🚀 go-pugleaf

thomas@mvac23.UUCP (Thomas Lapp) writes:
>> I will also add that at a lot of colleges there's a lot of, well,
>> street smarts in letting someone "slip by".
>I'm sorry, but I disagree.  This has been happening in high schools (where
>in the US students are required to attend until age 16) [...]
>People just keep
>letting them slip by and let someone else worry about the problem.

>To me, college was a place where you
>did your work or got out.  The professors took the attitude that they
>wanted to teach and wanted you to learn, but they weren't going to do any
>handholding along the way if you didn't put forth the effort.

This is probably true if the college is not highly political.  At many
schools all it takes is someone who knows the head of such-and-such a
department, or who knows someone who donates (say) buildings to the
school, and suddenly the professor who's doing his job is out of the
same, while the "just let it slip" professor is there forever.

This isn't fantasy, it's what I saw for three years and it made me
sick.  Even worse is that many of the so-so professors teach worthless
material or teach material poorly, so even those students who *would*
have learned something suffer.

The kind of environment I speak of is exactly the kind of environment
which encourages students to dodge requirements.  There were
remarkably few in my class who knew enough theoretical or practical
computing to be an asset to anyone.  Too bad, since the computing
environment was one of the best around.

Sigh.

jim frost
saber software
ji...@saber.com