On Thursday 26 April 2007, Guy Fraser wrote: >On Thu, 2007-04-26 at 11:07 -0400, Gene Heskett wrote: >> On Thursday 26 April 2007, Tim wrote: >> >Tim: >> >>> Sounds like they need to, also, employ someone who used to be a >> >>> teacher. Someone who's used to the idea of having to train, as the >> >>> main thing that they do. >> > >> >Gene Heskett: >> >> On the face of it, that is a good idea. Till that old saw about >> >> "those who can't do, teach" comes crawling up out of the back of my >> >> mind, having had it quite amply demonstrated in my nearly 57 years of >> >> chasing electrons for a living. The other corollary to that is that >> >> those who can do, and then try to teach, have a hell of a time trying >> >> to reduce the language to something that actually works for TV-101 >> >> classes. >> > >> >;-) Generally, we had the opposite problem at college. Teachers who >> >learnt electronics at college, then became teachers, were worse than >> >those who worked in the industry, then became teachers. For one thing, >> >they knew the difference between theory and practice. >> > >> >I could never get any lecturer to give a sane explanation of AM. They'd >> >tell us that the carrier was a fixed amplitude. I'd argue that AM was >> >modulating the carrier, therefor it has a varying one. I'd even >> >demonstrate by cranking the pot up and down to give a 1 Hertz AM. None >> >of them could give a reasonable explanation. Yes, they could give >> >strange ones, but none that fitted the situation demonstrated. >> >> I suspect they got lost someplace in the vector math, or the fourier >> transforms. Both are damndably hard to explain to someone, like me, >> sorely lacking in the math background to understand it. One of the >> disadvantages of having only an 8th grade formal education. Beyond that, >> I'm self taught, and have occasionally caught the teacher out & made him >> go back to the books. :) > >Aptly put. > >Math was my strong point, but I began my interest in electronics >in grade 6. I think I was hooked by the 3rd grade. I had an alcoholic uncle who carried mail in downtown DM IA way back then (late WWII time) and he used to bring in an 'All American 5 tube" in the bottom of his mailbag at night, figure out what was wrong with it and fix it if he could get the parts & take it back in that same mailbag when it was fixed. With the war and all, that was hard sometimes. Those were so simple that one could do repairs with a 20 questions poster on the wall, an "if it did this, replace that" sort of a list. He was replacing the filter caps in one of them one night and I asked him what was wrong with the one he was taking out? He couldn't tell me, so I set out to discover why it was considered non-functional. Mother hied herself off the the library and checked out what I needed. So I told him what was wrong a couple of weeks later and I honestly think I, at 8, maybe 9 years old, went way over his 45 year old head. I had by then a good grasp of electrical currents and how they could get through a capacitor, or were stored as charge in them. He also had an ohms law wheel on the wall, but used it with only sporadic success. The idea was after all, to keep him in beer money :) Another 6 years later they are divorced after 25 years, and he burnt himself up going to sleep one night with a lit cigarette in his hand, and I was by then fixing tv's for a living myself. I have to give some credit to my mother too. She was the only girl in the 'aviation technology' class of 1929 at Des Moines Tech High School. She didn't know the answers to a lot of things about the physical sciences a small child could ask, but she never forgot where the library was & whatever I was bugging her about, there was soon a book for me to study that probably had the answers as up to date as you can get from the library system. The one question that never got answered well was "what is gravity", and 60 years later we still don't have it fully defined. We don't even know how fast it propagates. All we can do is infer that its at least 1000x C speed or the orbital mechanics as we calculate them today, would be so broken the earth would have spiraled into the sun 4.5 billion years ago. It may be the only superluminal force in the universe. >I also tormented one prof who had no real world expertise >by pointing out his errors, and disproved one of his facts with >a demonstration when he called me on one of my objections. I did >not sign up for any more of his classes after I finished that one. And I would not have been too bashfull at telling the admissions office exactly why. You got screwed out of your tuition money, getting nothing of value in exchange. Such incompetency in front of the blackboard needs to be weeded out before it can do even more damage. One of the reasons I today, am still against teachers having absolute tenure at any level in our educational system, and are at the same time, suitably rewarded for a job done well. If that leads to an inequality in the pay rate, so be it. None of the good ones are ever paid >20% of what they are worth in todays unionized educational systems. Our children deserve nothing less than both good parenting, and good teachers. And good parenting includes meaningfull discipline by whatever means gets the child's attention when he/she miss-behaves. Quickly, before they lose the memory of the action that generated the disciplinary action. -- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) "Not Hercules could have knock'd out his brains, for he had none." -- Shakespeare
