procore

[kenberg]

It's been a while since I looked at what Maryland is doing. For sample problems they refer you to https://www.illustrativemathematics.org/illustrations/531

 

I looked at a couple of the problems and they seem pretty decent. I might do this or that differently but that's always the case when a person looks at what someone else has done.

 

Maybe I will get a chance to talk to someone on the spot.Our neighbor teaches second grade, but my memory of second grade is very vague so I would not have much to compare it to.

[mike777]

First off a big , huge thank you to Richard for spelling out what he is looking for in new hires.

 

I note he said he cant find qualified people that meet his standards.

 

I COULD understand many of his points after his point one.

 

At the very least Richard should find many, I repeat many that meet his nontech needs.

 

As someone who never heard of his main tech point in point one...good luck.

 

 

Otoh if marketing or finance matter as some point......

 

:)

[mike777]

"I tend to be rather protective of keeping high expectations of all students, probably because of where I work: 90% of our students receive Free or Reduced Lunch, and most of them were on track to fail out of HS. Our goal is to get them to-and-through a 4-year college"

 

 

ok but you present zero evidence why this is your goal and why this is best?

 

It may be best but at this point you seem to assume and be biased in so many ways.

 

Just to present a counter argument, you make students want to achieve a worthless goal instead of other worth while goals.

 

 

To be honest I see this often where education majors confuse education with scholarship

 

Where education trumps earning.

[mike777]

"What I see in all these SO newbies is people trying to do programming by rote, and that's not going to work."

 

why not?

why cannot programming by rote work more than zero percent of the time?

 

If more than zero ..then it works...it works.

[Zelandakh]

Just to present a counter argument, you make students want to achieve a worthless goal instead of other worth while goals.

...

Where education trumps earning.

You seriously believe that finishing a 4 year college course is meaningless? To take your last point, what are the current US statistics for average earnings of college graduates against school leavers?

 

 

why not?

why cannot programming by rote work more than zero percent of the time?

 

If more than zero ..then it works...it works.

Because an employer requires their developers to write new things, not merely take existing modules and hash them together without understanding. To take a bridge anaology, would you be happy with a partner that simply played according to rules (4th highest from longest and strongest, second hand low, thirs hand high, lead through strength and up to weakness, etc) without any thought whatsoever? You can certainly achieve a scoring finish on club nights with this approach so by your standard it works, right?

[kenberg]

You seriously believe that finishing a 4 year college course is meaningless? To take your last point, what are the current US statistics for average earnings of college graduates against school leavers?

 

College is good for many, but I really would like to see this statistical argument put up for early retirement. NBA players make a lot of money. It does not follow that I, at five foot ten, would have made a lot of money in a basketball career. Perhaps there is a five foot ten counter-example somewhere, but there is a reason why he is called a counter-example.

 

We need good plumbers, good car mechanics, good welders, good construction workers and so on. Operating heavy machinery is not an easy task. We need people who are good at this and we need to pay them well. In today's world most everyone needs training of some sort beyond high school but I favor a very open approach to what that training should be.

 

I went to college and got a degree in mathematics. This made no sense at all to me father. I did this not because I thought it was the route to riches. My thinking was: I like it, I seem to have some ability for it, apparently I can earn a living at it. I did not want to earn a living as a plumber, and I see no reason why a plumber should want to earn a living as a mathematician.

 

I very much appreciate helping kids discover their potential, but the final choice is theirs to make. If it is not the choice we would have made, this does not mean that we have failed them.

[Winstonm]

College is good for many, but I really would like to see this statistical argument put up for early retirement. NBA players make a lot of money. It does not follow that I, at five foot ten, would have made a lot of money in a basketball career. Perhaps there is a five foot ten counter-example somewhere, but there is a reason why he is called a counter-example.

 

We need good plumbers, good car mechanics, good welders, good construction workers and so on. Operating heavy machinery is not an easy task. We need people who are good at this and we need to pay them well. In today's world most everyone needs training of some sort beyond high school but I favor a very open approach to what that training should be.

 

I went to college and got a degree in mathematics. This made no sense at all to me father. I did this not because I thought it was the route to riches. My thinking was: I like it, I seem to have some ability for it, apparently I can earn a living at it. I did not want to earn a living as a plumber, and I see no reason why a plumber should want to earn a living as a mathematician.

 

I very much appreciate helping kids discover their potential, but the final choice is theirs to make. If it is not the choice we would have made, this does not mean that we have failed them.

 

Thomas Picketty showed in his book that a viable middle class is not a natural byproduct of capitalism but the result of planning and action to create such a class of citizens.

 

I agree completely with this post - but I go further and say none of this will happen without a radical change in thinking, away from the "free markets solve all problems" ideology back to the unionized, collective-bargaining liberalism that created the immense and highly successful U.S. middle class to begin with. We do not need to serve the needs of the few, but of the many.

[barmar]

"What I see in all these SO newbies is people trying to do programming by rote, and that's not going to work."

 

why not?

why cannot programming by rote work more than zero percent of the time?

 

If more than zero ..then it works...it works.

I'm not sure what you mean by "more than zero percent of the time". I'm talking about learning how to program in general. It's like the difference between "paint by numbers" and being an actual painter. Or putting together Ikea furniture versus being a real carpenter.

 

The fact that they get totally flummoxed as soon as their needs don't exactly match what they copied is the evidence.

[mycroft]

The only thing I think I can say is that Python, SQL - seriously useful, probably necessary for any real IT job (or Python's equivalents - .NET, powershell on the windows side, Perl et al on the non-Redmondware side; full-time programming requires knowledge of a compiled language, I guess, rather than a scripting one). I'd add whatever the basic OS is for administration if you're going into admin (knowing your way around ([bd]a){0,1}sh isn't required to run unix any more, but it sure makes your life easier; even now, knowing your away around the Windows CMD line is useful knowledge even to the most die-hard "click the right buttons" AD/Exchange Admins)

 

But awk? It's not today's anything, except possibly text manipulation on clay tablets using chisels and axes. Yes, it is powerful, but not sure what you need it for that a 20-line, *readable* python/ruby construction won't get you (or a quick sed/vi regex. But I now have two problems).

 

At least twenty years ago I heard, and it's still true: "awk was named after its inventors, Aho, Weinberger, and Kernighan, and is not short for awkward. But it is."

 

Okay, so I'm a little biased...

[mike777]

I'm not sure what you mean by "more than zero percent of the time". I'm talking about learning how to program in general. It's like the difference between "paint by numbers" and being an actual painter. Or putting together Ikea furniture versus being a real carpenter.

 

The fact that they get totally flummoxed as soon as their needs don't exactly match what they copied is the evidence.

 

 

you raise so many important points I cannot respond to them all.

 

Yes for the most part programming by rote works. It works to some degree and that is ok.

 

Yes oomputers will program other computers to some degree and they work and that is ok.

 

You mention Ikea and putting together Ikea...FOR THE record most of us cannot even do that.

----

 

Now if we want to discuss to innovation, true creativity ...true painters those who have the gift...ok

 

Barmar if you want to only discuss those of you who are creative, disruptive, genius ...ok that is a discussion.

 

------------

 

For the record I am one of those that never got the Ikea model...why the hell do I want to pay money and put together, waste my time putting together Ikea....rats.

 

----

 

Now have bbo put together a class on bridge by whoever, or computers by barmar, or math by kenberg, or anything by helene, add me to me class by Richard despite our debates or Winston on the humanities ....where do I send the check?

 

These are brilliant people with at times a point of view and that is ok. They make bbo a great place

[akwoo]

We need good plumbers, good car mechanics, good welders, good construction workers and so on. Operating heavy machinery is not an easy task. We need people who are good at this and we need to pay them well. In today's world most everyone needs training of some sort beyond high school but I favor a very open approach to what that training should be.

 

We still need these, but the problem is that we need a lot fewer of them than we need to. And the standard of being 'good' has gone up a lot. We need, as a guess, a third of the car mechanics we needed 25 years ago. (Cars are more reliable, and technology has made fixing cars less labor intensive.) I'm pretty sure a lot of good car mechanics these days are out of work. (I might also note that a car mechanic definitely needs to know some algebra!)

 

You might have noticed the world has changed since you were growing up, Ken. Back then, Fred the future plumber could become a plumber. These days, you flip a coin, and if it lands tails, Fred is the future unemployed plumber. If your skills do not substantially extend beyond what a robot can be programmed to do, you will be replaced by a robot. I'm exaggerating one bit; it's more like 90% chance you will be replaced by a robot, and 10% you will be managing the robot. But I don't think a 90% chance of unemployment is good.

 

I met a retired farmer a few weeks ago (at a bridge game at a club I don't usually play at (because of distance)). He told me his son tried taking over the farm for a while, but he just wasn't smart enough to be able to do the minor fixes on the machinery, program the combine to do what he wanted, not to mention the basic financials needed to keep a farm from going bankrupt. His son now barely scrapes by on odd manual labor jobs around town and will probably, if he ever gets a permanent enough job to have long term disability coverage, be one of those people who go on disability in his late 50s because they can't find work and have some plausible excuse. Luckily his grandson (now in his late 20s) was capable enough to take over the farm.

 

Think about it. We are in a world where someone who has intelligence within though perhaps at the low end of the normal range isn't smart enough to be a farmer.

 

There's a second problem here. Even if we find someone a place in our economy, how do we find them a place in our political life? Is this person ever going to be useful as a juror? Take part in and contribute to the ongoing town debate taking place at the barbershop or the diner on local issues? Making a contribution does require knowing something about how the world works and how to reason with this knowledge. Or do we give up on participatory democracy and accept that democracy should just mean a restricted choice among the graduates of the ENA(*), deemed the only people with the knowledge and ability to actually run things?

 

(*) That's the Ecole Nationale d'Administration, the French university of public administration from which most French politicians and practically all of the French civil service has graduated.

[mike777]

We still need these, but the problem is that we need a lot fewer of them than we need to. And the standard of being 'good' has gone up a lot. We need, as a guess, a third of the car mechanics we needed 25 years ago. (Cars are more reliable, and technology has made fixing cars less labor intensive.) I'm pretty sure a lot of good car mechanics these days are out of work. (I might also note that a car mechanic definitely needs to know algebra!)

 

I met a retired farmer a few weeks ago (at a bridge game at a club a little farther than I would usually go to). He told me his son tried taking over the farm for a while, but he just wasn't smart enough to be able to do the minor fixes on the machinery, program the combine to do what he wanted, not to mention the basic financials needed to keep a farm from going bankrupt. His son basically just works odd manual labor jobs around town and will probably, if he ever gets a job where he gets the right insurance coverage, be one of those people who go on disability in his late 50s because they can't find work and have some plausible excuse. Luckily his grandson (now in his late 20s) was capable enough to take over the farm.

 

Think about it. We are in a world where someone who has intelligence within though perhaps at the low end of the normal range isn't smart enough to be a farmer.

 

There's a second problem here. Even if we find someone a place in our economy, how do we find them a place in our political life? Is this person ever going to be useful as a juror? Take part in and contribute to the ongoing town debate taking place at the barbershop or the diner on local issues? Or do we give up on participatory democracy and accept that democracy should just mean a restricted choice among the graduates of the ENA(*), deemed the only people with the knowledge and ability to actually run things?

 

(*) That's the Ecole Nationale d'Administration, the French university of public administration from which most French politicians and practically all of the French civil service has graduated.

 

What is the problem?

 

What you discuss is an issue for thousands and thousands of years

 

 

the problem is you seem to not know that

---

 

 

 

What is worse the answer is always the same, yet you don't know it.

 

 

competition....and failure

 

 

competition and people who wish to restrict and direct it. failure and those who deny it

(*) That's the Ecole Nationale d'Administration, the French university of public administration from which most French politicians and practically all of the French civil service has graduated

[kenberg]

We still need these, but the problem is that we need a lot fewer of them than we need to. And the standard of being 'good' has gone up a lot. We need, as a guess, a third of the car mechanics we needed 25 years ago. (Cars are more reliable, and technology has made fixing cars less labor intensive.) I'm pretty sure a lot of good car mechanics these days are out of work. (I might also note that a car mechanic definitely needs to know some algebra!)

 

You might have noticed the world has changed since you were growing up, Ken. Back then, Fred the future plumber could become a plumber. These days, you flip a coin, and if it lands tails, Fred is the future unemployed plumber. If your skills do not substantially extend beyond what a robot can be programmed to do, you will be replaced by a robot. I'm exaggerating one bit; it's more like 90% chance you will be replaced by a robot, and 10% you will be managing the robot. But I don't think a 90% chance of unemployment is good.

 

I met a retired farmer a few weeks ago (at a bridge game at a club I don't usually play at (because of distance)). He told me his son tried taking over the farm for a while, but he just wasn't smart enough to be able to do the minor fixes on the machinery, program the combine to do what he wanted, not to mention the basic financials needed to keep a farm from going bankrupt. His son now barely scrapes by on odd manual labor jobs around town and will probably, if he ever gets a permanent enough job to have long term disability coverage, be one of those people who go on disability in his late 50s because they can't find work and have some plausible excuse. Luckily his grandson (now in his late 20s) was capable enough to take over the farm.

 

Think about it. We are in a world where someone who has intelligence within though perhaps at the low end of the normal range isn't smart enough to be a farmer.

 

There's a second problem here. Even if we find someone a place in our economy, how do we find them a place in our political life? Is this person ever going to be useful as a juror? Take part in and contribute to the ongoing town debate taking place at the barbershop or the diner on local issues? Making a contribution does require knowing something about how the world works and how to reason with this knowledge. Or do we give up on participatory democracy and accept that democracy should just mean a restricted choice among the graduates of the ENA(*), deemed the only people with the knowledge and ability to actually run things?

 

(*) That's the Ecole Nationale d'Administration, the French university of public administration from which most French politicians and practically all of the French civil service has graduated.

 

I pretty much agree that the problem is as you state it, and more. Let's take the guy who is not smart enough to be a farmer. Is he smart enough to go to college and get a degree? Maybe. There are a lot of degree mills around. But will a degree actually make him useful?

 

"A mind that's weak and a back that's strong" no longer is enough, although there are jobs where a strong back can help. But, as you say, not enough such jobs. All my life, not just growing up, I have known people who really are not into academics. For that matter, I was only selectively into academics. First priority: A person has to grow up expecting that he can, must and should support himself. Maybe not get rich, but support himself. To not do that is to remain in a state of adolescence. How do we make such an expectation reasonable for most everyone? Honestly I don't know. But I think "send everyone to college" is not the right answer. If you take a kid that lacks the intelligence to succeed in farming and send him to college for four (or maybe six these days) years, and if he stunbles through with a degree, then you have an adult that lacks the intelligence to be a farmer but has a B.A. in something. When people do these statistics showing how much college grads earn, they should also look at how much the guy earns who took six years to stumble through to a B.A. in something with a 2.01 GPA and several courses repeated. My guess is that those statistics will be less impressive. And of course many stumble on for six years and drop out without the degree and with a load of debt.

 

I really do not know the answer, but I think broadening our view of what it means to be a success would be a good start.

[awm]

As for why kids from poor backgrounds (especially) should be encouraged to attend college:

 

1. More and more jobs effectively require a college degree. For example, jobs like secretary or police officer which used to be available to people with just a high school diploma now virtually require a college degree to obtain, simply because the pool of applicants is large and many of them do have college degrees (and are viewed as more qualified).

2. Connections often help in starting a successful career; many people got their job by being referred by a friend or family member. For people coming from poor, insulated communities where they may not even know anyone really "successful" it's difficult to get these referrals. College is both a way to meet people and make connections, and a required entry way to careers that are a bit more "meritocratic" (i.e. engineering fields).

3. Even among the entrepreneurs Mike so lionizes, a great majority of them got their innovative ideas while in college, where they were exposed to new ideas, people from diverse backgrounds, etc. Some of them dropped out of college to start a company, but most did attend college.

4. Even if you're starting your own business, you need seed capital from somewhere. If your family can scarcely afford rent, it's not coming from your parents. Banks and VCs will look more favorably on a proposal from someone with a college degree.

5. The statistics on salaries and unemployment for college grads versus non-grads are very stark. It's true that correlation is not causation -- maybe the college grads are smarter or harder working or it's just discrimination in hiring. It could well be that college gives stamp of approval more than any useful skill, but in this case the process of getting kids prepared to obtain the degree may well involve helping them to become smarter and/or harder working and/or overcome the severe discrimination that many of them face (coming from poor/minority backgrounds like Elianna's students).

 

I agree that college may not be for everyone, but it's for a lot more people than it used to be. And there's no reason that college should be an expected destination for almost all the "rich kids" and almost none of the "poor kids" when the latter need it so desperately to escape their family's economic struggles.

[barmar]

I heard a story on the radio a week or two ago about racial biases in hiring -- African Americans college graduates have less than a 50% chance of getting a decent job; even in the current poor job market, whites with similar education have significantly better prospects. So some black teenagers question whether they should bother with a college education, and all the debt they'll run up as a result.

 

My reaction to that is: Yes, your prospects of getting a good job with a college degree may not be great, but if you DON'T have a diploma they'll be practically nil. So unless you're just totally giving up on the possibility of improving your lot in life, you have to take a shot. You can't win if you don't play.

[kenberg]

I heard a story on the radio a week or two ago about racial biases in hiring -- African Americans college graduates have less than a 50% chance of getting a decent job; even in the current poor job market, whites with similar education have significantly better prospects. So some black teenagers question whether they should bother with a college education, and all the debt they'll run up as a result.

 

 

I don't seem to be getting any traction with this so I will soon surrender, but:

 

With all of the data gathering that is now being done, surely we could get statistics along the following lines:

 

Pick a University. I went to the University of Minnesota,that would be good. Pick a major. We could do Math, but let's say Economics. Now pick a grade point range. Let's say 2.8 to 3.2 (for the non-Americans, I note that all Bs gives you a 3.0, all Cs gives you a 2.0, etc). Now compare, within this fairly well-defined population, whether African_Americans are having a tougher time in the job market.. Maybe they are, maybe they are not. Having this more precise data could be useful and indeed could be helpful in overcoming the stated discouragement. I think it is likely that the racial difference in job opportunities would be much less pronounced within this narrow population. Then do this for other schools, other majors, othe GPAs. A young person, of any race, any gender, any social class, could look at data of this sort and say "It appears that goning to some colleges with some majors and just stumbling through may well not be worth the time and money, but being more selective might give me a real leg up". I suspect this would be an accurate conclusion, but I will await the analysis from actual data. . Broad based statistical arguments have ecan easily do more harm than good. : Someone tells a kid "Statistics show that you should go to college" Then someone else tells him "Statistics show it won't do you much good if you are African-American". What is he to think? Who should he trust? Better statistics could paint a far more realistic picture.

 

To put it briefly: The entire world understands that employment prospects for a college graduate vary greatly with the major. Why should anyone pay the slightest heed to statistical arguments that ignore this fact?

[barmar]

To put it briefly: The entire world understands that employment prospects for a college graduate vary greatly with the major. Why should anyone pay the slightest heed to statistical arguments that ignore this fact?

The problem is that there are many factors that affect your employment prospects. Your major, the college you attended (because of its reputation, networking opportunities, internship programs, etc.), race, family and acquaintences. There's no way to ancapsulate these in any simple statistics.

 

Statisticians don't ignore other factors with the intent to obfuscate; if you incorporate all the facts into the statistics, you get something too complicated to be useful. So instead, they have methods for controlling for other differences, and the statistics that result should be interpreted as "with all other things equal". Unfortunately, in the real world other things are practically never equal. So you have to make judgement calls about which statistics you find most relevant to your situation.

[kenberg]

Bar,

 

Fair enough, but given the limitations it is important to be cautious. You said "I heard a story on the radio a week or two ago about racial biases in hiring," But surely we should at least consider other factors than racial bias. It's no secret that African-Americans are under-represented in STEM fields. From pretty direct experience I can say that many employers, those with any sense at all, would be be pleased to be successful in minority hiring.

 

No, of course we are not a post-racial society, even an old white guy like me realizes that. And I don't want to get into an area where actually I am pretty ignorant of the facts. I am more interested in the later statement "So some black teenagers question whether they should bother with a college education". Here is where I think clarification could help a lot. Actually I am stunned by the statistic that fewer than 50% of African-Americans with a college degree can find a decent job. I can see where a guy might be a little pissed. But I think a possible lesson is that in advising a young person about college, regardless of racial or other demographics, we might want to depart from the blanket assertion that going to college is the key and, instead, go deeper into what works and what doesn't. And, very important, what works for James does not necessarily work for Pete.

 

We all want to help the young find a path that works. No doubt college is often part of this path. I think though that I might have more faith than others on this thread that there are workable alternatives to college. Or let me put that differently. There should be workable alternatives and it is in society's best interest to nurture this. I am at Starbucks. Just why does the barrista ( a word I did not know five years ago) need a B.A.? And yes, she might like to move up. So? Some business courses could be useful, reading Plato maybe less so . The reason I am doing this from Starbucks is that while doing yardwork I sliced the cable for my phone, internet, etc. A guy/gal will come out and fix this. I will not ask him/her to show me his/her college degree.

 

When I was 20 I had a summer job (that extended part time into the fall) that I really liked. Very physical and it paid fairly well I considered quitting school. I think I would have been successful on that route but of course not if I stayed at the entry level. I would have had to learn something about business. But really, I am a mathematician. I actually like the stuff. So I stayed in school. But there are many ways to skin a cat.

[nige1]

Currently, an employer can judge a degree by the university-reputation, intake-quality (admission standards), lecturer-quality, research output, and alumni achievements. Visiting students and external examiners also help to judge standards.

 

Something like Procore would also help to assess degree quality: at all universities, for each kind of degree, at each level, a universal core course with identical content and the same exam, and externally marked. Even if some specialists avoided the course, this would paint a broad picture of relative degree quality.

 

Another idea from the 1950s: 2-4-6 Degrees:

• 2 yr Bachelor. Similar to current degrees but shorter and more general. Students could make compatible and useful friends. Most employers don't really care what is the degree-subject. For them, a degree is mainly a test of intelligence, character, and concentration.
• 2 yr Master: A sort of career apprenticeship e.g. a would-be medical practitioner might study diagnosis/triage/first-aid/prescription (Most GPs refer patients to specialists for even minor ailments) and psychology (most illnesses are psychosomatic/psychogenic).
• 2+yr Doctor: for research and advanced specialist training.

[akwoo]

I pretty much agree that the problem is as you state it, and more. Let's take the guy who is not smart enough to be a farmer. Is he smart enough to go to college and get a degree? Maybe. There are a lot of degree mills around. But will a degree actually make him useful?

 

Sorry I'm replying so late to this.

 

First, I think intelligence is something that can be improved with training.

 

Second, I really think there is no solution (unless you count deciding as a society to limit the technology we will use) that will allow useful employment in large numbers of people not smart enough to be a farmer. If a robot can be programmed to do a job, the robot will be cheaper than any human.

 

So I think the only possibility is to keep this person in school long enough to get them smart enough to be a farmer. If it takes fifteen years of college, it takes fifteen years. Or we can decide it's not worth it to society to keep trying to educate this person, and that it's better (or at least cheaper) to let them be perpetually dependent. I hope such a decision would be made in recognition of the effects of having a large group of people who are widely regarded, by themselves and everyone else, as people on whom society has given up. (I would hope that, these days, we wouldn't consider just letting this person freeze or starve to death.)

 

What needs to stop is this business of awarding worthless degrees. All it does is keep people from having an education later on the grounds that, on paper, they already had one.

[kenberg]

Sorry I'm replying so late to this.

 

First, I think intelligence is something that can be improved with training.

 

Second, I really think there is no solution (unless you count deciding as a society to limit the technology we will use) that will allow useful employment in large numbers of people not smart enough to be a farmer. If a robot can be programmed to do a job, the robot will be cheaper than any human.

 

So I think the only possibility is to keep this person in school long enough to get them smart enough to be a farmer. If it takes fifteen years of college, it takes fifteen years. Or we can decide it's not worth it to society to keep trying to educate this person, and that it's better (or at least cheaper) to let them be perpetually dependent. I hope such a decision would be made in recognition of the effects of having a large group of people who are widely regarded, by themselves and everyone else, as people on whom society has given up. (I would hope that, these days, we wouldn't consider just letting this person freeze or starve to death.)

 

What needs to stop is this business of awarding worthless degrees. All it does is keep people from having an education later on the grounds that, on paper, they already had one.

 

To begin at the bottom, I enthusiastically agree that this business of phony degrees is a serious problem. Some are more phony than others, but I have seen instances where it's pretty brash.

 

I also agree that people can learn. We develop our muscles through exercise and we can develop our brains as well. Furthermore, taking some courses in agriculture can provide information, even if it doesn't particularly raise reasoning ability or enhance creativity.

 

I think where we may, or may not, differ is this: We need to greatly enlarge opportunity for training. This includes college but is by no means limited to college. I have had the great good fortune to make my living in a career that I enjoyed. I'm 75, I am a retired math prof, I am currently working on a math problem with a friend, also retired. No pay, no nothing really, we just enjoy it. But not everyone likes mathematics. Time out for a true story: I was in the barbershop and the barber asked as they do, what I did for a living. "I'm a mathematician," "Oh, I really like mathematics". Not the usual response. He continued "Well, not he hard stuff, like algebra. I really like..." pause for thought "addition. I really like addition." Anyway, I would like to see expanded opportunity for those who not only don't like mathematics but also who are not very academic. This barber's brother owned the shop. I think that they both make a decent living. The barber has a family, owns his house, etc. The owner probably makes a better livingh. I imagine he has some business training. Did he go to college? Beats me.

 

A farmer today probably needs quite a bit of training that his father would have never heard of.. Sure. So make it available. But going off to a four year college and running up a lot oi debt studying a lot of stuff that is of no interest, maybe we could skip over that.

 

My own years in college were great. Great for me. I grew up in a neighborhood where my father's eighth grade education was about the norm. Here I was in college reading Aescculus, Dante, Goethe etc and studying mathematics and physics. I thought it was wonderful. But that was me. I am sure that if I ever came home and told my father I was quitting college and was going to become a carpenter like he was he would have told my mother "I was getting worried about the kid, but he has finally come to his senses". My parents were not paying the college bills, so it was completely my choice.

 

I am not really sure that we disagree. A modern farmer no doubt needs to know a lot of stuff. Soil, business, environmental issues, possibly some legal training. It's so much stuff that maybe a four year college, if it has a good program, is right for a farmer. But others, the barbershop owner for example, needs some business training and some specialized training in styling (not for me, I don't do "styling", my response to "How do you want it cut?" is "Shorter") but for him I think much of college would be, professionally, a waste. If he enjoys it, as I did, then fine. But he may not enjoy it and he may not need it.

 

My father was born in 1900, a very different era, but even so, as he was reaching retirement, technology was causing issues. The skills you learn when you are 20 may well be outdated when you are 40, or 60. So training and education has to be a lifelong commitment. Both the individual and society has to accept this fact of modern life. A college education, for some, and probably for many, can be part of this. But we need to cast a much larger net.

[akwoo]

You talk about training, but I think technology is going to make training itself mostly obsolete.

 

When I said someone was not smart enough to be a farmer, I did not mean they did not have enough farming training. I meant that their general intelligence, abstract thinking, reasoning ability, ability to learn, ability to come up with original solutions, et c was not good enough for farming. Even in your lifetime, Ken, I think it's possible we'll see farmers programming their combines to farm some of their fields without them actually sitting on the combine. If you're not smart enough to figure out how to program a 1980s VCR you're not going to be competitive as a farmer. And I explicitly mean 'figure out', not 'have taught to you' because it'll be just like 1980s VCRs; each model will be different and come up with its own weird arcane instructions.

 

So I think we are going to a society where almost any occupation which is reasonably useful to society is going to require a good deal of reasoning ability and abstract thought. Probably these abilities can be acquired through studying farming rather than literature or mathematics. But it won't be acquired by rote training in specific farming skills.

 

If we're talking about rote-learned skills, I think we are soon reaching the point that, in most occupations, the skills you learn when you're 20 will be outdated by the time you are 23. At that point rote training is useless.

 

There is also the political aspect. Many years ago I recall some story about a large number of small New England towns getting themselves into really bad deals with companies coming in to fix and modernize their (I think it was) water systems. Part of the original story was the confidentiality clauses in the agreements, so the towns had no way of finding out that similar deals had worked out poorly for other towns. But I remember looking into some of the details, and it was plainly obvious with any amount of thought that the deals were ticking time bombs for the towns. The problem was that these small towns had no one who could and would read the details and figure out what the deal meant in 5 or 10 years. The state government can legislate and regulate all they want to protect these small towns, but they can't anticipate every possibility, so frankly the best solution is simply for enough citizens to be smart enough to figure this out. This is small town New England, and these were big budget items for these towns, so the deals usually had to go through town meeting with a debate and vote of the whole town. (In small town New England, generally the whole town acts as the legislative and executive authority (i.e. the 'town council'), although a small group is empowered to handle minor or urgent business.) The citizens really did have input and a few townspeople who could and would read these deals would undoubtedly have been able to stop them.

[blackshoe]

It takes quite a bit of smarts to be a farmer, just like it takes quite a bit of smarts (more than in the past) to be a soldier. Technology changes everything.

 

There are, to my mind, two parts to "education". The first is to give people enough basic knowledge to function in their society. In a democracy that means, among other things, knowing how to reason. The second part is to teach people how to learn on their own. Currently, the system fails on both counts.

[kenberg]

You talk about training, but I think technology is going to make training itself mostly obsolete.

 

I take this seriously and to a fair extent I agree. Coping with the modern world, in particular making a living in the modern world, requires quite a combination of abilities. This relates back to Core and includes much else.

 

I have said, and I mean it with some seriousness, that the best thing that I did in my adolescence was to buy a car. A '47 Plymouth for $175 that needed work. My current car is a 2013 Honda and I know virtually nothing about what is under the hood. But I have confidence that if it became important for me to know about it, I could sit down and learn. No doubt a 2013 Honda is more complex than a 1947 Plymouth, but my early experience points the way.

 

Part of learning is reading and understanding. Part of it is thinking. Part of it is experience and discussion with others. My hope for a 17-year old is that s/he would have a decent grasp of this interplay, an appreciation of its importane, and some confidence that s/he can handle this. That's a tall order.

 

Here is a frequent problem (my view of course): Someone, say Core, comes up with some standards, promotes (often correctly) their importance, and there is broad agreement of those in power that this should be done. BUT THEN. Teachers, principals, administrators and so on have ther salaries and jobs dependent on getting good scores. Fair enough, sort of. But how to do this? What happens is that the questions and the answers become very formulaic. Doing well on these exams has more to do with training, using training in the sense that you are deploring, then it does with actual understanding and thought. And so we end up with high school graduates who have passed the required algebra exam but have no idea how to figure the change for a $100 bill if the cashier has inadvertently entered a $20 payment amount into the register.

 

I, and I think you, have faith that people can learn to think far more effectively if they are given proper guidance. Learning how to do routine tasks correctly is important, much of our lives are routine, but it is not enough. It probably never was enough, but today is is really not enough. . So we need to do a far better job than we do in encouraging independent thought..

 

It will not be easy. People are diverse in their approach to life, and more than a few are very insistent that learninig consists of memorizing the correct answers to a list of questions, and everything else is a waste of time. By the way, while college is better than high school at encouraging thought, it is far from being a paradise.

 

Anyway, I think that we are more in agreement here than you might believe that we are.

[kenberg]

It takes quite a bit of smarts to be a farmer, just like it takes quite a bit of smarts (more than in the past) to be a soldier. Technology changes everything.

 

There are, to my mind, two parts to "education". The first is to give people enough basic knowledge to function in their society. In a democracy that means, among other things, knowing how to reason. The second part is to teach people how to learn on their own. Currently, the system fails on both counts.

 

Yep.