Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they're assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames's students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester.
It's not that they don't want to do the reading. It's that they don't know how. Middle and high schools have stopped asking them to.
Twenty years ago, Dames's classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It's not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot.
Failing to complete a 14-line poem without succumbing to distraction suggests one familiar explanation for the decline in reading aptitude: smartphones.
Students at elite collages(sic) such as Columbia can't read books anymore. It's not that they can't read but they can apparently only read short texts in short bursts of time. Their attention span have been ruined by smartphones, modern technology and a few decades of modern teaching methods that prioritize small texts.
What makes it extra bad is that these are apparently students that are taking courses in literature. These should be the avid readers. I guess we'll see more college books with large text, more pictures and being "for dummies" (it used to be a joke, not anymore I guess).
(Score: 3, Touché) by krishnoid on Tuesday October 22, @09:20PM (5 children)
I'm not saying we're there yet, but it seems like we're accelerating [youtu.be] in some ways. Nevertheless, there's also an amazing amount of high-quality content (and audiobooks of classics [librivox.org]) very readily available on Youtube and elsewhere.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 23, @01:40AM
I guess it's now down to two minutes or 20 seconds? Progress? 😉
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Wednesday October 23, @07:09PM
Yes and if the book is in an open format Linux has decent text to speech available. Then you can hear the book read quickly on headphones while you get on with something else.
When I was young I would read a whole book now and then but I was more often into dippng in and out of factual books and later spending a lot more of that time messing around with computers. I used to read a lot of computer and car magazines in my teens.
I never really enjoyed most of the classics of fiction that were recommended to me, probably because they weren't weird enough or nerdy enough for me. The well-known ones usually seem to be highly focused on character development and human relationships which I just don't find all that interesting, unless they're total weirdos.
Welcome to Edgeways. Words should apply in advance as spaces are highly limite—
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Wednesday October 23, @07:29PM (2 children)
I'm not saying we're there yet, but it seems like we're accelerating [youtu.be]
Irony at work!
If you read to your children when they're toddlers, they'll become readers unless the public school system kills their love for books.
But that's hard to do when we no longer have a living minimum wage and children are raised by heartless corporate child care.
Our nation is in deep shit, but it's illegal to say that on TV.
(Score: 2) by ChrisMaple on Friday October 25, @04:03AM (1 child)
Recycling centers often have hundreds of free books available. Most places have free public libraries.
The implication of "we no longer have a living wage" is that we're poorer than we were a century ago. This is demonstrably untrue.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Sunday October 27, @04:11PM
The implication of "we no longer have a living wage" is that we're poorer than we were a century ago. This is demonstrably untrue.
Many people have a living wage. My income is adequate. Your reading comprehension is not; you missed the word MINIMUM. There was no minimum wage a century ago, which was one reason we had a depression. It was instituted during the depression a decade later.
We no longer have a living MINIMUM wage. We did have one half a century ago. When someone can have a full-time job and is still eligible for food assistance, you don't have a living minimum wage. We have homeless working full time in America today!
It wasn't like that when I was your age, son.
I find it despicable and disgraceful. The federal minimum wage should be tripled, stealing labor should be illegal again.
Our nation is in deep shit, but it's illegal to say that on TV.
(Score: 4, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday October 22, @09:36PM (16 children)
You're a freshman, you've got 19 credits, because 6 classes in High School was a breeze. These six classes plus one lab keep you running about campus through the week, but you've got time inbetween and in the evenings to...
Ohhhh, look, there's a frat party...
There's actual interesting people my age to talk to, for hours and hours...
There's a pool hall (my father's personal downfall out of pre-med.)
Oh, and this English Lit prof wants me to read for 20 hours a week - like, when, dude? Same guy had us watch the most absolutely dull video of a Hamlet performance - bare sets, just actors walking in front of blank backdrops (up over a clever little roll in the stage that hid them until they walked over it)... it was a snore-fest of epic intensity. He was fun in the in-class discussions, though.
Anyway... I can only imagine that campus life today is even more distracting than it was in the late 60s for my parents, the late 80s for me... I actually had time to engage with BBSs, a little bit. Catcher in the Rye? Never got around to it.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by looorg on Tuesday October 22, @10:09PM (10 children)
It might be about attention span. The article sure seems to imply that. Personally I think that might be part of it but the other aspect is just about getting used to it. Having been in or adjacent to academia now for about 30 years I think I can see the decline when I think back. How it was when I started in the mid 90's, to more serious academic efforts in the late 00's. When I was an active full time student I read about a book per week, sometimes and usually more. These days? I do admit that I do read a lot less. A lot less fun reading at least, more boring work related reading or skimming.
About a decade ago I was taking some classes on the side, for fun, at another university. Class one evening per week. At the start of the semester some new students looked bewildered by the assigned reading list as it was just a list of book titles and what dates those books and topics would be discussed. So they asked the professor which pages they should read. He was equally bewildered at first, then proceeded to tell said student how books worked -- you start at the first page and then you read until you come to the last page. Epic academic burn. I admit I have since used that line myself.
I don't recall now if they quit the class after that or not. But that was a 10 week course that required reading at least one book per week and to write a short summary paper per book each week (3-5 pages). That was nothing strange really. How did I do it? Secret trick, class was at another university that was a 3h train ride away. So I got 6h of free reading time per week. In that time I could usually get thru a book or two, at least enough to write a summary of it. As you noted, no distractions when you ride a train alone at night going home.
But if you can't read books, with some sense of urgency, then perhaps academia isn't for you. Perhaps the best advice given then is that it's time to practice in front of the mirror -- would you like large fries with that order? In some regard I just can't understand why you try and go to university if you can't read. How do they think they'll gain knowledge and learn? Osmosis?
(Score: 5, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday October 22, @11:59PM (2 children)
In some ways, I was "ahead of my time" - I wasn't a cover-to-cover manual reader, I would skim and scan and skip through to get the interesting bits and leave the rest, even as far back as the late 70s (middle school).
I feel like my entire adult life (post 1985) has seen a rapid inflation of text volume - the documentation may have increased in actual useful content by 20% or so, but the volume of writing containing that additional 20% has multiplied 5-10x. There's boilerplate, there's template, there's disposable plate... In the 80s the people actually creating the documents were just getting the hang of re-using a previously saved document and editing the bits that needed changing. My Uncle actually had city workers who were treating their Word Processors like IBM Selectric typewriters, re-typing entire documents from scratch every time because they didn't get the concept of saving a file, opening an old file and just changing the job specific information, which at the time was usually around 5-10% of what might appear on the page.
These days... whoooo. You want to build a building? Every single component used in the structure must have an engineering report. That's windows, doors, sheathing, insulation, wire, outlets, framing, anchors, plumbing pipe, fixtures and valves. Using three kinds of valves? That's three separate engineering reports, and each engineering report runs anywhere from three pages up to 300. HVAC? - wheeeeee!!!!! Six kinds of register vents? Six different engineering drawings. Plus duct material, condenser evaporator air handler etc. etc. etc. These documents are required, by law, to be accessible to the building crews on-site while construction is happening.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 23, @03:47PM (1 child)
I'm glad to hear someone else has the same experience.
I think there is a push to have humans be replaceable (God forbid someone has some economic leverage!), so management has required all steps to be documented and verified. Which creates lots of admin overhead - and usually degrades the working experience. But, hey you're replaceable now so whatcha gonna do?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 25, @08:58AM
I dunno, maybe it's also due to people who don't regard humans as easily replaceable. So you have lots more rules and regulations.
Whereas in the bad old days, if people die - maybe there's just a few lines of law involved e.g.
Don't need pages and books of specs, rules, regulations and laws.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by driverless on Wednesday October 23, @04:09AM (5 children)
That's one thing that's a bit off about the article, which it itself admits:
So while it's convenient to blame cellphones, it could also just be the slow progression of taking things to extremes: "I had to read three mind-numbingly boring Victorian novels a semester when I did it, let's see if these whiny millennials can handle ten. Muahahaha". Some universities pride themselves in setting a near-impossible course load, for example one comp.maths assignment we had was only completed by a single person who (a) already had a PhD in engineering and (b) spent the entire three-week study break working on absolutely nothing but that single -ing assignment, not having the time to touch the assignments from any other paper he was enrolled in. So this could just be a case of business as usual but now students are more ready to complain about it.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by pTamok on Wednesday October 23, @06:16AM (4 children)
It's called a 'stretch task'.
The point is not to complete the task, but to see how well you do at it, and how well you cope with tasks beyond your immediate capability/ability. It also tests who is smart enough to give up early when they know they're beaten. Reasons for this include:
1) I couldn't be bothered/had parties to go to.
2) You didn't tell us which technique to use in the last lecture, so I couldn't do it.
3) I couldn't see an obvious method, so I gave up.
4) I tried three different methods, but didn't get anywhere.
5) From my course reading, I can see we need to use a specific technique, but we haven't gone through it in lectures/tutorials/assignments yet.
6) I taught myself to use the necessary specific technique, but got it wrong
7) I taught myself to use the necessary specific technique, but got it right
8) I invented a new technique that was unknown to mathematics and solved the problem.
Number (8) happens. I can't remember which mathematical prodigy did all his/her assigned questions, one of which was not known to be provable. The difficulty of the question was not flagged in the assignment.
Is it unfair? No. Problems you encounter in 'the real world' do not conveniently come with labels telling you how to solve them, or whether they can be solved.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Wednesday October 23, @07:08AM (1 child)
I don't think the specific examples I mentioned were by design, it was more lecturers setting all-elbows assignments where their one was the only one that mattered, or possibly existed as far as they were concerned. So you ended up with three impossible assignments to do at the same time. In the case of the nobody-else-could-do-it-either assignment, once it became obvious that (almost) no-one could do it I just did the minimum necessary and moved on to other work knowing they couldn't fail the entire class. So add that as a (9).
Oh, and the reason no-one could do it was because Eiffel, or at least the Eiffel software tools at the time. When the lecturer came into the lab and saw the whiteboard had a giant picture of the Eiffel tower broken in half with Bertrand Meyer hanging from a noose at the top he probably suspected there was a problem.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by pTamok on Wednesday October 23, @08:04AM
I'll accept (9). There are very likely other possibilities I've missed as well.
I sympathize with the problem of lecturers assuming that all your study time will be devoted to their subject. Some might be willing to coördinate their assigned workload with others, but often, if there is a differing mixture of subjects taken by each student, it is impossible to ensure that the load is not excessive for a particular student or group of students. You then get to learn about prioritization, negotiation strategies (e.g. how to get an extension, and who is most likeley to give it), and how to juggle multiple tasks. Sometimes you cannot win. That's how life is. The universe have no concept of fairness: it is a human invention. Some lecturers are just clueless and/or nasty and/or egotistical.
It is an illustration that university is not (high) school. (High) schools are, in fact, pretty sheltered environments, with reasonably well-planned curricula* and students can be given a lot of support*. Universities are still a pretty sheltered environment for students: they 'get away' with things that they certainly would not in a normal job. They have a curious mixture of 'play challenges' and challenges that have 'real world' implications, and how you deal (or not) with the study load is an area for learning. There were parts of my degree that I didn't get on with at all, which affected my attainment, and subsequent career possibilities. Organic chemistry is not my thing, but that could have been affected by some non-academic difficulties I was having at the time. Such is life.
*Yes, I can hear the laughter.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Opyros on Wednesday October 23, @05:05PM (1 child)
It was George Dantzig. [snopes.com]
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Wednesday October 23, @06:55PM
Thank you for finding the source of my story for me. I like to be able to provide references/citations. I'll try not to forget it (again).
(Score: 2) by driverless on Wednesday October 23, @04:21AM
That was how I did it as well, I read at about 100 pages an hour so with 2+ hours on the bus and bedtime reading I could get through a book a day, however I don't think anyone else I was a uni with in the 80s read a book a month, and no-one had cellphones, tablets, or laptops back then as an excuse. We really need a bit more data on this than just a few anecdotes.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 22, @11:10PM (3 children)
I can't even grasp that due to my frame of reference.
High school sucked ass. Loser government employees who couldn't be fired for incompetence...although one of them "resigned" after raping a friend of mine who coincidentally had a horrible life and OD'd on drugs last month.
I cut 6 months off high school by getting my GED and getting the fuck out. I was already employed during the last few months of high school doing tech support and software development for an ISP. Made bank compared to my classmates and their fast food jobs.
After I got out, I went full-time. They didn't give a shit that I didn't have a "High School Diploma"...only a "lowly" GED. Somehow with my lowly GED I managed to learn everything about software development (back in the day it was ASP, PHP, and ASP.NET, then on to Python and Node) and networking. I spent the next 4 years making ~$5k/mo. At one point I released a tool to automate stuff that saved the company tens of thousands per month. Got a nice $10k bonus for that. Ended up quitting to chase a girl who ended up not being worth it. Decided to take a cushy government job for a few years, then decided to go back into IT. Spent a 8 years at a shitty point-and-click MSP that only knew Windows and finally gave up trying to educate the wintards...so I start my own business. The first 4 years sucked and I was poor. The last ~10 years saw an average of $173k/yr.
Meanwhile...my sister went to school for 6 years at a "prestigious" college. Fast forward to today, and she's making a comfy $70k/year...but has ~$200k in student debt.
Abolish public schools. Stop catering to the dumbest people. Get your kids out of the camps.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday October 22, @11:52PM
You landed well.
On the other side of things, I have got more than a few promotions over the years that has a MS degree requirement... There are good opportunities that don't need diplomas, but there are more when you have them.
My high school was mostly a social learning experience. Maybe 6 college credits worth of academic/prep, the rest was about learning all the ways people screw off and get away with it to one degree or another.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 23, @01:35AM (1 child)
> ...so I start my own business. The first 4 years sucked and I was poor. ...
This lines right up with our experience, although you were a little quicker. The first five years of a small tech or engineering company are often hand-to-mouth, but once you get past that and have some reputation it gets a lot better.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 23, @02:41PM
I sorta lucked out. I had just started turning a profit, then a large client decided to fire their internal IT team the week before Christmas 2019 because they were "too expensive". It was because the CEO *constantly* called them and said things like "We just replaced all the X USB devices with Y USB devices, I need someone out to Office Z *right now*"....well...."Office Z" was in a different state and required a 6 hour drive to get there. Since the internal IT team worked for him, the response was "yes sir" and they'd jump in their car, bill the company for mileage, and have to stay in a hotel. They would happen every 3-4 weeks.
They came to me as they were getting ready to fire them and asked if I could do it cheaper. I threw out a number and put a line in the contract that said "Our rate is $150/hr for drive time and on-site time and it's at the expense of one of our techs not being able to answer your phone calls from other offices". The number was cheaper than what they were spending at the time and they ignored the $150/hr drive time. Every time the CEO called and said "Drive to Office Q and replace the sensors today!" I would say "We can do that remotely and save you a few thousand dollars. I just need your existing staff to plug USB devices in to all the computers and we'll have it set up in 15 minutes".
I ended up hiring several of their internal IT staff--the ones that didn't say "fuck that company, I don't want anything to do with the pieces of crap that were going to fire me December 20th with no notice" and gave them higher pay than what they were earning before--plus they all got to work from home instead of driving to a dumpster of a warehouse (that had no AC and no heat, had rats, and was right next door to a car shop with constantly grinding, hammering, compressors running, etc..).
Of course COVID hit a few months later and nearly 50% of my clients shut down and went out of business. The remainder (like the large client) stayed open with "skeleton crews" for 3 months, then started back up again. I spend those 3 months programming and automating. We can now have 2 people manage and maintain ~150 servers and ~3,500 desktops easily. One person could do it, but occasionally we get back-to-back calls and I don't like clients going to voicemail....and there needs to be coverage for vacation, sick days, etc...
I literally said to myself "Every other MSP is basically a middleman reseller of shitty services. They buy a ticket system from someone. They buy email services from someone. They buy phone service from someone. They buy remote access tools from someone. They buy monitoring tools from someone....then they resell all that shit at a mark-up to the client as part of a monthly bill...and they skim the profit off the top for themselves and to pay employees. That's dumb. Stop sending money to other companies."
So we wrote our own ticket system--we get a screen pop when someone calls in showing the office, list of users, and computers. You just click the user and click the computer, enter a short description like "Unable to print" and click "OK". You get a single panel of glass with an insane amount of detail about the client, the office, the computer, the user...and a bunch of "quick fixes" from the automation system. I would just click "Fix printing" and the automation system completely reinstalls the printer driver and re-creates the printers. There's also a "connect" button that tells the automation system to tell their computer to open a reverse SSH tunnel to our "jump host" and then sends you to a pure HTML and javascript-based VNC page so you can interact with their desktop. No more $5k/year for some shitty tool like TeamViewer. I can literally close 90% of our phone calls in under 60 seconds.
I can deploy an asterisk-based VoIP system for a client by selecting a few options in our Portal (pick a region, enter or request a few phone numbers and extensions, click a few routing choices, and enter the MAC addresses of the extensions) and telling the automation system "go". It'll spin up a VPS, install and configure asterisk, download firmware, and configure their switches to have a VoIP VLAN...then it's just plug the phones in and they're up and running within 20-30 minutes.
The only services we actually pay money for is AV, SIP Trunks, and a few VPSs in the cloud. Everything else runs on a kubernetes cluster on our own hardware in our office. This means every month we spend about $750 on "bills" for to manage ~4k machines (servers, desktops, routers, etc...). At $8 per device that's around $32k/mo that can go to paying employees more than they can get elsewhere. Most clients pay somewhere around $200/mo for their IT service, and thanks to automation, standardization, and monitoring we might get 1 or 2 calls per client per month.
It's a huge contrast compared to the MSP I worked at years and years ago. Spent tens of thousands on ConnectWise garbage when it first came out. Constant crashes. Tons of bureaucracy. Everything was Windows-based so they spent thousands per year on licensing and were always a version or two behind. They paid minimum wage unless you were family, and were frequently several days late on paychecks because paying vendors that were several months behind on payments to not have their tooling shut off was more important than paying the people working for them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 28, @05:35AM
Guess they get conditioned to "slogging" at an early age.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by RedGreen on Tuesday October 22, @10:46PM (16 children)
I will give high odds they cannot do math either, even with a calculator. The dumbing down of the education system has been going on for a good forty years with all these so called new fancy methods of teaching implemented. I see little hope for improvement until these are thrown out and going back to the basics that worked for generations, the old if it ain't broke don't fix it saying comes to mind. And it never was in any shape or form broken back then. They let the morons who did not want to do any of the hard work involved with learning take control and implement the garbage we have today.
"I modded down, down, down, and the flames went higher." -- Sven Olsen
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday October 22, @11:19PM (3 children)
Thing is: there are new skills to learn as well... Really valuable skills for today and tomorrow that didn't exist back when.
Already in the 1980s the most valuable skills that I learned during University were not taught by the professors, and certainly not by my high school.
I got some of the traditional University education while I was there, but frequently when I blew off classes and assignments within classes, the professor and I had an implicit understanding that what I was spending my time doing instead was more valuable than the traditional (and time consuming) things I was ignoring. Those were the cool profs, and they were the majority. Then there were a considerable number of profs who saw things more traditionally or just their own way... Those you had to brown nose if you wanted to maintain a high GPA.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 23, @07:14AM (2 children)
> the most valuable skills that I learned during University were not taught by the professors
69!
(Score: 3, Informative) by pTamok on Wednesday October 23, @03:25PM (1 child)
Sixty-nine factorial being the largest factorial most scientific calculators could calculate, as the result (1.7x1098 (to one dp)) just sneaked under the largest two-digit exponent in scientific notation that most calculators could display. Seventy factorial (1.2x10100(to one dp)) would give an error as it could not be displayed.
It meant you had to think a little bit about certain probability calculations (simplistic Permutations [wikipedia.org] and Combinations [wikipedia.org]), because simply plugging the numbers into the equations wouldn't work.
I imagine there was a common algorithm or integrated circuit/chip that implemented the algorithm used in most such calculators. It might even have been a simple look-up table.
For geeks/nerds who played with pocket calculators, the number 69 does indeed have a special significance.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday October 25, @04:41PM
10^100, the Googol limit.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by jelizondo on Wednesday October 23, @12:30AM (10 children)
A few weeks ago I was at an event where a lot of old geezers were around (I, included) and heard one complain to another how when he was in basic school he learned how to do square roots and now it is no longer taught.
I have two grandchildren, one 5 YO and one 3YO, both can use a cell phone or tablet to get whatever they want off the Internet. I’ll bet dollars to donuts the old fart complaining knows how to turn one on, at much. I did not want to start a fight so I kept my mouth shut but thought it is quite a bit more important today to know how to do a TikTok or Zoom or whatever than getting a square root.
Frankly, when was the last time you needed to get a square root? How much of the shit one gets at high school or Uni is useful? I love learning, I have two degrees, one in engineering and one in law, but I know a lot of what passed for education back then is not really relevant to everyday life or success.
(Score: 5, Touché) by RedGreen on Wednesday October 23, @02:37AM (3 children)
"Frankly, when was the last time you needed to get a square root? How much of the shit one gets at high school or Uni is useful?"
Not often but it is the process that is important the problem solving that gives benefit to the pupils. This can be applied to anything to help them in life what the school taught them is not as important.
"I modded down, down, down, and the flames went higher." -- Sven Olsen
(Score: 2) by JeffPaetkau on Wednesday October 23, @07:26PM
Yesterday.
Resizing logos to be the same size. Not the same width. Not the same height. The same size; the same number of pixels! Frankly I'm astonished this isn't a standard feature of image software. I derived the formula y2 = sqrt(p * y1 / x1).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 23, @08:54PM
When do I need a root? All the time.
(Score: 1) by Christopher Gray on Saturday October 26, @01:49PM
When I was in middle school in the late 70s, the class of 35-40 students with some borrowed 4-function (+, -, *, /) calculators was assigned the task of taking a root. We were not given a method, but had to derive that ourselves. Come to think of it, the class was divided up into five or six teams, and it was a contest to see which team could make the most precise answer during class time. And this was the class for slow learners.
(Score: 4, Touché) by Mykl on Wednesday October 23, @03:30AM (4 children)
When I was measuring up my outdoor deck to ensure that my posts were square - I used Pythagorean Theorem to confirm.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 23, @09:45AM (1 child)
And did you use pencil and paper and the tedious method they taught you in school, or did you just put the number in the calculator app on your phone and hit the funny icon that looks like a tick someone drew while sneezing?
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Wednesday October 23, @03:39PM
I got out my log tables and found the anti-log that corresponded to half of the log of the number.
Or, equivalently, use a slide rule: Move the cursor to the number on the A or B scale, and read the square root off on the C or D scale. Some slide rules have the R1,R2 scales - set the number with the cursor on the D scale, and the the square root off on the R1 or R2 scale (simplified version - there's a little bit more to using the R1 and R2 scales).
Newton's approximation algorithm also works.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday October 23, @11:50AM (1 child)
Recently they were still teaching kids to do the 3-4-5 right triangle and extend the lines. Usually you want a right angle from a provided line which can be done with 2 arcs. Then extend the newly generated 4 foot side and there's your right angle.
For squareness in general, they were teaching to make the diagonals match.
The new way is not to measure, just buy one of the fancier laser levels that outputs right angles in all directions and self levels and then trust it to work, or at best, occasionally verify it. Given the cost of labor vs the cost of laser levels, its hard to justify paying someone to whip out the tape measure and calculator when you can just "line up on the dot".
I don't know if this is STEM masquerading as shop or shop masquerading as STEM, but it's basically what they're doing in practice.
(Score: 2) by Mykl on Wednesday October 23, @10:03PM
Yes, I agree that using a laser level with squaring on it would be the easiest way to do it if you did a lot of that type of work. Mine was a one-off backyard project though and I didn't think that it was worth buying a new toy for that measure alone.
New project coming up soon - a curved wooden bench to go around a fire pit. Need to work out how I'm going to warp the wood to fit the curve I want (or whether to go with a polygon approach).
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday October 23, @11:54AM
One hypothesis is the filtering process is getting more selective and effective at an earlier age, or they're giving up on filtering in favor of the profit motive or similar, so Uni being 20% to 80% filtering rather than teaching is no longer relevant.
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by pTamok on Wednesday October 23, @08:22AM
"I will give high odds they cannot do math either, even with a calculator."
This is a snarky comment. Sorry.
Calculators can't do (much) math either. They mostly do arithmetic.
I think some might have symbolic/analytic 'equation solvers' these days, but since I don't use one, I'm not sure.
Arithmetic is one of those skills that improves with practice, so older people have an advantage, I can add things up with pencil and paper faster than younger people around me can with the calculators on their mobile phones. They don't perceive a need to practice pencil-and-paper methods, though.
One of the ways I used to keep myself occupied during long car journeys was to convert the fuel usage from litres per kilometre to miles per gallon in my head. (Yes, I know I'm weird. Never claimed not to be.) Doing Fermi estimation of stuff. Adding up the supermarket bill as I go round. But it's like physical exercise: some people don't, even though its beneficial in the long run. I suspect arithmetic is the same.
My mathematics skills are not first-class. I read Martin Garner's Recreational Mathematics columns in the Scientific American for a long time, and bought many of his books, but I was more of an observer than a participant. I don't have that spark of creativity that people really good at mathematics have.
(Score: 2) by Mykl on Wednesday October 23, @12:26AM (2 children)
Was this what the CCCP was hoping for all along?
Anyway, for those who want to embrace it, you can now watch famous movies in just a minute [youtube.com]
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 23, @12:38AM
No, this is what the GOP has been hoping for, stupid lemmings that will vote against their own self-interests.
(Score: 1) by Christopher Gray on Saturday October 26, @02:10PM
Could be a good resource for busy people to fake a knowledge of popular culture. When I lived in the US prior to 2013, I was always working overtime or multiple jobs to be able to pay the rent, so I did not have the time for watching video, but If I heard twice or thrice in my friends conversations about the same TV show, I would start reading summaries of the shows on the internet, so I could participate a little.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday October 23, @01:02AM (11 children)
Elite Ivy League colleges such as Columbia, huh? The trouble with these Ivy League schools is that they are susceptible to bullying by their rich supporters. Through those schools, rich parents can practically buy degrees for their spoiled brats who never bothered to learn, didn't have to learn even the very basic, foundational knowledge and skills taught in elementary school. These same parents also buy off the justice system and the victims of their brats' reckless and sadistic pranks that got people hurt. I would not take the student populations of those schools as representative of all schools. The Atlantic seems a good media organization, but on this matter, I am suspicious that they engaged in cherry picking and sensationalism.
(Score: 5, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday October 23, @01:36AM (9 children)
I taught (TA'ed) a senior level digital design lab at a private university.
When I gave my students the grades they earned based on what was on the papers they submitted, I was pulled aside and told -directly by my advisor, relaying what the Dean of Engineering told him: "These are paying customers, if they show up, they get at least a C."
Ivy league admissions have been for sale forever. Do you think those that buy their way in are going to flunk out?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Wednesday October 23, @02:18AM
The same sort of thing happens at the prep schools that claim to give a much better chance of entrance. The whole thing is a big scam as paying to get a degree from one of those colleges doesn't necessarily ever pay for itself outside of a few specialties.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday October 23, @02:32AM
This practice was at least at one time known as the "gentleman's C". And no, it wasn't offered to the kids who were there on scholarship. The Ivies in particular tend to get that sort, because really they just want Moneybags Jr to have a nice-looking degree and the right connections for when they immediately become the #2 at Moneybags Inc.
My own alma mater is fairly famous, regularly near the top of the US News rankings for a school its size. And the thing is, there were definitely students who were there to learn and worked their butts off, and definitely faculty that focused on making sure they actually did learn stuff. But there were also some that got to skate through spouting absolute drivel. How do I know? Because they'd leave their masterpieces on the shared printers (back in my day, paper copies were the norm), and just trying to read them I could see that they were very carefully saying absolutely nothing with an extensive use of a thesaurus. On the flip side, those who were from a poorer background had a much harder time getting the materials, doing their work-study jobs, sometimes doing their odd jobs on top of that, but did their best to make the most of their chance.
As for me, I was in the "learn stuff" camp, and somewhere in the middle of the income scale: After all, if I and my folks are paying that much to be there, I might as well actually try to absorb some discrete math and database design theory and economics and world history - you never know when that stuff will be useful. The profs were generally happy to support students that genuinely wanted to learn, too.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Wednesday October 23, @07:20AM (5 children)
The problem is that while you can H1B STEM to substitute the lack of local "talents" or even bring in a few foreign econ majors to run your companies, trying to outsource your humanities, social and legal majors from overseas to run the state dept. and backseat-drive (age-declined) congressmen and senators ends up with, well, the current state of things.
compiling...
(Score: 3, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday October 23, @12:23PM (4 children)
I don't believe the current state of affairs is due to immigrants running the show behind the scenes.
I do believe that the current state of affairs is due, in large part, to Moneybags the 4th running the legacy organizations with their fellow holders of paid for ivy League degrees all believing they know how the rest of us should be living to better serve them, and clumsily yet often successfully pushing laws and policies to shape the culture away from listening to those tedious academic wizards who made them look stupid in school.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 23, @04:12PM
Science has also become beholden to Moneybags who themselves never produced any science, but who have very certain views about how you should do it. And by "do it" I mean run with their kool idea - plus lots of permission slips, lots of overhead, lots of proving yourself (to their high standards).
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Wednesday October 23, @09:04PM (2 children)
You're actually describing the same problem from a different angle: As generational wealth inequality widens, a loopback is formed between the wealthy lobbying to cut back on public education leading to increased reliance on foreigners from nations who aren't cutting on their public education leading to mistrust in goverment leading to elections where none of the candidates is inclined to actually fix the tax or education system since they themselves are beneficiaries of how things are.
A current vivid example is Boeing's machinists strike: ~30k skilled technicians are striking for 40% pay increase sounds like a classic progressive cause, right? Well, they're all wearing MAGA hats because, between the Democrats being the MBAs that lowered the quality standards to focus on satisfying the investors and the Republicans being the investors and speculators, no one is stepping forward to fix the problem other than the demagogue pointing fingers at the designated "others" of the day.
But you could also see this in closer-to-home industries like gaming and film where the MBAs were pressured by investors to expand to other markets so, under the pretense of political correctness, they gradually removed American themes from their titles resulting in very generic, boring and under-performing launches. And what was the result? The devs got the heat with increased demands and worse pay (and the occasional layoffs) so now they're trying to unionize. And you just know there's going to be union action against the H1Bs around the corner with racism eventually working its way into things...
All the same.
compiling...
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday October 23, @09:29PM (1 child)
>The devs got the heat with increased demands and worse pay
The game development industry has been an unholy pit of worker abuse since the later 1980s, and Gen whatever they are willingly, eagerly even, signed up for the abuse - no H1Bs required. Also, precious little education required for the bulk of the workforce, just a willingness to put in life crushing hours. Sure, like two guys in the dev team need to know how to rotate a matrix - the rest? Grind is life, life is grind. Not only play testers, but content creators etc.
M.U.L.E., Seven Cities of Gold, StarRaiders (if you have any Atari Computer background, there were similar titles for C64, Apple II, etc. in the mid 1980s) - those were small team efforts, put together on human-scale timelines.
World of Warcraft, Starcraft, Diablo, similar titles by other houses I don't know because I never thought about playing that much in that era... those have production teams bigger than blockbuster movies, at least by their 2000s re-releases.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Wednesday October 23, @10:55PM
Modern game engines wrap it all up well enough you don't even need that nowadays.
Don't forget the '83 crash was resolved with the Japanese NES release in '85 which was a walled garden of higher quality, focused titles that avoided competing against each other. So, both the outsourcing and the regulatory factors from the aforementioned feedback loop (cycle, technically) were present.
I believe up until 2020 there was a fairly strong indie game market and the smartphone games markets wasn't big teams either up until recently. Maybe you could even argue the gaming industry is still trying to recover from COVID-19? Honestly I mostly lost interest in games even before that and only tracked GPU and title releases due to the same occupational interests most of us here have.
compiling...
(Score: 2) by bussdriver on Wednesday October 23, @05:50PM
My cousin who was in colleges for literally almost 20 years not finishing or failing and changing majors. He finally went to a private university which was somewhat well known and the advisor told him to just stick with a single major and keep paying and he will finally graduate. He was able to transfer credits in if he paid for them. Knowing him, I can say he'd not likely pass any class; his attention deficit is too bad to pass an honest class.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Wednesday October 23, @07:35PM
The trouble with these Ivy League schools is that they are susceptible to bullying by their rich supporters.
No, it's that kids born into that kind of wealth have no need to learn anything. The rich don't need brains, they hire brains.
Our nation is in deep shit, but it's illegal to say that on TV.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 23, @02:29AM
TFS omits a critical detail. Yes, these are students in literature classes who find the reading workload overwhelming. But literature is also a general education requirement for many majors, and the students are just satisfying the requirement. Is it bad that computer science major might not be willing to devote as much attention to a literature class as they would to a math or computer science class? I think that's understandable and a rational decision, though there's also much value in students at least getting somewhat of a broad education instead of only taking classes for the core requirements of their major.
Being a full-time student is often compared to the time commitment of a full-time job. But college is becoming more expensive, and students are faced with either going into large amounts of debt or working significant hours. If we want students to focus more on academics, we need to make it more financially viable for them to do so.
Faculty in colleges aren't battling students over the workload partly because priorities have already been conveyed to them during their prior education. The article explicitly says as much, that high schools and middle schools aren't expecting students to do as much reading, either. If we don't like that students are addicted to their phones, we need to address the problem of social media companies trying to make their products addictive to maximize "engagement" with their content. We've decided that students need to make extracurricular activities a priority when applying to colleges. We're telling students they need to make a significant investment of time toward activities outside of school, so how can we complain when they do exactly what we've told them to do? Students sometimes act entitled, but this is also a learned behavior. You don't like students with a sense of entitlement? Neither do it, but the solution is to stop teaching and rewarding that behavior. Perhaps it means not suing the school because you don't like that your child got busted for plagiarism and was held accountable through a rather lenient punishment.
Yes, there are students who don't give a damn, but they've always existed. They're not really the issue, though, and I don't believe students today are inherently worse than at any time in the past. The behaviors and priorities we dislike are prevalent because we've imparted them on the students. The summary seems to take a bit of a mocking tone, one that's not present in the article, and is mostly unjustified in my opinion. Yes, it's bad that students aren't reading as much and may lack the desire and attention span to do so. Then we need to understand why that's occurring and change our expectations for today's youth.
In my experience, the pressure of working significant hours to pay for tuition limits the time students are willing and able to devote to their studies. It's probably a major factor in why students find reading lots of books overwhelming. Fine, let's address it by making college much more affordable. That would be a good start.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by BananaPhone on Wednesday October 23, @02:29AM (2 children)
The movie in Idocracy was called ASS
It was nothing but a guy's naked butt on screen.
People in the theater were laughing as he farted.
https://www.reddit.com/r/idiocracy/comments/1crnhq2/the_1_movie_in_the_country_was_called_ass/ [reddit.com]
We are going there people!
(Score: 4, Funny) by Thexalon on Wednesday October 23, @02:39AM (1 child)
The really incredibly funny thing about that: Something along those lines [wikipedia.org] has been confused with notable high art, and the guy who made it treated as some kind of serious artist deserving of lots of money and attention.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 3, Funny) by quietus on Wednesday October 23, @06:26AM
Ha! Let me one up you.
These things [wikipedia.org] sell for millions. You too can have a single end product for the benign price of €7500 [christies.com].
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Covalent on Wednesday October 23, @03:08AM (1 child)
Kids read as well as they ever did. The problem is that more and more kids are going to college.
In 1970 when maybe 10% of kids went to college, those were the 10% that could read (and do math) quite well.
Now, when maybe 50-75% of kids go to college, these are the 10% that can read well ... and the 40-65% that can't.
The problem isn't the kids. It's that college just isn't for everyone.
You can't rationally argue somebody out of a position they didn't rationally get into.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Wednesday October 23, @07:17AM
Columbia Uni is a reasonably decent uni. For your argument to hold, Columbia must be pulling from a lower achievement range.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by pTamok on Wednesday October 23, @06:33AM (8 children)
"...read books anymore."
I would write as "...read books any more."
Wiktionary: Anymore [wiktionary.org]
Their attention span have been ruined by smartphones...
I would write that as "Their attention span has been ruined by smartphones..." (Italics to emphasize what I have changed)
"What makes it extra bad..."
I would write as "What makes it worse..." (Italics to emphasize what I have changed)
I know language changes, and has changed since I was taught, but I didn't realize it had changed so much.
One of the benefits of reading is that it exposes you to writing that has been edited professionally, and generally has fewer errors in spelling and grammar. The simple act of reading well written text helps to improve your writing.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Wednesday October 23, @11:11AM (3 children)
It could also be that I'm not actually English nor American so it's not my first or primary language and you should not be learning any language from it or me.
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Wednesday October 23, @11:39AM (2 children)
Apologies, I misread the original article to all be an edited quotation from the article in the Atlantic. I would not normally be so directly critical of a non-professional writer's language, and I apologise for that. It was rude and unwelcoming. I have made the point in other forums that people who do not have English as a first language are to be welcomed (because people who speak English as a first language are rarely fluent in another).
I hope you can forgive my rudeness, and it does not put you off from contributing in the future.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Wednesday October 23, @11:56AM
It's fine. No offense taken. I know it's not perfect, the longer you go from being in school the worse it gets cause there is nobody around to remind you or correct you any more. So you forget the little things, or bad things not corrected eventually become the new normal things. In some regard I probably do feel or think the same when I see people trying to communicate in languages I'm fluent in. But it has in some regard normalized I don't tend to care any longer, which is probably a bad thing to.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by janrinok on Wednesday October 23, @12:55PM
This comment, and the reply to it, are welcome. We do not all have the same skills or linguistic abilities. Thank you to both of you.
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Wednesday October 23, @01:02PM
I always correct my kids' use of colloquialisms. I don't particularly care, except they should have the capability to speak, read and write formal English for those circumstances where it is required. I assume they will pick up slang any old way but formal English not so much and it needs to be taught.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by quietus on Wednesday October 23, @03:25PM (2 children)
Are you really, really sure? It seems to me like looorg is using anymore here as an adverb in a negative construction, in the sense of to any further extent, any longer, and thus [writingexplained.org] should be written as, indeed, anymore.
Just 2 cents by your friendly neighborhood non-English speaker.
I do feel a rash coming up though.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Wednesday October 23, @07:16PM (1 child)
I like to say yes, but clearly I can't be trusted in these matters. That said when I read his comment I knew he was right about at least a few of the points such as worse instead of bad. I know it cause I was taught it once, but then it sort of just falls away until you are reminded of it again.
Partly I blame spell-checkers. Online like this I'm a slave to it, if I don't see the little read line I just think most things are fine and then I don't pay it much attention. If the read line is there I at least try to look it up or make some obvious correction. Worst part is when a you accidentally spell some other word in the dictionary instead or a letter fall off forming another word and then things look deceptively correct. Also there isn't really an editing process as with normal writing, it's a minute or two to respond and that is it. Now editing, rewriting things or looking it over a few more times. Perhaps I should. But I don't.
(Score: 3, Funny) by quietus on Thursday October 24, @07:58AM
Tut-tut-tut-tut-tut.
While I appreciate your attempt to prevent (any) (further) bloodshed, oh Mere Mortal: please stand aside, as sharp and pointy objects will soon whiz through the air.
I have been slumbering for centuries, it seems, waiting for a true blue-blooded grammar nazi to cross my path: and just when I had given up hope, there arrives pTamok.
Through the open window, the misty October wind carries the faint sound of quills being sharpened, out of the direction of Oxford-shire. The Universe must have its pound of flesh.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by ledow on Wednesday October 23, @07:52AM (3 children)
It's a general lack of attention, I don't think smartphones are helping but it's not just smartphones that are the problem.
They can't focus on anything for any significant length of time, any lack of immediate progress puts them off, they have no intention to put in the slog-work of learning and so they never acquire the skill of being able to learn quickly.
It's a building trend I've seen over 25 years working close to education (I'm not a teacher), and it's definitely present. I see it in new hires, I see it in young teachers, I see it in children and it's even creeping that far into management because of the age groups that are affected.
If I send an email that's a couple of paragraphs long, people complain. Everything has to be bullet-pointed and brief (and thus miss much of the subtle detail and understanding), even when it's the most critical thing they're dealing with at that moment and have asked for more detail.
We have 20-something's who've never read a book, something we've always had in some fashion, but you literally now have books at your fingertips for free in a digital format with easy-to-read text. They don't have the attention span to do it, and hence they instead go for YouTubes which hold their attention for longer (ironically... even though it takes far longer to learn anything). It's not the technology that's holding them back - they have Wikipedia and the world's libraries right there BECAUSE of technology. But it's not how their generation has been taught to do things, even by themselves.
They prefer information-sparse, high-bandwidth, data-intensive things that do the imagination and thinking for them. Reading a book isn't about putting your finger on the line you're reading and sounding it out, it needs to be translated into an image or scene or character in your head, and that's the part they lack, which is why they lack the interest. To them, it's just words, and they have to keep track of details.
I've asked a few 20-somethings over the years about it. Have they ever got to that point where the book is "reading them"... where their eyes are not taking in the text any more, it's just going directly into their visual and audio cortices and becoming images and sounds in their head and they're losing all track of time outside that. It's an indicator of the phenomenon because they generally don't. Even as a boy, reading LOTR or some heavy book, my eyes were directly connected to my imagination and it would stay like that for hours because "I" wasn't involved, I was just along for the ride while my eyes and brain did the work. And every detail on the page was somehow in my head too, and you lose all sense of actually "reading" the words.
But the younger generations don't experience that, and so they're just along for the ride but need video and someone else's imagination to do the hard work for them. It also means reading is boring for them, a slog that they have to get through, and "work" for their eyes and brain because they're reading the words in the school-like, finger-on-the-line sense only.
It's also present online. I've had people complain because of a three-short paragraph comment (or some comment like this). Apparently that's TL;DR to them.
One of the best things about my daughter - who lives with my ex- - is that even as a kid, and still now aged 16, her reading is incredible. She'll absorb books like her dad, mum, and grandfather do and then be hungry for more. It's a dying skill, but it's nothing to do with technology, but building a learning discipline. She has phones, laptops, TVs, etc. all available to her, just the same. But they aren't as interesting to her because her favourite movie-theatre is in her head, her favourite director is her imagination.
It's beyond literacy rates, it's beyond Hollywoodisation of stories, it's beyond having a phone in your pocket. It's a learning habit that we don't teach or encourage any more. It's a parental failing in many respects. Of course you can have 20 more minutes on your iPad before bed... reading a book with text on a screen.
These people are not going to be able to significantly study history, literature, etc. are going to fail to absorb documentation and instructions, and ultimately it's going to come back and bite them because they'll still be in a world full of T&Cs and lengthy legal documents and necessary instructions.
If you haven't ever read even a small book and had that disconnect (similar to the "I've driven 500 miles and don't remember the last 100 because it was just done autonomously" feeling - not because you were on your phone or anything), I suggest you read a few until you do. On your phone, if you like. The tech makes no difference, it's just made things EVEN MORE available and full of choices. You're utterly missing out and setting yourself up for failure. And, no, AI ain't gonna do it for you. We're not talking about deep text analysis. We're talking about your head being able to shortcut your eyes into your imagination without the part of your brain that interprets individual words, sounds them out or has to think what they mean ever getting involved.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by pTamok on Wednesday October 23, @08:54AM
If I read a book before I see a film of the book, I usually don't like the film because it does not correspond with my imagination. I felt the same with (children's) illustrated books, because rarely felt that the illustrations coincided with my imagination.
There are exceptions: Many people think that Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings was an excellent interpretation of the text. Oddly, I like both the illustrations of The Wind in the Willows by Ernest H. Shepard and Arthur Rackham, but have not found any illustrator of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland that I like - none correspond adequately with my imagination. I don't particularly like Tolkien's illustrations of his works, but presumably they are what he imagined - or perhaps, like me, he was unable to draw what he 'saw' in his imagination. (Learning to draw what I imagine is on my bucket list.)
The facility by which one's imagination is conjured up by a book might differ between people, much like any other capability. Some people are naturally excellent football players, others (like me) are more likely to trip over their own feet while dribbling. Ability to imagine could well have a wide natural variation, and those who are good at it don't realise how difficult it might be for others*.
*I have an anecdote about this. It regards beauty, rather than imagination. It is not original, but I can't remember the source. Essentially, beautiful people lead different lives. They tend to get good customer service, and thereby assume that everyone gets good customer service. The anecdote concerned getting service in a sandwich shop (deli), and the beautiful person concerned had no idea they were getting far better service than the writer (a regular customer) got. The beautiful person concerned genuinely did not regard themselves as good-looking, and was used to a life of pleasant people with smiles on their faces being attentive. So it could be that people with an active imagination do not understand people for whom it is not easy.
(Score: 3, Funny) by quietus on Wednesday October 23, @03:47PM
Not only with kids, or otherwise the revolution would already have happened.
I visualize the revolution, by the way, as a blockade of adults on office chairs outside the headquarters of multinational companies, screaming "NO MORE TECHNICAL TRAININGS IN VIDEO FORMAT".
(In the background, an influencer is on fire.)
(Score: 2) by sgleysti on Wednesday October 23, @08:59PM
The person with the longest or second longest post in the thread gets it.
I'm an engineer. This happens all the time where I work. It pains my metaphorical soul. I can't tell you how many times someone says, after talking about a concept, "I don't understand. Please draw me a picture." It drives me up a wall because diagrams can take a bit of time to draw, and it puts the burden on me to spend more effort communicating with someone who comes off as intellectually lazy. But maybe you're right; maybe those visualization skills just aren't there, and I need to be more compassionate.
I've come up with some pretty cool circuits visualizing the different topologies in my mind. Can get reasonably far before I need to transition to paper, at least for smaller stuff. Paper is good too though.
This is up there on my overall list of favorite things.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday October 23, @11:41AM
Big pharma purchases too many ads for legacy media to report ADD meds as even a possible minor factor. Also consider low quality diet, high caffeine intake, etc.
I find it interesting they carefully avoided researching workloads. It's entirely possible the "real" problem is they're utterly innumerate (I would not be surprised) and instead of doing 3 hours/week of math homework they have to do 9 hours/week of math homework and that workload is interfering with their reading schedule for lit classes.