In the Basement of the Ivory Tower • Hacker News Board

Re: In the Basement of the Ivory Tower

#111

Post by anamax » Wed, Jul 16, 2008, 4:32 PM UTC

marvin wrote: post #32

This is a very interesting story. What I'm left with is the question of 'who are these people, really'? Is there really a considerable portion of American (or we could say Western) society that is practically illiterate? This seems counter-intuitive to me, I thought it was hardly possible to function at all without a basic understanding of the written word. If these people are out there, I have certainly never had an…

> I'd expect even a car mechanic to have enough brains

How many things in your life can you fix by yourself? The typical car mechanic is far less dependent on others to keep things running.

> Isn't academic aptitude strongly correlated with ability to succeed in the world at large

No.

In fact, even in the areas where you'd expect academia to be most relevant, half of the genius' are academic failures. (The academics do dominate the middle, but that's probably because academia is used as a filter and that keeps out all but the best of the academic failures.)

> the educational system is a massive failure

Not massive, but anything else that "succeeded" as well would be considered a failure. However, the bigger failure may be outside the educational system, expecting things from it that it can't deliver.

Then again, that may be academia's fault. Who else would think that the ability to comment intelligently on the wizard of oz has broad predictive power.

FWIW, the guy who wrote Babylon 5, which is full of literary representation and symbolism, ie abstraction, says that he can't handle "let X = 5".

Re: In the Basement of the Ivory Tower

#112

Post by cdr » Wed, Jul 16, 2008, 4:57 PM UTC

josefresco wrote: post #34

tom_rath wrote: post #3

The most helpful grade I ever received on an essay was an 'F'. It was in my first year of university. I knew the course and knew the material but couldn't have been arsed to put together a paper which adequately addressed the subject. The comments the professor wrote were scathing and it was a wonderful full slap on the face that I'd better get my act together and actually deliver what was expected of me if I ever wa…

I never had a professor shoot down any paper I turned in no matter how half assed it was. I guess I was that good ... Now, it was the papers I never turned in that hurt me the most :)

Hah. You must not have been that good - the ones I never turned in didn't really hurt me either.

Re: In the Basement of the Ivory Tower

#113

Post by davidw » Wed, Jul 16, 2008, 5:26 PM UTC

andrewl wrote: post #87

davidw wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite 'English' class in high school was a journalism class, which was centered around learning to write well and communicate something effectively, with none of the BS about "hidden symbolism". I proudly got a D on an English paper once, when the topic was "how does the symbolism help us understand what the author is telling us", where I answered that it didn't help in the slightest, and that, truth be told, i…

DavidW, what was the book?

Don't recall, sorry.

Re: In the Basement of the Ivory Tower

#114

Post by tphyahoo » Wed, Jul 16, 2008, 6:54 PM UTC

hugh wrote: post #27

tphyahoo wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. I, too, taught "literature" to people that could barely read. It sucked. If you can't read, you should learn the mechanics of how to read before dealing with things like "foreshadowing" "theme" "denouement." Just, basic stuff.Otherwise, it's just ridiculous. That's what these colleges should be doing, if they're taking student's money. Not raping them in their vulnerability, naivete, and ability to get a loan.

That's what these colleges should be doing, if they're taking student's money. Oh, and also... if you're going to be claiming to be an English lecturer and complaining about illiteracy, you should probably master the rules of apostrophe placement first.

1) I was a high school teacher, not an english lecturer, and I did try to teach the basics how to write a complete sentence. However, the curiculum I was forced to teach was all this foreshadowing/theme/theory crap.

2) I quit to write software.

3) I would have been overjoyed had my students made the kind of grammar mistake (student's) I made in my off the cuff remark. In fact, my experience doing this has made me incredibly forgiving for this kind of thing, I guess in my own writing as well as that of others. Basically, if the meaning is clear and obvious I don't really consider it a mistake, just being a pedantic snob. The problem you get with people who really don't know how to write is the meaning isn't clear, I mean really not clear. You get, like, word salad, metaphors so brutally mixed that who knows what point was trying to be made, a level of incoherence that truly impedes what is trying to be communicated -- it can range from severe annoyance to total incomprehension. Grammar is for pedeants, get your point across and I'm your friend. Unfortunately many people can't.

Re: In the Basement of the Ivory Tower

#115

Post by stcredzero » Wed, Jul 16, 2008, 7:19 PM UTC

sspencer wrote: post #8

Excellent submission. That was an extremely well-written and particularly trenchant piece of writing. It is interesting to compare the experiences of Ms. L to various people in their 40s returning to school when I was in undergrad. They too had difficulty with very basic (to us youngsters, anyway) methods of computer use. Many viewed computers with either outright terror or blatant suspicion. I have often thought of…

"I have often thought of volunteering my time to a college or tech school locally to teach computer-illiterate people the basics of computer use. It would be such a simple thing for me and judging by Ms. L's plight, it could make all the difference in the world to some people."

If you do this enough, you will inevitably come up against a real challenge. One of my students could not even double-click. She would raise her hand to hover a couple of inches above the mouse, then stab down with her finger twice. Not only was this too slow to register as a double click, she invariably moved the mouse. with each downward stab of her finger. I would show her the right way to do it, but she would always devolve to her old behavior.

Re: In the Basement of the Ivory Tower

#116

Post by stcredzero » Wed, Jul 16, 2008, 7:30 PM UTC

davidw wrote: post #100

derefr wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know how zen koans work? They help you understand yourself. They don't do it by telling you about yourself, but rather by tricking your mind into paying attention to nothing other than yourself, even though you might not consciously want to. In the same way, symbolism is intended to trick the mind into grasping a concept it consciously has problems with understanding, or perhaps outright disagrees with. It's l…

The thing is, I'm not a dog, but a person, and I am actually quite willing to listen to people I disagree with as long as they are polite and reasonable.

There's listening, then there's listening. When someone is really learning, you are dealing with the edges of their model of the world and their conscious perception. When you are really teaching, you are playing in this dangerous interstice. Sometimes, the best way of teaching people is tricking them. Sometimes, if you just tell them, they'll just rationalize what you have to tell them away.

This is more apt to apply to classes in history than to computers, however. Even then, there are popular misconceptions to deal with.

Re: In the Basement of the Ivory Tower

#117

Post by stcredzero » Wed, Jul 16, 2008, 7:48 PM UTC

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #30

Perspicacious and lyrical. Nicely done. Having said that, I found the author a bit whiny. I can almost hear his supervisor at his "night job" "Old Professor X seems like a nice enough sort," they'd say, whispering among themselves, "but he'll never be ready for a job a at a major university. Sure -- he might get published in some rag like The Atlantic, but serious work? Not likely. He's just not cut out for it." It's…

You are right, but then one would have to focus on your success stories, which might just a few percent of the students.

By the time people are college aged, they are pretty set in their ways. Educational miracles where whole classes are swept up into success generally happen with younger students.

Re: In the Basement of the Ivory Tower

#118

Post by gambino » Thu, Jul 17, 2008, 12:05 AM UTC

dfranke wrote: post #58

marvin wrote: post #32

This is a very interesting story. What I'm left with is the question of 'who are these people, really'? Is there really a considerable portion of American (or we could say Western) society that is practically illiterate? This seems counter-intuitive to me, I thought it was hardly possible to function at all without a basic understanding of the written word. If these people are out there, I have certainly never had an…

How old are you? The baby boom generation seems mostly literate, but my generation, gen Y, is basically incapable of constructing a sentence. In my senior year high school English class I had a teacher who liked me, so she had me grade papers in lieu of some other work. In particular, I remember proofreading drafts of my classmates' college admissions essays. They were deplorable. The best one was grammatically toler…

I'm Gen X - the High School I attended, and ultimately received my GED from was inner city. While we had more Ivy League acceptances from our student body than any other local public school, we also had on-campus murders, armed police officers roaming the halls, and a bathroom that no one but drug dealers and users went into.

I left school my senior year, and went into a career in computers. I had been a part of the "computer underground" since 12 or 13, and knew UNIX better than most admins. I couldn't speak or write properly however. Turns out employers, weren't too keen on odd combination of l33+ sp34/It wasn't the school's fault, I made a choice. I could of easily gone to a decent college, but laziness and lack of priorities could have derailed my life. I was lucky enough to have these guys take an interest in me.

Re: In the Basement of the Ivory Tower

#119

Post by HeyLaughingBoy » Thu, Jul 17, 2008, 2:22 AM UTC

ia wrote: post #105

smelendez wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The arts and humanities are just terribly taught. People notice it more with regard to English than art or music class, because you have to take English every year pretty much anywhere, while usually you stop taking art or music before you realize how bad it is. I had a lot of great science and math teachers and a few great history teachers. I had some good English teachers but none who were really great. I think tha…

I think part of the issue here is the nature of the beast--for most English teachers, teaching is less about showing their students how to successfully parse the symbolism and subtext, and more about clubbing them over the head with the teacher's own interpretation. I imagine it's easy to fall into that trap. If you give a student the tools to find the answer instead of just giving the answer, you risk the possibilit…

This is perhaps why I went to grad school for Software Engineering instead of Computer Science: the mix of objective and subjective interpretation in the same course. e.g., one of the reasons I enjoyed my Patterns and Architectures course was the discussion around popular, useful patterns and when they fail, or when doing something generally considered the "right way" is a really bad idea. I hate being told "X" is the right answer in all situations.

Re: In the Basement of the Ivory Tower

#120

Post by rkts » Thu, Jul 17, 2008, 4:46 AM UTC

bluishgreen wrote: post #99

sophist wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The classic nurture side of the nature vs. nurture debate. The problem with your argument is that it's simply not backed up by evidence. There are plenty of cases of children who grow up in virtually identical environments, yet go on to have widely varying interests. My brother and I grew up experiencing basically all the same stimuli: same parents, same TV shows, same music, same magazines, same everything. As adult…

Just wanted to point out. You and your brother cannot possibly have had the same stimuli. You were his elder brother (say) and he was younger to you. People sometimes resist each others ideas. My friend took to piano lessons because his brother hated it. Sibling rivalry factors ever so little especially at the early stages of growth, and it tips everything later on.

Technically true, but sophist's experience is consistent with scientific findings. Sibling studies have repeatedly shown that genes do account for a significant amount of variation in behavior. While environment plays a role as well, the "blank slate" theory is flat wrong.

For an overview of the evidence, I recommend The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker.