Re: You have to be psychic to get a job

Straydog wrote:


On Wed, 14 Jun 2006, BMJ wrote:

Phil Scott wrote:

<snip>

I've had interviews scheduled, only to have them vanish before I was supposed to attend. Go figure.




I turned down my first submittal 'opportunity' today...

I told the girlie that after a year of total dilligence and a dozen interviews and noticing the fraud and idiocy. that my new policy is to leave my resume out, anyone can submit but they can't interview me first...no more catering to the battery of completely illiterate questioning...no phone calls or emails

if a client is interested enough in my skill set to pay me for an interview I will attend... If they refrain from being complete jerks at the interview I might accept a job...otherwise, my plan B works just fine.


I doubt that any of them even care if you turn them down. They'll probably shrug, say "What can you do?" and find someone else to chat up.




I am not loosing a days work to cater to this mess, or putting up with anymore idiot recruiters that pass through the agencies like toilet paper at a public toilet.


I might submit an application now and then just to see if anybody reacts to it. If they want to talk, they know where to contact me.

<snip>

we have just begun to see the beginning of the train wreck...brought to us by complete idiots...who screen our resume's.


Many of them are recent products of our educational system who can't spell or compose a simple sentence. Dictionaries and thesauruses are incomprehensible objects to them.


That is because they are all brain-damaged by playing too much Nintendo, which induces into the player the disease Adult Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. I'm serious.

It isn't just that. Recently, I came across an old newspaper clipping about "whole math" that I'd saved from a number of years ago. One of the points raised in it was that the emphasis on "teamwork" and "defining" problems means that students aren't being taught basic fundamental skills, such as multiplication and long division, any more.

Several years ago, I taught a course in basic electrical circuits. Some of the students whined that I penalized them for things like incorrect arithmetic. After all, they contended, they had already been "tested" on it (presumably in another course), so why were they being held accountable for it now. My answer was that my course was one in which they *applied* what they were supposed to have learned. All I got were blank looks.

While I was finishing my Ph. D. residency, I was a TA in a similar course and my job was to grade weekly exercises. I started taking off marks for incorrect math when I was politely informed by the supervising prof that it wasn't a math course, so I shouldn't penalize them. When I was an undergrad, I was held accountable for such things in courses where I had to use such methods.

What surprised me was that this prof had been teaching in the department for nearly thirty years, so he would have taught students of my generation (thus understanding why I did it) and should have known better. On the other hand, I suspect he did, but he was only following the prevailing educational doctrine and may not have had much choice in the matter.

By extrapolation, I wouldn't be surprised if subjects such as English and writing are handled in a similar manner nowadays. Test 'em once and that'll last 'em for the rest of their lives. Yeah, right.


Try teaching people like that.

<snip>

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