The Fighting Electronic Sun Devils...

Today's Sign that the United States is Doomed: Heard an advertisement today for Arizona State's online university. Ah, the final melding of the fraud of online education with a university that most recently made the news for having members of a frat drop off one of their brothers at the front door of the hospital. Not in the hospital itself but in the doorway. With a note pinned to his chest stating that he had just consumed 20 shots of tequila after competing in a shot drinking contest and hence had a BAC in the .4 range. It is nice to know that Arizona State teaches personal responsibility if not actual follow through. Oh, and why does Arizona need two online universities? We already have the University of Phoenix? Is there some weird online education synergy in the southwest?

I don't want to make it sound like I think that all online education is bad. I've started downloading podcasts of classes that interest me but I just think that taking a class online removes all of the dedication and rigor from the process. Students barely pay attention in class to begin with and now you can just play a lecture while completely ignoring the content. Just work the problems, write a paper, get a grade and earn a degree without ever really being challenged or interacting with people or ideas that are counter to your own. That is what education is about. Grade inflation makes things bad enough as it is; the watering down of degrees just makes it worse.

One of the things that concerns me about education (and to be honest, the next generation in general) is just how different it must be than from how I learned due to the internet. Understand that while I was online as a sophomore and Illinois invented the web browser we really didn't have a connected world at the time. We learned from textbooks and overhead slides and lectures with actual blackboards. For homework you would work it out personally with the concept of working together being considered cheating. To copy a paper or plagiarise actually took work. Now all you have to do is search google.

That really stuns me. I assume that any electrical engineering student could type in some of the details of a problem and find a solution online. It would make assignments simpler than ever and if I had that at my hands I would have learned nothing at all. The only way I was able to learn was by struggling with problems over and over again until finally the pieces fell into place. There were times when you would look at a problem and go "I have no idea how to get an answer so let's at least try to figure out what it is that I can figure out and then maybe, just maybe, I'll eventually see an answer." That was probably how I learned my greatest skill. That is all real life is. You don't know the answer so you figure out what you know and try to get there. Searching online will not provide you the answer.

So kids, try to turn off the computer once in a while. Grab an actual pencil. Maybe you will learn something.

How we remember

I heard an interesting theory a few weeks ago that I want to share here. In my own experience I find it to be true and if it is then we should probably rethink how we teach our kids. The idea is this: when you are in your early teens you have the largest amount of brain cells that you will ever have. It is not just your brain cells are dying when you are old or when you drink them to oblivion. They are already dying when you are in high school. As a result you have the most retention and most vivid understanding of what you are interested in those years. At every point after that learning and retaining new information grows more and more difficult.


I’ve certainly have found this to be the case with me, especially in what I would consider absolutely trivial subjects. I can probably discuss the world of professional wrestling in the late 80’s to a degree of detail that is staggering. I think I can even recall entire cards of Saturday Nights Main Event. I could probably recall entire brackets of the NCAA tournament from that time. I can tell you every detail in the Hitchhiker’s Guide stories and don’t even get me started on Monty Python sketches. All of this is still in my head today though if you asked me about details regarding the last book I read or the last movie I’ve seen I would probably struggle greatly.

This might also explain why no matter how old I seem to get I still get drawn back into high school mode. I know that since the rise of Facebook there has been this massive rise in relationships ending due to people hooking up with old high school flames that they find online. Maybe it is because those moments occur when our minds are at their most fertile that they take on a much greater importance than they really deserve. Those memories are vivid decades later so we interpret that as being an indication of their worth. We end up being bogged down by these memories that our brains hold on to until the end.

Where I really think this is important is in education, though. I was lucky enough to be a studious kid which while not the best for me socially had me studying a lot of varied subjects at a time where that data would stick in my mind. Studying math and science as a kid made becoming an engineer a much easier task. My interest in history and literature at the time gave me a foundation in those subjects that stays with me. Somehow we have to determine how to create an environment in which children are brought up to focus on the important subjects at a time when their minds seem to be everywhere else. That is a challenge.

I also have a great need for paste

Remember when you were in grade school and you sat and wondered when in your life you would actually end up using these skills? Well, I had one of those moments today where I realized that my second grade teacher was on to something. That is because despite the fact that I have at my fingertips massive computing power, three monitors, the entire breadth of information contained in Google and a cell phone that is more powerful than my first three computers I had to spend a good portion of my morning searching for a ruler so I could measure something.

Seriously, I had to find a ruler. Incredibly, we had one in our supply closet so I was able to accurately measure some distances on a map. I know it sounds vaguely normal but it was just one of those moments that really struck me as totally bizarre. I have no recollection of the last time I even used a ruler. A tape measure is a different matter; everyone needs to use those occassionaly around the house. But a ruler sits slightly above the protractor and the compass in terms of useful items (and that is giving the compass bonus points due to its potential to be used as a deadly weapon. Whose wonderful idea was it to provide kids with essentially metal spikes?)

We did learn a lot of useless skills as kids. I only use cursive to sign my name and might not even be able to write a sentence in it today. I certainly couldn't write a legible paragraph but that is why I gave up using cursive when I was in high school. My handwriting was atrocious due to the fact that I can't hold a pencil correctly (I'm right handed and right brained which causes a lot of strange side effects) so I just started printing everything. Now since everything is typewritten cursive is a thing of the past. I also don't perform long division anywhere nearly as often as you would expect nor do I ever have a need to find the lowest common denominator. Calculus though I have used every frigging day of my adult life. Diagramming a sentence? Not as much.

(Side note here. I was thinking recently about how I took absolutely zero fun classes in college. I mean, I had friends who took ballroom dancing and long distance running for credit. The closest I had to something fun were my liberal arts electives of intro to world history and intro to english. Those were interesting but still pretty well required. Everything else was math and engineering. It may have made me successful but it certainly wasn't much fun. I would have killed to have taken the english course that focused on comedy writing.)

One of the things that I have noticed is that despite the fact that I am now undeniably old I still think back to my time in school. This week I have had two nightmares that were high school or college related even though that was 20 years ago. Maybe we never quite leave the classroom.