Re: Garden tools. A bit of research


"Frank" <frankdotlogullo@comcastperiodnet> wrote in message
news:srudnYt-5eJkQrXanZ2dnUVZ_gWdnZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
JoeSpareBedroom wrote:
Almost.

An acquaintance of mine taught a senior level research methods course,
and
informed the class that if anyone plagiarized anything from the web,
they'd
flunk the course, no matter how high their grade was on previous work.
School policy. Two students thought she was kidding, and in their final
paper for the course, they cut & pasted stuff right off the web. They
flunked, they complained, they needed the course to graduate. Oh well.


You might like this letter in todays Chemical and Engineering News:

I'm responding to "Wired for Learning" with 36 years of teaching
experience behind me, yet with something less than enthusiasm for the
technology-savvy teachers who were profiled in the article. It has been
my experience that today's teens know very little about modern
technology except how to use it. They know almost zero about the science
behind the technology. Most know nothing about electricity, don't know
how AC differs from DC, and don't know what electromagnetic waves are or
why their frequency matters. In fact, all they know about most of this
technology is which buttons to push and in what order.


This isn't a today thing. Back in the 20's just about all drivers knew how
to fix their own cars. By the 50's that had dropped drastically with the
introduction of the automatic transmission and electric starter which
allowed more women to drive. By the 70's only a handful of drivers
knew how to fix their cars, and today it's like 2% of the population if
that.

The story on the flunkees is interesting. I am not sure exactly how
you can plagarize facts or statistics. A fact is a fact whether it's copied
from the web or from a book. I suspect the real problem with the 2
student's actual problem was not copying and pasting from the web, it
was the inability to separate facts from opinions and create a summary,
namely, the skill of critical thinking. They couldn't think critically and
so when presented with the raw information on the Internet, they could
not properly sift it. My guess is the rest of the students in the class
also
used the Internet very heavily, but instead of a cheap hack and paste
they did some real research and rewrote the data. You wonder how the
2 students even got to the level to be able to take this kind of a class.

Making teens push more buttons than they already do does not make them
wiser or more talented; it only gives them a warm feeling that they
understand many things that they, in fact, do not understand.

One sentence struck me as particularly untrue in this piece: "For
example, before computers became ubiquitous, when students were at home
and got stuck on a homework problem, other than a phone call to a fellow
student, they didn't have access to immediate help."


The usual method was to not do the particular homework problem and
ask the teacher for assistance the next day, then do it the following
evening.

Are they all orphans? Don't they have parents? Isn't asking your parents
a valuable learning path for today's youth? I asked my mother for help.
My children asked me. My grandchildren ask their parents, and I presume
my great-grandchildren will do the same. Surely, homework problems are
about something that parents learned also. I hope the homework problems
are not about which button to push. If so, the teacher's syllabus needs
examining.


I think most kids wouldn't have asked parents. I never did. With no
disrespect to my dear father and mother, the problem was that nothing that
I was working on in homework had anything to do with what they learned.
With Mathematics, both parents didn't do "new math" and with English
they both did sentence diagramming and other such things that were
completely
out of fashion when I was in school. It's not that they couldn't have
learned
the methods I was being taught by, but it would have taken a lot of effort
for them and they couldn't have done it in a night.

Today, my oldest is learning Japanese. I am not a Japanese speaker. I
cannot help him on this. What I can do and I do, is spend hours
sitting with him making sure he's actually doing the homework, instead
of being distracted by the tv/radio/sister/snack/bathroombreak/favoritebook/
video/pieceofdustfloatingintheroom/etc.

Enough said. Your readers will know what I am trying to express. I hope
so, or my mother would be very displeased.


I understand what your trying to express. But I do not think it will be
solved.
Keep in mind that technology is like a pyramid, it builds on more basic
technologies, and EVERYTHING is all tied up together.

For example, I know all about AC and DC power. But, I know very little
about metallurgy and little about chemistry. If I had to go back 200 years
I might be able to build a generator and electric light bulb in a lab. But
I would not
know how to produce an electric cable (like for example a piece of Romex)
that would be safe to put in a building that people were living in. I would
not
know how to melt copper and extrude it into miles of copper wire nor
sheath the wire in an insulator. I would probably end up doing what they
did back then which was sheath the copper in cotton - which caused many
an electrical fire back in the olden days.

The people you refer to who only know how to push buttons are very much
like me. They know how to push buttons but don't know how to wire a
circuit that runs those buttons. I know how to wire a circuit that runs
those
buttons but I don't know how to make the wire nor the materials in the
button.
The guy who knows how to extrude the wire doesen't know how to mine the
copper ore from the ground. The miners that mine the copper ore don't know
how to manufacture a mining machine. In fact, the only people who know how
to design and build the mining machine are the very same people who are
pushing
the buttons that I know how to wire.

Now, I ask you this. The people designing the mining machines, do you think
they would know how to design a better machine if they knew how to mine?
Yes. But they would know how to design a mining machine even better than
that if they knew all about metallurgy and copper ores. And to know all
about
that they need to know all about what the copper coming out of the ore will
be used to make - the wires. And to know how to make the best wires,
they need to know about electricity, and circuits and so on.

Where does it really end? You are asking for the impossible. What you are
asking for is that anyone that does anything must know every possible thing
about it, about all that goes into it, all about how it would be used, and
on and
on. That's fine if the guy your asking this of is hammering horseshoes onto
the
hoof of a horse. It's impossible if the guy your asking this of is
designing a
car body.

There's nothing wrong with wanting kids to understand electricity. They
are,
in fact, supposed to get that in high school physics. But getting into
frequency
and resonance in electricity is getting into a specialty of electricity and
radio.
And frankly without getting into that speciality, you don't really
understand
electricity now, do you? And without understanding materials science you
don't really understand electrical resonance in wires.

And this isn't limited to wires. Take the modern average rubber car tire.
There is a whole science behind this that deals with materials and traction
and tread and such that you are ignorant of. All you know about the tire
is you drive into the tire shop and a guy mounts and dismounts them from
your car. So, you really aren't much different from those button-pushing
kids, are you?

Ted


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