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From: pector@ihuxw.UUCP (Scott W. Pector)
Newsgroups: net.flame
Subject: re: Educational Experiences
Message-ID: <565@ihuxw.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 4-Nov-83 19:42:54 EST
Article-I.D.: ihuxw.565
Posted: Fri Nov  4 19:42:54 1983
Date-Received: Mon, 7-Nov-83 23:14:39 EST
Organization: AT&T Bell Labs, Naperville, Il
Lines: 169

Bob Parnass:

I'm not certain that we should have this in net.flame, but I don't know
offhand where else it should go.  However, given we're here, let's see
how it goes!

I'm going to use the Mark Twain method of remembering events in my life.
Of his autobiography, he said, "I'm going to write one unlike any other
before.  It will be written in the order the events come to mind." (or
something very close to this).

Bad, but entertaining experience:
  While a junior in high school (Niles East H.S. in Skokie, IL), I took
  course in trigonometry.  The teacher was rather rotund individual (I
  believe it was a physical since the diameter of the circle formed by
  his waist was about 1/4 to 1/3 his height) with a very deep booming
  voice who called every boy "Sir" and every girl "Ma'am" (although one
  time he called Marcie "Sir").  If there was an obnoxious individual
  in the class, he would say to this person, "Sir, you are an idiot!"
  The man didn't mince words.  Every day, we were assigned problems
  for the next day.  On the next day, we would take turns putting our
  solutions on the blackboard.  If your solution to a given problem
  was correct, you could sit down and the next student alphabetically
  would do the next problem.  However, if you did it wrong or didn't
  know how, "Sir" (the teacher) would let you have it.  If you were
  on his bad side, he would imply you were stupid; if you were on his
  good side, he would razz you a little and let you sit down.  Of course,
  you were graded on your success/failure ratio, among other things.
  When he gave a test, he would ask other students in the hall before
  class for numbers for the trigonometry problems.  He would also take
  his own tests with you, and announce half way through it, "I'm done!"
  (I remember one when he did this and one of the students, a virtual
  calculator, said, "Well, I was done 10 minutes ago."; by the way, we
  weren't allowed to use calculators).  These seem like OK experiences
  except I remember one time where a friend of mine (who was disliked
  by this teacher for being obnoxious in the school bridge club) was
  given a lower grade (a B instead of an A) for a midterm grade.  The
  problem was that the teacher earlier had announced a certain cutoff
  percentage (i.e., if average 90% or better over all tests, you get an
  A) and now had changed so he could get even with this one student.
  The grades were read off in class, I believe, and when the student
  protested, the teacher put another student on the spot (a student who
  wouldn't dare disagree with him) and asked that individual if the
  announced cutoff was the same as the previously announced one.  Of
  course, the cowed student agreed.  A couple of us (including myself)
  disagreed, but we were ignored.  It's sad that a teacher has to be
  that way, particularly I knew both him and the student in question,
  and the student was not that obnoxious to this teacher to warrant this
  type of action.  Maybe a lecture, but not a grade change.

Bad experience:
  When a sophomore in high school, I took a 3rd year honors French course.
  The teacher was a young woman and she had a class of 15 girls and 2 boys.
  Neither of us boys were really atheletic at that time, in fact we were
  considered bookish by many of the other students (I later became a body-
  builder, but that's another story.).  Well, she ran the class as if it
  were a young girls' slumber party; that is, lots of silly young girlish
  talk and stories and giggling and ... It made me sick.  If I continued
  into the next year of the French sequence, I would have had this indi-
  vidual for a teacher.  I would have died or have gotten an ulcer.  It's
  a shame that she couldn't have made us boys feel more part of things.
  I was an A student in French but I gave up after that year.  (Actually,
  what I learned in French turned out to be useful when I visited Quebec
  Province in Canada 2 years ago.)

Entertaining experience, with bad and good connotations:
  When I was in my 2nd year as an undergraduate, I took a Civil Engineering
  Introductory Mechanics course.  The teacher I had in this course I also
  had in my 3rd and last year as an undergraduate, at Northwestern University
  in Evanston, IL, in another course that was on a related topic.  This
  teacher was from Japan and taught this material there for 20 years
  (according to him) and had been teaching it here for another 10 years.
  His use of the American language (note that I distinguish it from English)
  was interesting.  Every sentence sounded like an order.  The tone was
  comparable to John Belushi's Samurai imitations on Saturday Night Live.
  Anyways, the professor assigned lots of homework problems and gave similar
  problems on the test.  He graded quite fairly, but he did have one
  idiosynchracy.  After he graded the tests, he would hand them back to the
  students by walking up to each one, looking at the graded test, read the
  name of the student out loud, and give his impression of your performance
  by saying one of the following: Very Good!, Good!, OK, BAD!, VERY BAD!
  If you got one of the last two impressions, he added in a dictatorial
  tone,"BAD! VERY BAD! GO TO FRONT OF ROOM TILL NEXT TEST!"  And you would
  sit every day in class in the front row until you could prove you didn't
  need to be there by doing well on the next test.  Further, he would ask
  the front row people questions every few minutes to make sure they were
  listening.  It was very interesting.  He really motivated you to do well,
  or rather, at least well enough to sit further back.  I didn't agree with
  this aspect of his technique, but it was highly amusing to be there.  I
  was lucky I was an A student in his classes.

Bad and Good Experience:
  In my 3rd and last year as an undergraduate at NU, I took a course in
  the Electrical Engineering Department called Linear Integrated Circuits.
  The particular teacher involved always held his courses at 8:00 in the
  morning since time immemorial.  In this course, he emphasized that as
  engineers, we need only be close to the right answer and could get there
  any way we wanted, even by wrong ways.  Such is reality by the way as
  I have found out as a professional.  Anyways, his grading system as such
  had nothing to do with his tests as it turned out.  Instead, your grade
  was a function of the time you came to class each day.  The teacher
  always came 10 minutes before class.  If you came 5 minutes before
  class or earlier, you got an A for the course.  If you came between
  5 minutes early or the start of class, you got an A or a B depending
  on your skill on the tests.  If you came between the start of class or
  5 minutes late, you got a C.  If you came any later, woe to you!  As
  it turned out, I was still a dedicated young man, and still am occasion-
  ally, and got my A.

Bad Experience:
  When I was in high school, we did not get extra points for being in
  Honors courses or Advanced Placement Program courses.  Further, for
  my first two years, the school did not allow you to pass/fail courses
  other than Physical Education classes where it was mandatory.  Of
  course, I got my only Bs during these two years.  During my last two
  years, they had a pass/fail system where after the first six weeks of
  a course, you elect to take it for a grade or to take it pass/fail.
  Well, I finished 3rd in my class because the two guys ahead of me got
  to use this wonderful option to their advantage.  In fact, the class
  ahead of mine had gotten honors points when they were freshmen.  The
  best students in that class, when they were seniors, were pass/failing
  courses that they easily got As in so there grade points wouldn't drop.
  Isn't this disgusting?! However, it taught me a lot about reality.
  There is a hole in every system and you can use it to your best advantage
  to trample everybody else out of your way if you wish.  Survival of
  the fittest, I guess.

Good Experience:
  When I was in my one year of graduate school for an MSEE at NU, I took
  a graduate-level seminar in Artificial Intelligence.  The teacher was
  a visiting professor from Japan who could read and write American, but
  couldn't easily speak it or clearly understand it when spoken.  He was
  a kind hearted man who realized the problem for his American students.
  He went to the local High School and took speech classes for his and our
  benefits.  Further, he discussed his difficulty with us in advance so 
  we knew that he knew and was concerned.  It turned out that he had built his
  own little robot, the size of a small to medium sized dog.  It could
  act as a sentry and it could chase people if they walked slow enough.
  Well, myself and two other students (they weren't in this class with me)
  were building our own robot for the Amazing Micromouse Maze competition
  that year, 1979.  I had a great rapport with this professor and was
  invited to visit him if I ever came to Japan.  Knowing him for a year
  convinced me that he would have thought as much of me whether I made
  robots or not.  It was nice that he was as interested as he was in his
  pupils.  It's rare to find such professors.  (As it turned out, I was
  about the only student that could understand his American clearly).

Semi-bad experience:
  When in graduate school, I had to do a 1-2 quarter project in order to
  get my degree.  I did an interdisciplinary project involving Electrical
  Engineering, Computer Science, and Neuroscience areas.  The lab I worked
  out of was in the Biological Sciences building at NU.  While in that
  building, I learned that 90% of the faculty in that building were
  pornography fiends.  Maybe that's a little harsh, but seeing Adam & Eve
  puzzles (they weren't religious in nature), Playmate calendars, sexually
  explicit posters, and other printed erotica in full view in the various
  labs and offices of these learned individuals tends to make you wonder.
  I don't mean to seem prudish, but I had never seen this stuff out so
  blatantly in an academic environment. (I had when I was at frat parties,
  but, then again, frats aren't academic environments.)  So this is what is
  meant by the Life Sciences (heh-heh)!  Amazing.


WELL ....... that's all I can think of for now.  I hope that this soliloquy
of mine wasn't too boring.  Maybe it will be educational.  It's sad that
our first thoughts are of bad things, then good things, rather than the
other way around.

						Scott Pector