3 ms·

By the time I reached the senior year of my EE degree, I was terribly impressed with how neatly the prerequisite courses slotted into requirements of later clas

by gamble 16y ago

By the time I reached the senior year of my EE degree, I was terribly impressed with how neatly the prerequisite courses slotted into requirements of later classes. It's a shame that the reasoning is opaque until you've already been through the program. If I was in charge of the program, I'd give every freshman a manual summarizing the content of each class up to the junior year, and why they should know it.

nitrogen 16y ago
Something like this would certainly have helped me during high school and university, but I suspect schools may view it as competing against themselves by showing students all they need to know, thus allowing them to skip school and learn the exact same material on their own.
- xyzzyz 16y ago
  What is the problem with students skipping classes and learning the material on their own? If they like it more that way and have good results, why should they be forced to attend the classes they do not like, or do not find helpful in absorbing the material? Universities are supposed to do the research and help students learn things. If the students learn things and scientists do research, everything is all right, I guess. No need to impose a military regime. However, it might not be true for high schools, for it is more supposed to gather students in one place and keep them from fooling around, than actually teaching them stuff.
- jseliger 16y ago
  I suspect schools may view it as competing against themselves This kind of thought process is strange to my way of thinking but plausible; very few teachers I ever had said, "Hey, this is why we're doing what we're doing and why it's important," which is part of the reason I make a point of saying exactly that in the classes I teach. One favorite question: "Why are we reading this, as opposed to something else? What are you supposed to take from it?" by showing students all they need to know, thus allowing them to skip school and learn the exact same material on their own. This seems implausible: if students came in already well-prepared or overly advanced for the classes I teach (chiefly Engl composition), I'd be delighted. By now I've taught about ~250 students, and somewhere between 1 and 6 haven't really needed a comp class. Probably only 1. But I can guarantee that more than 6 have thought they didn't need a comp class... HN has a lot of talk about being self-motivated, and learning on your own, and so forth, which I think is great. But standing in front of a classroom makes me think that the number of people who will really do this is not very great, especially without deadlines and so forth to motivate them (for more on this, see Dan Ariely's book _Predictably Irrational_). That's not to say the number of very self-motivated people who could acquire the knowledge that school imparts on their own is zero. It isn't. But it's really, really small, which is part of the reason school systems are shaped as they are.
- scott_s 16y ago
  This reasoning doesn't hold up because all of the information is already available through course descriptions and syllabi on course webpages. You don't even need to attend a school to get at that information.
JimmyL 16y ago
In doing my CompE degree, my favorite part of any of my junior- and senior-year classes were the last two weeks - which was when they'd connect what you'd spent all semester learning with what you'd learned in previous classes. "This transform is actually just a low-pass filter (which you can now derive in two different ways","All that matrix algebra can be used to simplify calculating how two transmission cables interact", "If you add in complex variables, all those calculations you've been doing just got a whole lot easier", etc.; for me, that was always the golden moment when it became clear that someone had put some thought into what I was learning, as opposed to just hitting a course catalog with a shotgun. Only one professor - one of the signals guys - made this point at the start of the semester. I don't remember the exact problem, but he started the first lecture (after giving out the syllabus) working out on the board a relatively complex problem from another course. Took him about ten minutes and three or four blackboards, and he made a few mistakes along the way. Then he erased all his work, solved the same problem in about four lines using a bunch of symbols/variables/calculations that we hadn't yet been exposed to, and said "in three months, you will understand what these four lines mean, and why they're so much more powerful that what you're used to writing out." Come the end of the semester three months later, he was right - the solution he showed us (he wrote it out again) made perfect sense, and applied in a whole bunch of places. Having said all that, I'm still not clear why I had to take analytical mechanics/statics in my second semester.
- wallflower 16y ago
  > Having said all that, I'm still not clear why I had to take analytical mechanics/statics in my second semester Part of the hazing :) On a serious note, it looks like ABET has relaxed their standards. > For most of its history, ABET’s accreditation criteria specifically outlined the major elements that accredited engineering programs must have, including the program curricula, the faculty type, and the facilities. However, in the mid-1990s, the engineering community began to question the appropriateness of such rigid accreditation requirements.[8] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accreditation_Board_for_Engineering_and_Technology http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accreditation_Board_for_Enginee... New standards (references room-for-interpretation "Engineering Sciences" and not statics, dynamics, nature of materials): http://www.abet.org/Linked%20Documents-UPDATE/Criteria%20and%20PP/E001%2010-11%20EAC%20Criteria%201-27-10.pdf http://www.abet.org/Linked%20Documents-UPDATE/Criteria%20and...

by gamble 16y ago

nitrogen 16y ago

Something like this would certainly have helped me during high school and university, but I suspect schools may view it as competing against themselves by showing students all they need to know, thus allowing them to skip school and learn the exact same material on their own.

xyzzyz 16y ago
What is the problem with students skipping classes and learning the material on their own? If they like it more that way and have good results, why should they be forced to attend the classes they do not like, or do not find helpful in absorbing the material? Universities are supposed to do the research and help students learn things. If the students learn things and scientists do research, everything is all right, I guess. No need to impose a military regime. However, it might not be true for high schools, for it is more supposed to gather students in one place and keep them from fooling around, than actually teaching them stuff.
jseliger 16y ago
I suspect schools may view it as competing against themselves This kind of thought process is strange to my way of thinking but plausible; very few teachers I ever had said, "Hey, this is why we're doing what we're doing and why it's important," which is part of the reason I make a point of saying exactly that in the classes I teach. One favorite question: "Why are we reading this, as opposed to something else? What are you supposed to take from it?" by showing students all they need to know, thus allowing them to skip school and learn the exact same material on their own. This seems implausible: if students came in already well-prepared or overly advanced for the classes I teach (chiefly Engl composition), I'd be delighted. By now I've taught about ~250 students, and somewhere between 1 and 6 haven't really needed a comp class. Probably only 1. But I can guarantee that more than 6 have thought they didn't need a comp class... HN has a lot of talk about being self-motivated, and learning on your own, and so forth, which I think is great. But standing in front of a classroom makes me think that the number of people who will really do this is not very great, especially without deadlines and so forth to motivate them (for more on this, see Dan Ariely's book _Predictably Irrational_). That's not to say the number of very self-motivated people who could acquire the knowledge that school imparts on their own is zero. It isn't. But it's really, really small, which is part of the reason school systems are shaped as they are.
scott_s 16y ago
This reasoning doesn't hold up because all of the information is already available through course descriptions and syllabi on course webpages. You don't even need to attend a school to get at that information.

JimmyL 16y ago

In doing my CompE degree, my favorite part of any of my junior- and senior-year classes were the last two weeks - which was when they'd connect what you'd spent all semester learning with what you'd learned in previous classes. "This transform is actually just a low-pass filter (which you can now derive in two different ways","All that matrix algebra can be used to simplify calculating how two transmission cables interact", "If you add in complex variables, all those calculations you've been doing just got a whole lot easier", etc.; for me, that was always the golden moment when it became clear that someone had put some thought into what I was learning, as opposed to just hitting a course catalog with a shotgun. Only one professor - one of the signals guys - made this point at the start of the semester. I don't remember the exact problem, but he started the first lecture (after giving out the syllabus) working out on the board a relatively complex problem from another course. Took him about ten minutes and three or four blackboards, and he made a few mistakes along the way. Then he erased all his work, solved the same problem in about four lines using a bunch of symbols/variables/calculations that we hadn't yet been exposed to, and said "in three months, you will understand what these four lines mean, and why they're so much more powerful that what you're used to writing out." Come the end of the semester three months later, he was right - the solution he showed us (he wrote it out again) made perfect sense, and applied in a whole bunch of places. Having said all that, I'm still not clear why I had to take analytical mechanics/statics in my second semester.

wallflower 16y ago
> Having said all that, I'm still not clear why I had to take analytical mechanics/statics in my second semester Part of the hazing :) On a serious note, it looks like ABET has relaxed their standards. > For most of its history, ABET’s accreditation criteria specifically outlined the major elements that accredited engineering programs must have, including the program curricula, the faculty type, and the facilities. However, in the mid-1990s, the engineering community began to question the appropriateness of such rigid accreditation requirements.[8] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accreditation_Board_for_Engineering_and_Technology http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accreditation_Board_for_Enginee... New standards (references room-for-interpretation "Engineering Sciences" and not statics, dynamics, nature of materials): http://www.abet.org/Linked%20Documents-UPDATE/Criteria%20and%20PP/E001%2010-11%20EAC%20Criteria%201-27-10.pdf http://www.abet.org/Linked%20Documents-UPDATE/Criteria%20and...