My first job? Paperboy. Then cart-pusher and register guy at a
supermarket. Tried the military, didn't make it through. Back to school
for several years. Worked at Borders Books for about six, seven years.
Worked in a small publishing company. I suppose in all of those I
learned SOMETHING -- how to deliver papers, how to push carts in all
weather and run a register, how to shelve books, etc., but none of it
seemed to be, so to speak, educational. It just was "this is what you do
in order to do this job.
I got to read a lot of stuff at the one small publisher. And there was
the small company that had the CEO go slowly nuts and take the company
down with him, cratering just in time to make me unemployed right after
9/11.
>
>> A lot of other people actually did learn stuff in school.
>>
>>>
>>>> There
>>>> is a huge difference between education and "doing your work" in an
>>>> employment field.
>>>
>>> Yes, in the one case you have to sit in a classroom and regurgitate
>>> textbook answers on demand. In the other you have to actually make
>>> things happen.
>>
>> If you can't even remember basic facts and procedures, you're not going
>> to be able to do work, either.
>
> School didn't teach me much in the way of "basic facts and procedures"
> that I have actually used anywhere. Some of what I learned 40 years
> ago would be useful to me now in my new career but I have forgotten
> most of it.
>
>> True, I wish schools taught some
>> different things, and taught some things differently, but it's not the
>> useless setup you seem to want it to be.
>
> I don't _want_ it to be useless, I just find it so.
And many others do not.
>
>> Stats show that people who
>> DON'T get schooling generally do more poorly. (naturally there are
>> outliers that don't fit the curve, but on average, having more education
>> helps)
>
> There are many occupations for which a piece of paper is required by
> the employer. That doesn't mean that the skills associated with that
> piece of paper are necessarily relevant to the job.
>
>>>> In education, the idea is to see if *each individual
>>>> student* has learned the lessons and is able to apply them properly, not
>>>> whether they can find someone in the class to help them do so.
>>>
>>> Whereas at work the most important skill one can have is knowing who
>>> to ask.
>>
>> No. That's *AN* important skill. But depending on your particular job,
>> the MOST important skill could be one of hundreds of others. The most
>> important skill *I* have had in my professional career was being able to
>> write clearly, coherently, regularly, and productively. The second most
>> important skill (by a hair) was and is the ability to read quickly,
>> extract meaning accurately from what I read, and apply what I learn from
>> what I read to the particular problem at hand.
>
> So what do you do for a living?
R&D Coordinator at a small company. This mostly entails writing grant
proposals and, if they're won, overseeing the work and writing the
reports and such.If new innovations are sufficiently interesting, I
usually write the patents (at least the first version thereof before a
lawyer goes through and writes the detailed claims).
And of course I write SF/F.
>
>> Of course if you've only worked at tiny little companies with
>>> tiny little products that one person can understand in their entirety
>>> with a few minutes effort, you might not be able to understand the
>>> importance of that skill. And if you are some teacher who has never
>>> had a job, well . . .
>>
>> If you think that "being a teacher" is "never had a job", you have
>> absolutely no clue. Teachers have a very demanding job which most people
>> who sneer at them probably couldn't do.
>
> I'm sorry, but nothing one does in a classroom is a "job" in my
> opinion.
Then your opinion is barely worth the electrons spent to transmit it.
My father and my mother were both teachers -- my father at Albany
Medical College and later at Albany College of Pharmacy, and my mother
at several of the local public schools over the decades, teaching
English, Spanish, and sometimes running the library. Between them they
taught many thousands of students, and both of them affected their
students sufficiently that even today, decades after they stopped
working and more than a decade after both of them died, I still get
contacted by people who tell me how much my mom or my dad helped them in
one way or another through their teaching.
I got to see how much work, how much thought, was put into their work.
It's not only a job, it's a very demanding job.
I have taught at several levels, been paid for it, I agree
> that there is a certain amount of effort involved, but compared to the
> kind of work where you have a concrete result to produce at the end of
> the day, it is not the same as working in a business.
Most businesses aren't producing anything nearly as important and a lot
of them these days aren't producing anything concrete.
>
>>>> Yes, it's
>>>> fine for them to talk together and so on, but if the assignment is
>>>> "write a 25 page paper about {topic}", it doesn't give me, as an
>>>> instructor, much insight to Joe Student's capabilities in the matter if
>>>> five people work on the paper.
>>>
>>> If the assignment is "write a 25 page paper on x topic" the class is
>>> likely of little relevance anyway.
>>
>> You're not going to graduate from any decent school without doing some
>> research papers on SOMETHING, especially not in a STEM field.
>
> I believe that Georgia Tech qualfies as "any decent school", and we
> were not required to write papers. Writing papers is what the fuzzy
> studies people do. Engineers make stuff, we don't write about making
> stuff.
Maybe engineers don't, but scientists do, and there's nothing fuzzy
about physics, math, and chemistry. And if you're an engineer doing
innovative work and you don't write a paper or three on it, you will be
sure SOMEONE will.
And I have no great opinion of an engineering college that doesn't
teach its students how to understand prior research, how to do their
own, and how to write clearly and coherently on that research.
>
>>>> At the least it gets really hard to
>>>> untangle, even if they tell me who did what -- especially since I then
>>>> have to decide how much I BELIEVE of what they tell me. Did all five of
>>>> them really do what they say, or did two of them do most of the work and
>>>> just distribute the credit more evenly so all five of them did well?
>>>
>>> What subject do you teach?
>>>
>>
>> I don't; it was an example. My parents were both teachers, though, and
>> so are people of my acquaintance. I spent many years not just in the
>> public school system, but also in multiple universities.
>
> And you learned that they are useful?
Sure.
I spent many years in the same
> situation and realized that I should have gotten out of the academic
> world as soon as I had that piece of paper.
>
There are many days I wish I was STILL in the academic world.