TourDeForce: “Engineering school is a rude awakening for most college freshmen.”
An old friend pointed me at this article over lunch today. It’s funny, but also very, very accurate. There is something wrong with a large chunk of our education system , or at least how people typically leverage it. This tends to produce very high failure rates in the disciplines that require subject mastery (more than others). Examples are Engineering, Mathematics, Computer Sciences, Physics, etc.
The article at Kitchen Table Math presents eight points and reads as a tale of experience. For those of us that have been through it, it rings very true. For those that are about to embark on this journey, I’m not sure what to suggest other than:
Learn how to learn.
From the article by KDeRosa :
You had been coddled the past 13 years by your well meaning K-12 teachers. You were mostly spoon fed the material, at a slow pace, and then tested on how well you could regurgitate the exact same material back to the teacher in the exam. Rarely, if ever, were you required to apply your knowledge to solving new problems. As a result, you could, and probably did get by, with merely inflexible knowledge. You probably never mastered the material to the point of automaticity and you had little time to re-learn it now. This would be most apparent in …
Algebra…
(Via lunch with a friend at Nellie’s Kitchen.)