Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!ames!mailrus!uflorida!gatech!udel!princeton!phoenix!dykimber
From: dykimber@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Daniel Yaron Kimberg)
Newsgroups: comp.edu
Subject: Re: Student preparedness
Message-ID: <5216@phoenix.Princeton.EDU>
Date: 8 Jan 89 19:58:37 GMT
References: <52767@pyramid.pyramid.com> <5053@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> <56@rpi.edu> <9252@ut-emx.UUCP> <556@mccc.UUCP> <5191@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> <559@mccc.UUCP>
Reply-To: dykimber@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Daniel Yaron Kimberg)
Organization: Princeton University, NJ
Lines: 25

In article <559@mccc.UUCP> pjh@mccc.UUCP (Pete Holsberg) writes:
>In article <5191@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> dykimber@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Daniel Yaron Kimberg) writes:
>=("Preface.  I am a very famous...[middle deleted]
>=yourself a well written review article.  Thank you.")
>
>Silly.  For one, he doesn't know that he can't write to save his life;
>he writes the same way as the authors he's read!  Second, publishers
>couldn't tolerate that level of honesty.

True, but that was supposed to be a joke.  I realize no one is going to tell
readers his/her book stinks in the introduction.

>The job of the college-level teacher is to help students learn, not to
>make their lives easier or better, or to train them for jobs. 

Right, but a lot of professors confuse these two, and decide that their job
is not to make learning easier or better.  The message chain was on readings,
so I thought I'd note some of the ways in which professors have made readings
easier for me in the past.  Becuase no matter what you're not going to be able
to get a room full of students to zip through 50 pages of extremely dense
material a night.  [dense: material such that 50 pages takes much more than a
night to read]  But if the important parts are only about 10 pages and some
diagrams...

                                                 -Dan