fields will have significant numbers).
I consider a good engineer to be well rounded and able to handle engineering situations outside of their speciality. That doesn't mean that we can do anything though.
LOL - We had a lot of "Power Point Engineers" in my old company.
My first engineering job involved beating other engineers over the head until they came up with the results that were needed. They really needed somebody with a management degree, not engineering, for that job. The next one I was a number cruncher and I was a lot happier with that one but it didn't last.
J. Clarke wrote: ...
...
My first employer (like many in those days) had two "career ladders" for engineering; a management and technical supposedly parallel path. The technical ladder, however, was missing a very large number of rungs of opportunities for advancement as compared to the managerial side. My first boss was always searching for ways to provide additional benefits at annual review time but my choice to stay technical limited the options of positions available so when ran out of $$ at grade he talked me into taking the managerial slot. I reluctantly agreed but discovered I simply was so disinterested in such other tasks that were adjunct to the position such as yours mentioned above plus the scheduling, progress reporting, etc., etc., that I soon ceased doing much of it and was relieved of the position. This happened three times iirc; I much later at his retirement shindig learned that was his plan all along until I had accrued the "time in grade" to actually get the Sr Engineer title as he knew personnel wouldn't make him retract the pay and office once bestowed... :)
May "RAT" rest in peace; best man to work for ever (and not a bad engineer)...
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Scatter wrote: ...
I spent only about 10-12 years of the 40 in a field more than remotely related to my engineering major specialty. In consulting, I rarely did even a very similar task more than once; in general, my job was always to work my self _out_of_ a job by solving whatever problem was the bottleneck or hang up. Sometimes it had to do w/ a product functional design, sometimes w/ QA/reliability/manufacturing process control, other times a new instrument process (pulverized coal flow by a novel concept vis advanced nonlinear signal processing was one); for a while did field support and nuclear training and site-specific implementation for online analyzers at coal mines, prep plants and mine-mouth power plants to adapt the company's base instrument to specific situations, ... While I worked in analytical fields virtually entire career, it was not in any one narrow discipline. If I would claim any area of particular enjoyment it would probably be the application of probabilistic and statistical techniques to engineering problems and similar.
One thing I _can't_ do is draw well; I avoided the second semester of drawing as a freshman in uni because I heard the plan was to switch from two 2-hr courses to a single 3-hr course the following year so I figured if I had two hours they'd let me substitute something else for the lacking credit for the four in the curriculum when I enrolled by the time I was ready to graduate... :)
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On Wed, 19 May 2010 08:12:20 -0500, dpb wrote the following:
Yes, RIPRAT!
-- The great thing about getting older is that you don't lose all the other ages you've been. -- Madeleine L'Engle
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