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Write Your Own Virtual Machine (2022)

jmeiners.com

101–102 of 102 posts

Re: Write Your Own Virtual Machine (2022)

#101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not the person you replied to, but you are wrong about this; > "I am the teacher, and you will not do anything I don't sanction, like learning way more than I demand for today's lesson" The person explicitly made it clear that while you can be encouraged on your own initiatives you still need to be graded/ranked on a common scale with your peers and hence the need for some sort of standardization. For example, i…

This was college. Not primary school. The point (which they are amply paid to perform) is to make sure you learn the necessities of the science/art/craft. They can do this any way they like I suppose. But to resort to primary-school gold stars and points and such is possibly the very worst way, the lowest common denominator of the educator's craft. I dare say my enthusiasm was evident. Knowledge and skill were on amp…

I think you have too many preconceptions, assumptions and misinterpretations here. My charitable interpretation of your comment would be that you have been scarred strongly by the event you describe and are generalizing from it unnecessarily. The uncharitable interpretation would be that you have an inflated sense of your own self-worth which was not validated in the above event.

When it comes to our own selves we are all necessarily biased in our own favour. Hence we need to step back and take a broader perspective so that we can be objective in our assessments. In today's society Teaching as a profession (in School/College/University) has been unfairly denigrated and become a thankless job. They are asked to operate only within a defined policy framework and not really allowed freedom to change that framework. In spite of that there are scores of stories (and even movies made) where Teachers have gone well beyond their boundaries to help students learn and perform. If you want to blame somebody blame the "System" built by policy-making idiots with no idea of human psychology, behaviour, needs etc. Teachers are really caught between a rock and a hard place i.e. policy says follow standardized curriculum/tests and don't do any creative individual things whereas students want individual recognition/attention and don't want to be called out on their lack of hardwork and application to proper studies. Hence we need to be understanding of them.

Re: Write Your Own Virtual Machine (2022)

#102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very good question. My working assumption throughout was that the people in a computer architecture class already had 1 or 2 semesters of other programming courses where they worked in a high-level language, and are looking to learn how computers work "closer to the hardware". And educational architectures create a completely false impression in this domain. If I had to teach assembly programming to people who never…

Many years ago I taught CMPT215 - Intro to Computer Architecture. This was a second year course and taught MIPS assembler. There’s a chain of follow on courses culminating in a 400-level course where you implement a basic OS from scratch on x86 (when I took it) or ARM (present day, I believe). MIPS was, I think, a decent compromise between academic architecture and industrial architecture. There was a decent amount o…

This is very interesting. I assume that most of the students would never manage to get a similar job such as working with JVM or MIPS assembly, but I'm sure they would recall your class with a smile.
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