I don't know, can you help you?hi everybody!
can i help me step by step this exercise , thanks very much!
Hi,hi everybody!
can i help me step by step this exercise , thanks very much!
I'm speculating quite a bit here, but my guess is that you would find the people that struggle with these kinds of things tend to be highly field-dependent, which basically means that how they perceive things is primarily within the context of other things and that if you change the context they have trouble grasping that it is still fundamentally the same thing. Engineering and most technical disciplines lend themselves to people that are highly field-independent, meaning that they see things as being composed of smaller things that can, in turn, be viewed independent of the context. People that are highly field-independent have problems keeping things straight in situations in which context is the dominant factor, which often is the case with things like project management. I saw one study that estimated that about 60% of Americans are at least moderately field-dependent while 90% of engineers are at least moderately field-independent and many are highly field-independent. Conversely, a very significant fraction of marketing, sales, and business executives are highly field-dependent.It worries me how a bit of basic algebra and decomposition can boggle peoples minds when they reach the Laplace/Fourier milestone.
At that point some engineers can pass themselves off as managers, too!Hi,
WBahn: Very interesting view you have there.
Maybe you also heard the somewhat funny 'proverb' which i'll try to remember here which is a twist on another quotation...
"Engineers are people that learn more and more about less and less until they know everything about nothing, while Managers are people that learn less and less about more and more until they know absolutely nothing about everything and thus can pass themselves off as Engineers."
I've seen that many, many times, both here and in the classroom. I think there are a few factors at play and that the blame lies in a few different places. In the classroom it is sadly all too possible for people to advance from one course to another without learning the fundamentals. Sometimes that's because the course doesn't emphasize or even teach the fundamentals, but rather just a bunch of memorized formulas and recipes for how to do a handful of very specific things. Other times the fundamentals are covered and perhaps even stressed, but the requirement that students actually demonstrate comprehension of them in order to pass the course is weak. To be sure, that's easier said than done and I've been guilty of it myself -- no instructor (well, damn few) likes failing a student. On top of that, faculty are held hostage to the all-important course survey that students fill out at the end of the course and that, most places, has a huge impact on whether the instructor will be retained or, even more so, whether they will receive tenure. So faculty all too often make decisions based on what will improve their course surveys rather than what will truly serve their students in the long run.I have ran into several people on the web who are attempting to solve complex circuit problems but dont understand simultaneous algebraic equations yet.
As an engineering student, I've had the opposite experience. Instructors are at the mercy of the curriculum, which usually forces a tight lecture schedule, making completion of the required material the overriding priority. There simply is no time for depth. Generally, even with motivated students, our ability to absorb and explore the material is limited by the rate at which new material is presented. In particularly dense courses, neither instructor nor student has any "free time", so to speak. For example, Calculus II -- a class in which I was genuinely interested -- felt like a whirlwind of topics and techniques; there was no possible way we could have explored the significance or beauty of even one of the topics, let alone the subject as a whole.All too true again, and it makes me kind of sad to see this kind of thing. I often found myself wanting to get into some deeper exploration of the subject matter with some students but they almost always complain that they simply do not have the time. I believe that steals from them some of the beauty and joy of theory and even application.
It's always, "Big test coming up on Monday, have to study.", but never, "Big test coming up on Monday, have to learn and understand."
While I agree with much of what you've said, there is plenty of blame to go around and the student has to shoulder their share of it. When I teach I always have Help Sessions weekly and my policy is simple -- I will stay until the last student is ready to leave. On occasion this has meant leaving at 4am. I even had this policy when I was running mentoring sessions for Physics II as an undergrad. At least then I was getting paid for the scheduled two hours whereas my Help Sessions now are completely on my own time and dime. The result is completely predictable each semester -- tons of students come to the first one but as soon as they discover that I won't just show them how to work the homework problems (though I often work similar problems as examples) and that want them to put forth the effort and that I will work with them, even sitting right next to them guiding them from step to step, they don't come back. Each semester there will usually be two or three students that come every week and work on their stuff asking questions as needed and those students often stay well past the official end time. But that's two or three students out of a total enrollment in my courses of typically 120 or more. So even when in instructor is willing to make the time available, only a tiny fraction of students are willing to take advantage of it.As an engineering student, I've had the opposite experience. Instructors are at the mercy of the curriculum, which usually forces a tight lecture schedule, making completion of the required material the overriding priority. There simply is no time for depth. Generally, even with motivated students, our ability to absorb and explore the material is limited by the rate at which new material is presented. In particularly dense courses, neither instructor nor student has any "free time", so to speak. For example, Calculus II -- a class in which I was genuinely interested -- felt like a whirlwind of topics and techniques; there was no possible way we could have explored the significance or beauty of even one of the topics, let alone the subject as a whole.
It's frustrating, and I blame the academic system. It's a peculiar notion that all undergrad degrees should take roughly the same amount of time to complete. To this end, departments devise roadway-like curricula with the courses serving as sign posts, and the destination being a graduate (and not necessarily an engineer). Professors are hamstrung by this approach because their primary responsibility is not to educate, but to get the students to the next sign post. Students, in turn, are trained to view the process as a means to the destination. Worse still, the universal criterion by which our journey is judged is a letter grade at each sign post, which further encourages study techniques that tend to short-circuit the learning process.
For better or worse, students adapt to the conditions of their situation. If our algebra skills suck entering college, it is because our algebra education sucked in high school. If, upon hiring us after university, you find that we don't have the foggiest idea of what we're doing, blame the system. Some time ago I was having a conversation with a friend who is a working engineer and ABD in a PhD EE program. I asked him at what point in his academic career did he start getting "real" courses, where the coursework involved real depth and learning. He sighed and said that there was no such thing, that as an engineering student the burden is squarely on me to go deeper. My experience certainly agrees with this assessment. And that's fine; good engineers work hard to become good engineers. But the realization, from a student's perspective, puts the entire academic rigmarole in quite a different light.
(I love hearing about dedicated teachers; kudos for that!)While I agree with much of what you've said, there is plenty of blame to go around and the student has to shoulder their share of it. When I teach I always have Help Sessions weekly and my policy is simple -- I will stay until the last student is ready to leave. On occasion this has meant leaving at 4am. I even had this policy when I was running mentoring sessions for Physics II as an undergrad. At least then I was getting paid for the scheduled two hours whereas my Help Sessions now are completely on my own time and dime. The result is completely predictable each semester -- tons of students come to the first one but as soon as they discover that I won't just show them how to work the homework problems (though I often work similar problems as examples) and that want them to put forth the effort and that I will work with them, even sitting right next to them guiding them from step to step, they don't come back. Each semester there will usually be two or three students that come every week and work on their stuff asking questions as needed and those students often stay well past the official end time. But that's two or three students out of a total enrollment in my courses of typically 120 or more. So even when in instructor is willing to make the time available, only a tiny fraction of students are willing to take advantage of it.
You are very fortunate to have had such an excellent education! Was it luck, or an institutional thing -- you found a rare academic culture that truly fosters education -- or perhaps it was a generational thing? While I've had good teachers (bless them each and every one!), most of my educational experience seems to be the opposite of yours. I would like to think that my friend and I are the exception, that great education is the norm, but it is difficult to believe. All I have to do is think about how we teach math (at least in the U.S.) and I become depressed: from primary school through undergrad, it's all techniques and zero mathematics.I also disagree with your friend, at least based on personal experience. I have had LOTS of courses that involved depth and real learning both at the graduate and undergraduate level. Deep enough and with enough learning that I was able to design simple electronic systems on spec for a few customers and was able to design and build two research grade test systems for NIST as an undergraduate while a co-op student and also designed and built a support system for them as an independent contractor while a graduate student. But I do believe that I was lucky in both high school and college in that, both times, I went to quality schools that had quality faculty that held students to reasonably high expectations. In all of my high school and undergraduate education I think I could only say that I had two or three instructors that I found it very difficult to learn from. But I worked with students (from other schools when I was their peers and more generally later on) and so I recognize that this may be the exception rather than the rule. I really saw it at a for-profit university that I taught at for one semester -- their students were horribly unprepared for the course I was supposed to be teaching them and so I set about bring them up to speed. The graduate course in particular was responding well and getting quite involved when someone from the undergraduate course complained that I was expecting too much from them and so I was ordered to abandon my efforts and stick to the junk curriculum. I concluded that they didn't care about the students actually learning anything, they merely wanted to string them along for as long as possible paying nearly twice the tuition as at a real university. I couldn't get out of there quick enough.
The dynamics are certainly complex, there's no doubt about that and no simplistic answer can truly sum it up. What I've noticed time and again is that the students that come every week tend to be the among the top tier students. They almost certainly would have done just fine had they not come, but they wanted to learn as much as they could. The rest were certainly a mixed bag but the ones that really, really should have been coming every single week tended to only come late in the semester (other than the initial rush in the first week or two) just before a big project was due and after they had already pretty much sealed their fate.The dynamics of the situation make it self-selecting that only a few will attend: The top-tier students won't need the extra help; they do it on their own. Those in the middle-tier could be A students in your class if they took advantage of these extra work sessions, but they may need to allocate their time to another class (in which they're bottom-tier). That leaves only the students who are genuinely lost, which should be precious few.
I think it was a combination of all three. I graduated from high school in 1983 and got to observe some very interesting dynamics in my school district first hand (and also in retrospect). At the time that I was in elementary school there was a fad that had started a decade or so earlier called "open concept" which was a mish-mash menagerie of muddle-brained policies. The basic idea, in practice, seemed to center around letting students explore on their own and learn at their own pace and that rigid settings only inhibited the learning process. So schools were built without walls between classroom (just things like bookshelves or other furniture to divide class areas) and students were free to come and go as they wished between their class area and the library and the playground. Not surprisingly, a LOT of kinds spent all their time on the playground. But this was considered just fine since obviously that was how these kids were most productively exploring their world. The result was that when I was in kindergarten, which was nothing but playtime, and my sister was in fifth grade she could barely read and the expectation for me (my dad and I ran across the documents a couple decades later in stuff my mom had kept) was that I be able to recite the entire alphabet by the end of second grade! My parents saw what that was doing to my sister so we moved specifically to get us out of that district in the middle of my kindergarten year. The school I ended up in was almost no playtime and these kids were reading and writing so I had to play catch-up big time. In the middle of my first grade year they built a new elementary school a couple blocks from my house and I was supposed to go their the following year, but it was open-concept and my dad flat out told the school board that that wasn't going to happen and that we would move again if we had to. The school board gave us a waiver (school boundaries were quite rigid back then) so I stayed at my traditional (closed-concept) school. When I went to junior high there were about six or eight elementary schools feeding my junior high and mine was the only one that was closed concept. My high school was physically open-concept but by then the fad was fading and so the way in which classes were taught was closed-concept. We had about five junior highs feeding us but the only path that a student could go from K-12 and be closed concept the entire way was from my elementary school. When I graduated something like 2/3 of the honor students were from my elementary school. The notable exception was our valedictorian who went to my junior high but an open-concept elementary. I was talking to her dad one night and we got to discussing that and I asked how she (and her younger brother) was able to get such a good education at that school and he said that every night when they came home he and his wife took it upon themselves to teach them the things they should have learned in school that day.You are very fortunate to have had such an excellent education! Was it luck, or an institutional thing -- you found a rare academic culture that truly fosters education -- or perhaps it was a generational thing?
There's certainly a correlation, but there is a lot of cultural influence as well. Different cultures view the value of education very differently (and this changes over time). Historically, for many of the immigrant surges into the U.S., the people coming here were predominantly very poor and very poorly educated. But they saw education as the key to their children succeeding in this country, even when they felt that it was "too late" for they themselves. In many of the countries they came from it was all but impossible for a poor person to get an education and, in many places, even if they did the class system was so strong that it was unlikely to make much of a difference. But, sadly, there are other cultures that have come to view education as a waste of time and effort -- frankly it's an attitude that I can't get my head around, even having seen it numerous times firsthand plus countless documentaries and the like chronicling it. I can't help but conclude that a number of factors may have conspired to create that same sense of futility in those cultures, primarily that getting a good education wouldn't actually make any difference and that their children are stuck in the same life that the parents are in.Thanks for the detailed reply. It's striking (and more than a bit worrying) how seemingly arbitrary factors, such as where and when one lives, can have such profound effects on education. It can be life-changing! But it reinforces how incredibly important it is for parents to take an active role in their kids' schooling, something they are likely to do only if they themselves received a good education.
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