Sign of the times

[J. Clarke]

Wanna have some fun, google "Hercules". Runs 360 code on a PC faster than any 360 ever did.

[J. Clarke]

Lucky you. The only kind of "problem" we were required to "characterize" was "what's going to be on the test".

[J. Clarke]

Well, it did teach me to resist boredom.

[Steve Turner]

Reminds me of a Monty Python skit:

[PDQ]

Back when the 50 was new we could get a day's work out of it in 36 = hours. Wasn't until I got to use the 65 that I could get a day' work in a day.

Later, in the 70 and 90 series, I could get 3 days work in 4 hours. = Thank "whomever" for we had a total SNAFU (almost a FUBAR) that took us = most of a week to recover. Took me 2 days to figure out how much had = been screwed up (by whom) another day to convince the headshed what = needed doing to recover and a 4th day implementing the requisite = changes. Started at 6:00 one evening and by sunup I had managed to = recover the whole week's throughput.

[Drew Lawson]

Let's see: San Leandro, California Coronado, California Lemoore, California Newport, Rhode Island Springfield, Virginia Elementary in all, Jr High and High School in the last.

Based on slightly removed observations, the selections are still similar here in Beavercreek, Ohio (Dayton area). Recent (2-3 years) feedback from Sterling, Virginia says the same.

Of course, I started school in the heat of the space race when building the US school system to beat the Russians was a priority. If I were a decade older, thinks might not have been funded so well. (In TV terms, I'm the Brady Bunch generation. I get mixed stories from the Father Knows Best era.)

I'm thinking that you got taught a thing or three that worked into whatever your career was, but I don't expect you to agree.

[J. Clarke]

Not really. Most of what I learned from 6-18 that was engineering related I learned on my own, which got me in trouble because on tests I would put down the right answer instead of the regurgitate the lecture answer.

[Morris Dovey]

That's grim. I don't know about LA, but I'm fairly sure that languages other than English are now common (or at least not rare) in FL, VA, and CA.

Yeah - at some point along the way someone decided that it was more important for teachers to know about theories of education and how to handle administrivial paperwork than about the subject they were to teach. The results speak for themselves.

I'm sitting here giving thanks that this didn't happen to me because I'd have been dead meat - I can learn, but I've never been able to memorize anything.

I was blessed (although it didn't always seem that way at the time) with teachers who wanted their students to /think/ - who were always asking: "So where do we go with that?" or "When might that be useful?". I had an English teacher (not in public school) who regularly walked over in front of my desk, looked down at me, and smiled broadly just before he'd ask: "And what does The Dove think of /that/?" I'm sitting here laughing about it now, but in the beginning it absolutely terrified me. :)

I /do/ see the problem. Somehow we need to replace indifferent instructors with _teachers_ who know their subject, the value of its knowledge, and who see that the future is in the hands of their students. It's the "somehow" that's the hard part.

Hmm. I was a math major who went into computer new product development (and who only rarely ever used any of the math) :-b

I only tackled the solar technology because (at age 60) I decided it was important enough and potentially valuable enough to use up my last years demonstrating its potential.

Think of it as an attempt to be worthy of the efforts of those Good Teachers, however lame that might seem.

[J. Clarke]

But introduced at what level? If they don't start it until high school then most students are not going to develop any fluency.

And now they're loaded down with paperwork to satisfy the bureaucrats besides.

And we have to get off the backs of the ones who do. I have a friend who has a PhD in education and is a retired teacher. Every time I see him he has another horror story passed on to him by one of the many teachers with whom he has contact. Idiocy like being disciplined for answering a student's question with anything other than "look it up" on the basis that they're "supposed to be teaching studends how to learn" for example. I don't know how widespread that sort of thing is--he seems to think it's pretty commonplace. The last teacher I dated was good with the kids and good with dealing with the administration, but quite frankly outside of work she was NUTS (not going to go into anecdotes) and I suspect that the work had done it to her.

Good thought. The thing is if I was going to do something worhty of my Good Teachers I'd be an author, and in that area, well, I have seen talent and it is something that I lack.

[Ed Pawlowski]

Old fashioned. Nobody does that any more.

[Morris Dovey]

I suspect that about the best that can be hoped for is /preparation/ for fluency. For most of us, real fluency probably only comes with actual use of a language. AFAICT, the most effective route to fluency is a total immersion - and that's difficult to do in a school setting.

From what I've heard, it's at least not unusual.

[Morris Dovey]

Just for grins, I looked to see if the school is still there (it is). This online satellite imagery stuff just boggles my mind - there's a bird's eye view of the school, my home, and the rec center where I spent a lot of my time at

you can get a look at the "moonscape" around the town by going to Google maps and specifying 'Abqaiq, Saudi Arabia'. Any green you see outside the town is /not/ vegetation. :)