Subject:
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Re: Rush: "Lego is a Tool for 4 year olds"
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Tue, 1 Feb 2000 21:56:15 GMT
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Viewed:
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841 times
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Scott E. Sanburn wrote:
> This whole issue is a sidestep. Giving this test, as a way to try to get
> around affirmative action rulings in recent years is wrong. I wish all
> of my test were as easy as having other people imitate a LEGO model in
> another room. If I ever have kids, I hope to God they never have to get
> downgraded to this level to get into a college.
To me there are two issues. The first is do we take people into college
who are not necessarily the most likely to succeed. The second issue is
how do you assure someone is most likely to succeed.
Since I believe it is impossible to come up with a perfect test which
satisfies the second issue, I think it is imperative that colleges take
a diversity of students, independant of the possible value of that
diversity from outside a pute "success". I think it is wrong to take
students, and then not work with them to help them succeed the best they
can. I think it is wrong to continue to take students using some "test"
who consistently fail. But if your "test" gives you a set of students
which mostly succeed, I'd say that's a good test. I also see nothing
wrong with using multiple tests.
As a totally seperate issue, a private university should be free to
chose their students however they please, and as we've been discussing
Libertopia, the government should get out of the buisiness of running
schools, which renders any constraints on how the government should
chose which students go to college meaningless.
And as far as learning non-traditional stuff in high school, I would say
that I got a LOT more usefull stuff out of the electronics and computer
stuff I did in my vocational high school than out of any traditional
classes (though there isn't much to be said for their "traditional"
classes, they didn't teach calculus before I came along). Actually, when
I look back at my schooling, from high school on through college, the
most valuable contribution to what I do for a living today was being
given the opportunity to experiment with computers in high school. I am
heavily a self taught programmer, and the skills of self teaching have
stood me quite well since I learn pretty quickly when I get a new job
assignment. I also value the practical experience in electronics which I
learned from my vocational studies (and even there I bucked the
curriculum, my sophmore year, I finished the "standard" curriculum
early, and instead of going on to the "advanced" curriculum like several
others in the class, I started working with the teacher and "played"
around [the other "advanced" students always complained about that],
well come final time, we had a 6 hour practical exam. I was the only
person who completed the problem on transistors, because in my "playing"
around, one of the things I did was test transistors, and so I had much
more understanding on how to figure out what was going on [I think part
of the problem was that the transistor supplied for the problem was
mislabeled as to what the base, emitter, and collector were], my senior
year, I spent a lot of time "playing" with the computers [teaching
myself 6502 assembler on an Apple II]. One day, I came back from
"playing" with the computer an hour or so before the end of the day, I
saw the students working on something which looked interesting, so I
asked what the assignment was, in the remaining hour, I accomplished
more on the problem than anyone else had all day). At least twice in
college courses, I used knowledge learned in high school. Once, we
needed to use some test equipment, no one else had the foggiest idea of
what we were using and how it might have worked (I think it was a logic
analyzer, one of our projects in high school was to build a circuit to
display 8 digital outputs on an osciliscope). Another time was when I
watched a student working on an infrared LED project. It wasn't working,
I looked at his circuit and asked where the resistors for the LEDs were.
When he said, what he said why do I need those, I told him to throw the
LED in the trash and add some current limiting resistors.
Another interesting one I self taught myself was multiple integration. I
had come up with this idea to come up with a formula to calculate the
actual radius of a D&D fireball when it went off in a closed area. It
was obvious to me that I needed to work with volumes, and I knew
integration of a curve gave you an area, so I set out to figure out how
to get a volume, and decided I needed to integrate twice. So I proved to
myself that I could get the volume of a sphere by integrating the
equation for a circle twice, and then set on my way. When we got to
multiple integration in calculus a few months later, I said, "oh, that's
what it's called." and went to sleep.
The only thing I regret from high school was skipping trigonometry. I
never learned all those half-angle and double-angle formulas, and that
hurt me some in college (despite that I learned how to do integrals
relating to those by integrating by parts).
I had a lot of fun with learning computer languages in college. They had
these big posters on the wall in the computer center telling you how to
compile a variety of languages. Seeing SNOBOL, I though to myself that
that just sounded neat, so I set off to see what this SNOBOL language
was all about. Interesting language, and very useful. I of course also
started playing with mainframe assembler before I took a class in it.
--
Frank Filz
-----------------------------
Work: mailto:ffilz@us.ibm.com (business only please)
Home: mailto:ffilz@mindspring.com
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Message has 1 Reply:
Message is in Reply To:
 | | Re: Rush: "Lego is a Tool for 4 year olds"
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| Tom, (...) It might be, but doesn't have anything to do with testing people to get around affirmative action rulings. (...) So, giving an unfair advantage to people is being fair? (...) I took many classes over 5 years of going to college, Tom, and (...) (25 years ago, 1-Feb-00, to lugnet.off-topic.debate)
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