STEM Education? Discussion.
SRLM
Posts: 5,045
I was just doing some research for an essay on the topic of STEM in high school education, and I was wondering what others thought on the topic. By the way, this is not meant to be political in any way, and I'd apprecieate it if politics stayed on the sidelines for now. It's meant to be bipartisan, as it's something that effects us all.
STEM (Science, Engineering, Technology, and Mathematics) is an issue in modern education. Looking around at my fellow students, I find that they tend to do the minimum possible, and never try to build anything of their own. A vast majority of them couldn't build a simple circuit or make a simple mechanical design, and show a page of code with instructions to interpret it and they'll go blank. Is it there fault, or is the that they are a product of the public education system? I think that they have been cheated, and that it takes a special set of circumstances to work around the deficiencies of schooling and to learn how to engineer. Schools should have a solution to increase student participation in these STEM topics, and I have a proposal.
Public schools should have an 'Engineering and Technology' class to allow students to apply principles and core concepts that they learn in science and mathematics classes, and gives them a hands on approach to learning. Such a class would be administered in 8th, 10th, and 12th grades. The goal is not to teach students everything they need to know about modern technologies: it is to inspire them to learn more on there own. By learning on their own, a student is much more prepared for the hard work required to succeed in any sort of profession, and indeed, to excel at it. The class proposed would be scheduled as a regular class, with mandatory participation. Every week, a new subject would be presented. For example, topics might include 'Ballistics', 'Motors', Efficiency', 'Practical Circuits', 'Programming', and 'Structures'. By covering a broad range of topics, students will understand that they 'useless' calculus and physics have applications to modern life, and to them in general.
Any thoughts on the subject?
Post Edited (SRLM) : 2/5/2009 4:29:26 AM GMT
STEM (Science, Engineering, Technology, and Mathematics) is an issue in modern education. Looking around at my fellow students, I find that they tend to do the minimum possible, and never try to build anything of their own. A vast majority of them couldn't build a simple circuit or make a simple mechanical design, and show a page of code with instructions to interpret it and they'll go blank. Is it there fault, or is the that they are a product of the public education system? I think that they have been cheated, and that it takes a special set of circumstances to work around the deficiencies of schooling and to learn how to engineer. Schools should have a solution to increase student participation in these STEM topics, and I have a proposal.
Public schools should have an 'Engineering and Technology' class to allow students to apply principles and core concepts that they learn in science and mathematics classes, and gives them a hands on approach to learning. Such a class would be administered in 8th, 10th, and 12th grades. The goal is not to teach students everything they need to know about modern technologies: it is to inspire them to learn more on there own. By learning on their own, a student is much more prepared for the hard work required to succeed in any sort of profession, and indeed, to excel at it. The class proposed would be scheduled as a regular class, with mandatory participation. Every week, a new subject would be presented. For example, topics might include 'Ballistics', 'Motors', Efficiency', 'Practical Circuits', 'Programming', and 'Structures'. By covering a broad range of topics, students will understand that they 'useless' calculus and physics have applications to modern life, and to them in general.
Any thoughts on the subject?
Post Edited (SRLM) : 2/5/2009 4:29:26 AM GMT
Comments
Verizon Math fail:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHyZOOfxtfE
(if you've seen it already, skip the video. If you haven't, get ready to cry)
The desperate need for better STEM education is beyond any serious doubt. It should move ahead of almost anything else that is done during the school day (though reading and writing are still more important, IMHO).
(Not that credentials should matter to a discussion, but I'm an educational psychologist by trade)
Addendum -
When I was in graduate school during a seminar my fellow students were asked to present on their research topics. Each one talked about some problem in education or society, and presented research showing how serious that problem was, and then proposed a class that schools could add to address the problem. Finally one of the professors stopped us and pointed out that collectively we'd proposed something like a 36-hour school day (I'm exaggerating a bit, but that's pretty much what it came to).
Most of the problems were completely unrelated to education, and in fact in the entire graduate school of education, only three of us in the Doctoral program were working on educational issues. The rest were all things like anger management and peer mediation and stress management and sex education and drug abuse prevention and cultural sensitivity and so on, plus the entire collection of special education issues that have been dumped onto the public schools.
What I learned is that improving education is more than a matter of simply designing and adding educational courses. That's the easy part - though I agree with you 100% that such a course _as a requirement for graduation_ would be a very good thing. But you've got to get someone OUTSIDE of education to take over for those noneducational problems.
In short, I think that your idea is excellent, and if I could snap my fingers and make it happen, I would. But it would require much more than just designing and adding a course.
Post Edited (sylvie369) : 2/5/2009 5:27:04 PM GMT
I can't believe this! I'm studying electrical engineering at the University of Texas and I'm around engineering students allll day. Not to sound snobish, but it really amazes me about the rest of the non-STEM world sometimes. I totally agree with you SRLM. We need to put more emphasis on this sort of thing. The United States, in particular, has gone from the world leader in technology and education, to a mass of people that watch American Idol and idiocy on the TV all day.
Anyway.
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From my point of view,·judging from·the posts on this forum, not enough time is devoted to grammar·and·spelling.··It's appalling, the dearth of what we used to call the hallmarks of basic literacy: subject-verb agreement, the ability to properly use that or which in a sentence,·and understanding the difference between its and it's.·
So, who cares,·as long as "the numbers are right," yes?
Reminds me of a bumper sticker they sold at the student union at the engineering school I attended:
"Six months ago, I couldn't spel injiner, now I are one"
I thought her "I'm not a mathematician" line was just as inane. So in her mind if you want someone who can multiply two numbers together and pay proper attention to the units, you need to hire a mathematician? And it's perfectly reasonable (in her opinion) that a person working customer service in a billing department not be able to do so?
I also agree with the other responses here about spelling and grammar, and I'd like to add to that the basic ability to communicate what one is trying to get across. We get a fair number of questions here that are simply unintelligible. The ability to read and write properly are absolutely fundamental to everything else. I teach in a college psychology department, and we're in the middle of instituting what will be a pretty rigorous "show us that you can read two articles, make sense of them (including where they conflict), and write your own evidence-based conclusion about the topic" exam, set up so that students who do not pass the exam do not continue in the major. I think it's the most exciting, positive thing I've been involved in so far, in over 20 years of teaching. I feel the same way about engineers - if you can't spell properly and put your thinking into proper English, I'm not going to trust that you're capable of understanding programming and making bullet-proof code.
Many of the non-native speakers have better speaking and writing skills than do native speakers. However, managers can't officially hold folks to different standards. What bothers me most is not that people don't know the difference between their and there or it's and its, but that a lot of them don't care, and say so.
Mike
-Phil
Post Edited (Phil Pilgrim (PhiPi)) : 2/8/2009 10:22:35 PM GMT
Your writing seems to be correct so you haven't given up completely.
It would be nice to be able to read everything clearly though. When I first started using the Microchip forums I was in for a surprise. Mchip forums users are much more outspoken against certain things like creating one paragraph (or sentence) describing a lengthy problem. It was a good lesson though. Part of getting a problem figured out is in understanding a good way to ask it.
A spellchecker correction list would be nice for the reply box.
You realize of course there's a lot a more involved in programming and creating what you call "bullet-proof code" than merely a being a word smith.
BTW if you are really interested in the subject, check out the book "Code Complete".
My apologies - you are correct, of course. I would try my best to make allowances for non-native English speakers. I do travel extensively in countries where English is not the first language, and I'm quite sure that my French and Spanish and Italian fall far short of the standards I want to hold people to in English.
Obviously.
My point is that attention to detail is required, and an inability to write properly generally indicates an inability to attend to detail properly.
The public school system needs to get back to Reading,Writing and Arithmetic. After students know that, THEN you can pile on the touchy-feely stuff. And if you don't learn the basics then you don't get a diploma. The schools are really letting our children down. They don't teach them anything about the real world. Like how credit cards and loans REALLY work. How compound interest works (in both loans and savings). How to balance a checkbook, how to do your taxes, how to figure out what you want to do with your life.
The other problem is that the schools systems lead the students to believe that they DO know everything, when they don't. A friend of mine went to a computer training school for 6 month. I was talking to her and I mentioned that I used Pascal (I used Turbo Pascal for years at the time). She commented that "Oh, yeah I know Pascal" so we started talking about pascal and I realized very quickly that she didn't "know" pascal. She knew what it looked like, that was about it. Then she said, "We also learned C, C++, BASIC, SQL and FORTRAN too". Yeah right, in 6 months you learned all those languages. But what really got to me was that she truly thought that she could get a job writing programs in any of these languages right from day one.
When I was in high school, I majored in shop(industrial arts) for all 4 years. I'm glad I did. If I had taken "college prep" I would have had so much homework, I never would have learned anything. Because I basically taught myself engineering. The only "hard" courses I took at school was math. I love math. Had the radio-shack 150-in-one and such kits at home and used them all the time.
We had a computer class, and me and two of my friends knew ALOT more than the teacher. We would correct him when he said something that wasn't right. And we would help him with his college classes he was taking. The rest of the class didn't give a hoot about computers, and the teacher knew that.
This goes back to the same problem of cashiers that cannot make change. Even college graduates.
Bean.
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There is a fine line between arrogance and confidence. Make sure you don't cross it...
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No language is static. I don't put apostrophe's in my spoken language. I don't understand why it is necessary when I write.
Stupid waste of time. Most of the time the meaning is clear from the context and on the rare occasions when something isn't clear we could add a word or two... rather than each and every time, trying to remember is it "its" or is it "it's"?
Young people are experts with user interfaces and calculators... and if something isn't in the user interface or available on the calculator they appear willing to wait until it is.
Most people never use math until it comes time to pay a bill and then it all seems rather natural to them.
You can't really teach math... either it is inside of you or it isn't. You can sometimes make it more communicable and useful to a person, but you can't really teach it.
Science doesn't actually exist... it is really just another religion.
What does exist is technology... and if we ever lose our technical capacity... we are just screwed.
(Respectfully[noparse]:)[/noparse] I disagree with quite a bit of that. It's not at all rare that the meaning is not clear from the context, and if I had a choice of interacting with someone who gets it right the first time and someone who needs to be prodded and questioned before he or she can get the point across, I'm definitely going to work with the one who gets it right the first time. I've worked on writing projects with good writers and with bad ones, and there's a very clear difference in both the process and the eventual product.
I'm certainly not the only one here who has noticed considerable variation in the quality of technical documentation. A product whose documentation was written in that text messaging language would be a product of little value. Properly written documentation is a major "plus" - as the Parallax people have certainly demonstrated. A large part of the value of the Parallax products is the well-written documentation.
As for distinguishing "its" and "it's" - there's no waste of time involved, and no need to try to remember it "each and every time": you just learn to do it right. Do you have to "waste time" each time you're trying to remember what 4 plus 4 equals? I write correctly*, and I'm quite sure that I can successfully express my thoughts more quickly than someone who tries to express them using text messaging language.
Again, I disagree. Of course there are innate differences in ability and interest that lead some people to learn math more quickly and others more slowly, but the fact remains that people can learn math and people can teach math. I'm reasonably good at math - I taught college statistics for quite a few years - and it certainly wasn't something that came naturally to me. I sweated hard and long under the direction of good teachers. I failed some math courses, and came back and retook them.
As for why most people never use math, has it occurred to you that might be because they don't know the math that they should be using? When you teach statistics, you find yourself noticing many examples of decision-making that's driven by nothing more than habit and prejudice simply because the decision-makers don't know how to measure things and how to work with the results they get. I'll bet that well-trained accountants have the same feeling about how many business people work.
Science is most definitely not "just another religion". Whether it "exists" or not depends on what you mean by that, of course, but science is qualitatively different from religion, and in fact is a spectacularly successful human endeavor whose value is beyond question.
* For the most part. Of course the moment I say that, I'll make a typo.
Post Edited (sylvie369) : 2/9/2009 1:11:38 AM GMT
There's another way to think about this. Don't think of it as spelling a word wrong. Think of it as using the wrong word.
These are all spoken in (more or less) the same way, but they mean entirely different things:
To too many people...
Too too many people...
Two too many people...
Too, to many people...
Two, to many people...
The English language is hard enough to parse when it's written correctly. Spelling and grammar mistakes shift an undue burden to the reader.
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
Mike
P.S. My son (13 years old) just said "Correct spelling and grammar are very important. It's a standard for communication. It's not just there to annoy you." Maybe there is hope for the youth of America. By the way, many of his teachers subtract points for incorrect spelling, not just his English teacher.
Studying French made me acutely aware of this. Unlike English, French has letters with accent marks.
The problems that make most people unable to achieve Silvieishness -- nice coinage, don't you think -- are multiple, including at least the following:
(1)· The average person is a dullard.· How many people do you know whose IQ is 100, which is rather dull?· How many of them do you respect?· Once upon a time, education was for those who might absorb it and profit from it; and those who failed, failed.· Now it's·glibly called an entitlement, and most of the·pearls fall before swine.· This is a waste of pearls, and also·of swine.
(2)· The teacher's job, being government employment, is also an entitlement.· Entirely too many teachers are able to get and keep their employment only because of this.· Visiting public schools, as I have occasionally done, I note that many of the teachers aren't particularly bright.· There are nearly always a few who are bright, and they are cherished by their bright students --·as one lost in a Sahara treasures an oasis.· The cherishing goes both ways.
(3)· Teachers lie to students, exacerbating the modest difficulties of English orthography by uncomprehending and uncritical·repetition of lies their teachers taught them.· For example, students are told that the only way to distinguish to from too is by rote.· The claim is·that to and too are identical in pronumciation, which is a lie.· Say out loud, I want to go to the store, too.· Listen to yourself.· Did you pronounce to and too the same way?· Of course not.· Too is longer (and louder), and so it's spelled longer.· Why don't teachers know that?· But that's just an example -- teachers don't know what they're teaching, so how in Heaven's name can they teach it?· But the bright students learn it anyway.· Some even learn all four almost-but-not-quite homophones:· to, too, two, tew.· Doubt me?· Look it up.· But that's just an example -- and lots does have to be learned by rote, which can be done painlessly by reading a lot.
What is true in language-teaching, surely, is true in science education, in mathematics, in -- well, everything.· We have teachers with distinctly second-rate knowledge and aptitude, boredly teaching students who ought to be sweeping the streets instead.·· No wonder Johnny can't read.
Actually, many of those Johnnys-who-can't-read might become reasonably good readers if they spent any time reading.· Every intelligent person I know has acquired a houseful of books, which do not sit idle but are read and reread.· Every dullard I know avoids books, either by intention or by default.· These two moieties constitute almost the whole population -- few are·in between.· But which is cause, and which effect?
Seek out the people in the techie classes -- they're the only ones interesting to talk to anyway.· By techie, I mean not just the science-and-engineering types, but also those fascinated by language; those who would be the best at whatever interests them:· writing, circuit design, physics research, market research,·trumpet-playing (can't be a good trumpet-player without solid music theory), cosmology, economic theory, whatever -- even programming.· All of these require brain-power, and all require superior ability in the language skills of expression and·reception.· Poor language skills are a death-knell in anything a monkey can't do.
Parenthetically I add that, as a hiring manager of a systems programming department, I found many times that computer science graduates were almost always a poor hiring risk, while musicians were almost always excellent.· That ought to be worth a good dissertation for someone.
As for STEM in high schools (or any schools), it ought to be taught by the best (it sometimes isn't), and ought to be taught for the best (it seldom is) -- and flunk the dullards out.· Who wants to drive over a bridge designed by·one who doesn't thrill to the challenge of designing it?· Not I -- I don't want to die in the river.
By pandering to dullards, we wind up with people who can't tell whether their change is correct at the grocery store, who never spend time reading, and who write it's for its, were for where, there for their, and put too many e's and not enough a's in separate; who always use optoisolators when an inexpensive relay would be better and cheaper; and who claim that interrupt programming is just too, too hard for poor little old me.
Pooh.
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· -- Carl, nn5i@arrl.net
Regarding your rebuttal to rjo_, thank you! Your response was both measured and articulate, and it would my folly to try adding anything to it. (Sorry, rjo_, but I'm still shaking my head. Please tell me you were merely playing devil's advocate to foment a discussion.)
-Phil
Er, I'm a guy, real name "Paul". Sylvie is my cat.
It's a holdover from the very first time a website ever asked me for a username, and I couldn't think of anything else, so I went with that (and of course then it asked me for numbers in it...). I used to routinely sign "From a guy, despite the username". Maybe I should start doing that again.
Thanks, though, and to you as well, Phil and Mike.
To Carl's comments, I'd like to emphasize the point (which I think he makes) that one learns spelling and the rules of grammar not by memorizing a bunch of rules but by reading a lot of proper English and picking up the rules implicitly. I was writing properly before I could tell you what the rules are, and I probably still would be unable to explain or even describe many of the rules that I am nonetheless using properly in my writing. I didn't sit down and memorize a bunch of rules and then begin writing properly.
I also want to reemphasize something I said up in my first post in this thread: the schools have gotten saddled with a lot of responsibilities that have nothing whatsoever to do with academic education (as Bean points out as well). Of course since that happened, the field of education started attracting people who think that's just fine, so the current crop of educators and educational professionals cannot collectively claim to be innocent of it. That was the biggest surprise and disappointment I had when I was in a school of education: hardly anyone there was interested in academic education. People were in fact surprised to find that I was working on science education - all of the other students were in the doctoral program to study counseling or school psychology. ALL of them. All of the counseling students assumed I was a school psychologist, and all of the school psychology students assumed I was a counselor. When I was accepted to the program, my acceptance was delayed a couple of weeks simply because the program had to find someone to be my advisor, and they weren't used to having to ask someone who was interested in academic education.
The problems that those people are working on are real problems (mostly), but the assumption that schools should be responsible for solving them is, in my opinion, completely asinine. In defense of education professionals, there are a LOT of them who know a LOT about academic education and who are working hard to improve education. But for every one of them, there's 5 who are enthusiastically working to spend kids' classroom hours on stuff that has nothing whatsoever to do with academics.
I also liked Carl's "flunk the dullards out" comment. It's worth pointing out that schools have also been saddled with the responsibility to not do that, and since passing the dullards takes the most effort, it's what gets the most attention, which of course drags everyone down. It also attracts people who are interested in working with dullards to education. Guess who those people tend to be.
(well, that's a little unfair of me, but it's not completely out of line)
Post Edited (sylvie369) : 2/9/2009 9:57:35 AM GMT
Some quotes from my original post:
and
I must say, 'there' was my my fault (and the STEM explanation failure). 'There' is a pointer to a place or time, while 'their' is a pointer to a group who have something.
Suppose that humans have a finite amount of memory that is available for use. While it may be possible that that amount is so much larger than any one person could ever hope to fill, let's narrow it down to something that you could expect to fill, to some amount M. Unless you are a TV based vegetable, let's suppose it is likely that you are to fill M before you reach the age where you start your professional life.
Now, say you wanted to build a bridge, and you decided to hire an engineer. Would you rather have an engineer who filled most of his M with English studies, Classical Mythology, Business Ethics, and so on? Or would you rather have an engineer who could mostly talk and write coherently, but filled most of his M with engineering skills and advanced concepts? An excerpt from a conversation with each:
Harvard Engineer: "I am sure you will be fine with the way I have it designed. I'm using a Girder Bridge to span the 400m natural barrier. It will be fine."
Technical Engineer: "Well, dawg, you could use that beam bridge, but it pissen far, dude, I mean f***, a lattice thing like my ma has in her garden would be alot more chill for this."
(I know, my street talk is a little rough). While an exaggeration, the point is that an engineer who knows more about engineering would be a better choice for a job, than someone who tries to be a 'Renaissance Man'. I can hear the a rebuttal coming my way:
"Poor language skills denote a lack of discipline."
While good language skills denotes discipline, poor language skills does indicate that the speaker has a lack a discipline. It was mentioned earlier in this thread that some leeway should be given to non-native speakers. However, should they be judged in their native language?
Say there was a programmer named Julius who could program in any language perfectly: you look at the code he types, and there is absolutely nothing you would change about it. However, Julius has one, slight problem: he uses slang, curses, and informal language to communicate. Does that mean he doesn't discipline? No, rather, he is disciplined in code rather than language skills.
So, while language skills are a useful tool to have, they're not required to excel in a STEM field. If an engineer can fit them into his finite memory space, then wonderful. He has a useful skill that can be used, but in a memory cut and a required decision between language skills and engineering skills, I'd choose engineering skills.
Post Edited (SRLM) : 2/9/2009 9:22:20 AM GMT
If people really worked that way, I'd take the quality engineer. But that's not how our minds really work. There's something called "The Matthew Effect" that has shown to be pretty robust across education. It amounts to "the rich get richer" (it's named after Matthew 25:29, which says "For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath."). The more you know, the more connections between things you can make, and the more you're capable of knowing.
Knowing a lot about English doesn't get in the way of knowing a lot about engineering. At the very worst, it's unrelated. It's far more likely that knowing about one topic will enhance your ability in other topics, even apparently unrelated ones like English and engineering.
Again, you're assuming that "finite memory space", and that's not really how things work. You're setting up a false dichotomy here, based on false assumptions.
Who is more likely to be able to "program in any language perfectly", someone who writes well in plain English or someone who writes poorly in plain English? With your "finite memory space" idea, you're suggesting that it's the person who writes poorly in plain English, but in fact it's not. Imagine that you needed to hire an engineer, and had to choose between two of them. Imagine that for some reason you didn't get to examine their engineering skills, but you had a writing sample from each. You're suggesting that at best, the writing sample wouldn't help you make your decision, and you seem to even think that the worse writer would be the better engineer. You can have him - I'll take the better writer, and in general, I'll be getting the better engineer. Sure, there'll be exceptions, but they're exceptions. The rule is "the person who writes better is likely to also have better engineering skills".
I also don't buy your claim that language skills are not required to excel in a STEM field. Doing the math/science/engineering stuff is almost never the entire job. The vast majority of real STEM jobs involve projects too large for one person to do alone - they're not like being a hobbyist putting together a robot in his workshop. If you've worked with any significant code in a real project, you know the importance of documentation. Projects need clear specifications, and the techies working on them need to communicate clearly with each other during the project, and they need to be able to report out.
Now, there may be few enough skilled engineers out there that companies are forced to take on some (okay, many) whose language skills are bad, but you can bet they'd much rather have ones whose language skills are good, and that good language skills would make them considerably better at their jobs.
There's a stereotype that people have of science and technology-oriented people, that suggests that those people tend to do nothing but science and technology, and that they don't know about or even bother with non-STEM fields. I have lots of colleagues who seem to think that the fact that they're not into science makes them good at art, as though you're automatically one or the other, and never both. That's just nonsense, of course. You don't have to scratch far beneath the surface to find that the good science and technology people have all sorts of interests and abilities in the arts and humanities (FAR more so than the typical arts and humanities people have in the sciences, though there's some real science and tech skills in the kinds of artists who work with paints and other physical media). In fact language and music and math skills go together so often that I'm starting to find myself surprised when I meet a mathematician who DOESN'T speak other languages and/or play musical instruments (and I've never met a mathematician who couldn't spell).
Frankly, I think the "we don't really need to learn to write correctly" thing is yet another symptom of the anti-intellectualism that's just killing us economically. Look at your example:
In the movies, the "Technical Engineer" will turn out to be right, but that's just the movies. It comes out that way in the movies because some writer who struggled in high school math decided to take out his frustrations by having his make-believe Harvard Engineer look foolish on the screen. Real life isn't like the movies.
Post Edited (sylvie369) : 2/9/2009 10:10:31 AM GMT
Try as you might, there is no "best way to educate" without intellectual segregation. When faced with educating the masses without favor or partition, the lowest common denominator is all you can hope for and/or achieve. Give real aptitude tests early on and teach according to the student's abilities, and hopefully their inclination. Shop math is not financial math, nor statistical math, nor scientific math, nor is it pure math. Teach the arts, give them something for personal release, maybe even a life's career.
I think they should teach first aid in 10th grade, if not sooner, with constant follow up classes, and offer optional higher classes in the health field in the higher grades. And, as someone mentioned earlier, teach the kids how to get a job, hold a job, do taxes, invest, raise THEIR kids... and never stop offering FREE classes like these to the populace the rest of their lives. Right after they're (thanks, Mr Fell) taught the Three R's and critical thinking.
Face it. We live this well (now, THERE'S a topic for argument!) because of ever-advancing technology. Mind bending, concept riddled, technology, with its endless list of disciplines and data tables. I was watching a PBS special the other day. The narrator, standing before a long book case, gestured down the row and intoned,"These thousands of BOOKS (not pages!) represent man's present knowledge about the human digestive system and the tens of thousands of chemical reactions taking place there!" I mean, jeez, folks, (still hung up on proper use of commas) this is where the data flow is taking us. I'm a simple technician. I cook book a lot when I have to cobble together a circuit. But I also do clever little cartoons, and, I'd like to think, I'm articulate. English was my best class in school. So I excel at reading manuals and applying what I read there to setting up test instruments. Thus I earn my pay. I get payed on the side for proofreading and correcting users' (again, Mr fell) manuals. No one would ever mistake me for a programmer, but I program simple test beds with embedded processors, and design Excel sheets to take data and make graphs. The New York State educational system did OK by me. I progress. I come to sites like this 'cause this is where the intelligentia (spell?) gather in my field of interest and talk about things inside and outside my field, but do so intelligently. God bless you all.
And Einstein's wife had to keep the check book, he was hopeless at it.
End 2 cents,
kenjj
At the U of I, as an undergraduate I was instructed (in a formal lecture on physical chemistry) that to be a true scientist, you must first deny the existence of God. I didn't quit the class, but I stopped going to the lectures.
I prefer to deny the existence of science, since science insists that I should deny the existence of God.
When we are wondering why young people aren't more interested in science, we should look at how science is posturing itself. Science isn't just being ignored, it is being rejected... for reasons that I just stated. Say something stupid to a young person and they just turn you off... and everyone like you.
Physics... the queen of science can be deconstructed quite easily. Not that we shouldn't study physics... not that physical phenomena don't exist... just that if a person actually believes that we have arrived at anything close to any universal truths in physics, he or she is either too young to have an opinion or too stupid to be doing physics.
Every time I see Michiu Ukaku (sp) on television, pretending to represent the truth, I want to ... expletive deleted.
With regard to documentation... I agree that we all need to do a better job documenting... but that has nothing to do with formal English... it has to do with simple effort.
The apostrophe has two meanings in English... "it" is used to indicate both contraction and possession... and yes, I have to think about it every time I use an apostrophe with the word, "it." English has a convention that applies to one word... it... and you think the whole world should remember that convention. I say... drop it... it isn't worth the time and effort... and it makes English look like a really weak language.
We all have different kinds of brains. This just happens to be the way mine works.
English is my primary language. For some on this forum, english is a secondary or even tertiary language. I don't want anyone worried that they shouldn't contribute because they might not spell something right or use the wrong word of word form. Or because they left a comma out of their previous sentence[noparse]:)[/noparse]
Post Edited (rjo_) : 2/9/2009 3:01:15 PM GMT
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The subject is education. Parallax is big in that world. Lots of educators hang around here. Never hurts to talk.
Rich
- As you noted, some scientists - Newton, to use your example - managed to accommodate their beliefs in gods with their beliefs in science.
- In addition, you accepted the claim that "science insists that I should deny the existence of God" simply on the basis of the fact that someone in one of your science lectures said that - but you already knew that Isaac Newton didn't agree.
I have more politically incorrect responses, but out of respect for Parallax, I'm going to keep them to myself.
If you can tell me what the rules are, you are a linguistics prodigy.· No reputable modern linguist claims to be able to do that.· For a century and more, linguists published English "grammars" based upon an assumption that Latin grammar applied to English.· What they described actually had little resemblance to English, which grammatically is more like Chinese than like Latin (most Latin grammar depends upon inflections [noparse][[/noparse]word endings], while English grammar depends almost entirely on the order of the words [noparse][[/noparse]distribution] in a sentence.· No similarity.· But our schools still teach "rules of English grammar" that are nothing of the sort, based upon fundamental error.· For example, our kids are taught that English has seven "parts of speech", which is true of Latin but manifestly untrue of English.
Charlton Laird puts it well in his wonderful book The Miracle of Language (recommended reading):· In short, the conventional grammar is not much more revealing of the actual grammar of Modern English than one should expect it to be when we consider what has happened:· The grammar of an inflected language, Latin, has been forced upon a distributive language, English, which has been wrenched in the attempt to make it fit the alien grammar.· A large number of intelligent people have labored for generations to make sense of this forced wrenching, this set of rules which is fundamentally wrong.· That the conventional grammar makes as much sense as it does is a high tribute to the patience and intelligence of our grammarians.
In the last century, linguists have shown that the old grammars (based on the work of Lowth and Murray) are nonsense, and some progress has been made, but we are still far from being able to write down a set of rules that explain how I decide what words to write as I sit here, and how you turn my words into an understanding of my thoughts.· We simply don't know.· Knowing that we don't know is progress.· But the public-school ·teaching profession largely has not kept up even with that.
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· -- Carl, nn5i@arrl.net
Interesting stuff. Of course I meant that I was correctly following specific rules - such as some of those guiding the use of apostrophes for contractions and possessives - before I could have told you what those specific rules were. I certainly don't claim to know all of the rules, and when I began to submit journal articles to experienced editors, I quickly learned how much I have to learn.
I agree with you completely about the mistaken assumptions about how to teach these things. A good writer is not someone who has laboriously learned each of the rules of the English language anymore than a good pool player is a person who has laboriously figured out the physics of each pool shot. I'm fairly certain that extensive reading will do far more to help a person's writing than study of grammatical rules will. Of course that does not imply that it's unimportant to follow those rules in your writing.
Of course, not everyone can become a great writer, even by reading a lot.· But I maintain that no one can become a great writer without reading a lot.· Native ability is necessary but not sufficient.
What is true of writing, I believe, is true of every intellectual pursuit -- writing, spelling, engineering, generalship, statesmanship, medicine, the physical sciences, mathematics, chess, contract bridge, poker, programming, musical composition·-- you name it.· He who does not spend time reading·will not be good at any of these.
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· -- Carl, nn5i@arrl.net