Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!ames!elroy!orion.cf.uci.edu!ucsd!rutgers!njin!princeton!phoenix!dykimber
From: dykimber@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Daniel Yaron Kimberg)
Newsgroups: comp.edu
Subject: Re: engineering students and verbal skills
Message-ID: <5803@phoenix.Princeton.EDU>
Date: 25 Jan 89 08:31:38 GMT
References: <19244@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <5618@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> <19292@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <5676@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> <19443@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>
Reply-To: dykimber@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Daniel Yaron Kimberg)
Organization: Princeton University, NJ
Lines: 41

In article <19443@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> matloff@iris.ucdavis.edu (Norm Matloff) writes:
>What controls?  In my grad course last quarter, only 1 out of 15 reports
>was written clearly.  [In fact, I heaped SO much praise on that one student 

Oh, okay.  I just got the impression from your message that you meant
the frequency with which you noticed poor writing ("observe constantly,"
I think, was the phrase I remembered), not the proportion...

[some of my stuff about bias deleted]
>Hey, wait a minute, don't make this an Us-vs.-Them thing.  I'm not one
>of those guys that says, "In my day, we trudged through 5 feet of snow
>to get to school, and we knew how to WRITE!"  [I'm from LA, so I certainly
>couldn't talk about the snow stuff. :-) ]  

Okay, sorry, didn't mean to do that.

>In fact, if you go back to my original postings, you'll see that I really
>was implicitly putting the blame on the FACULTY, for not adequately warning 
>the students about the need for good verbal skills.

I'm more or less up in the air about this, but I think that the real
problem isn't with students or faculty, it's with something else, which
I don't really want to call "society", but for which I can't think of a better
term.  I'd suspect that many if not all students, including myself, are
students for reasons other than education, although education may be one of
the reasons, even the top reason, for some.  And for similar reasons, people
who have no interest in or aptitude for teaching are ending up teaching
classes.  [i'm mostly talking about lower level college courses on down to
high school.  above that, i don't think teaching ability is as important as
understanding, since by that time a student should need professors less as
instructors and more as expert resources - by that point, most students
should at least have the ability to learn on their own, given decent feedback]
I think most of the blame for this rests on the shoulders of the
administrators and beaurocrats and government furniture, who are making
decisions about education without any knowledge [at least that they are
using] about education.  I'd suspect this is true at every level, from the
decisions made by the federal government, down to the decisions made by
elementary school principals, school board officials, and deans of
faculty.

                                                    -Dan