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Re: When math makes sense - w/ cooking, consruction
Posted:
Jun 10, 2013 8:55 PM
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On Mon, Jun 10, 2013 at 5:14 PM, Robert Hansen <bob@rsccore.com> wrote:
>
> On Jun 10, 2013, at 7:07 PM, kirby urner <kirby.urner@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> You mean high school students were already doing construction? Or do you
> mean they were already tracked into construction such that their choice to
> pursue so-called "blue collar" jobs was already made (perhaps for them).
>
>
> No, I mean that they were attracted to construction as a profession, in
> high school, like I was attracted to engineering. You have something
> against construction?
>
No, I just attended mostly international high schools where "construction"
would not have been a focus for most kids. Not because we weren't
surrounded by Roman ruins, but because construction jobs are not usually
the kind that take you overseas, unless contracting for the military, and
in Rome we didn't have that many military families. Same in Manila,
because most of the American engineers and construction workers would be
tied to Clark AFB or Subic NB and they had their own schools. My best
friend's dad was a road engineer in the private sector but rather unusual
in that regard. It's from him that we borrowed the HP-65 and learned
rudimentary programming. I was ready for that IBM 360/370 when I got to
that blinking terminal prompt.
>
> On the contrary, today's machines tend to run self-diagnostics and include
> many "chips".
>
>
> Nope. I was just down at the shop last week. They were full of grease. I
> love grease. The saddest part of running out of fossil fuels is a world
> without oil and grease. I really don't see me staying up till the wee
> hours of the morning rebuilding an electric motor.
>
My mechanic of choice is Barry Redd, retired banker. Turns out a "dimmer
switch" in a cabin cruiser is something you would of course like, but it's
hard to come by. Something about DC I guess. Barry programmed a chip, in
assembler, that does the dimming. Mixed with that oil and grease are lots
of such delicate electronics, at least in the maritime world. Your shop
might have been more focused on lawn mowers, given the Florida ecosystem.
Barry is oft covered in grease and oil, helps people take boat motors apart
and reassemble. Here's a picture of Barry doing something mechanical:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/kirbyurner/3695569063/
He's one of the two "machine-savvy guys" I talk about in this post:
http://worldgame.blogspot.com/2006/06/machine-world.html
Barry gave a lecture on his dimmer switch device one evening, shared the
source code. Not bad for a banker, I was thinking.
>
> Either you think students should have options or you don't. You can't have
> it both ways. You can't say "Yes, they should be able to choose a
> curriculum they are interested in as long as it involves algebra and
> calculus."
>
>
I think they should have options, which is why I shared three camera shots
for the "badge options" that Boy Scouts have. Did you know about Mozilla
and badging? We were talking about that at work around the virtual water
cooler recently. Scott, our boss, thinks badges are too wimpy for what
we're doing. But he wasn't denigrating scouting, just facing the reality
that most people aren't Eagle Scouts.
> Biz math ended up along with typewriters on the ash heap of history.
>
>
> Nope. Biz math equals spreadsheets plus the basic principles of accounting
> and finance. It is a huge requirement of practically all professions from
> vocational to technical. It is the "rithmetic" in the three R's. Yet, it
> got displaced by algebra and calculus, which are used by only a handful of
> quants.
>
You make that mistake often: confusing a concept in your head with a
changing reality. "Biz math" is whatever "biz" needs in the way of "math"
from its cubicle people and if you've been in a cubicle lately you know
that not just Excel is important but Microsoft Access. You can't do
reliable bookkeeping on a spreadsheet because they're notoriously
unprotected. If somewhat makes a mistake and wants to "back it out", they
have to record a transaction in database world, and that's the world you
want when doing bookkeeping, with people's (users') fingerprints all over
the data, everyone on record as to what they did to what column when.
Spreadsheets have none of these features and any business of more than a
tiny number of employes is using a database, not a spreadsheet, for its
accounting.
I stand by my original thesis: once cubicle world started to require SQL,
in the form of Microsoft Office, Access a part of it, the biz math teachers
mostly just walked, became too expensive, or the textbooks just dropped off
the map as too ridiculously old fart to matter. The books had no SQL. The
teachers had no SQL experience.
In today's world, might as well go get a shopping cart, as far as being
taken seriously in business. True, there's a close-to-retirement
management layer that got there through good old boy connections and
doesn't know any "biz math" (i.e. SQL) but that's a vanishing species.
If you want to be taken seriously in any automated record keeping
environment, you at least know what SQL *is*, whether you know how to write
a SELECT statement another matter (an 8th grade topic, dropping to 6th in
near future -- in schools that have any competent faculty I mean). No one
out of high school should have not at least had the option of learning this
basic skill to some level.
> Your doctrine is no different than these others' Kirby. You want the
> students to study what you want them to study, not what they want to study.
>
> Bob Hansen
>
>
My doctrine, as spelled out over the years in this archive, is that the
model for USA public schools at least is you're educating "virtual
presidents". It makes no difference if they're inclined towards
construction. We have presidents in every walk of life and of every
religion and gender. It's not about what you actually *do* in the sense of
"career". The Oval Office is that shape for a reason: it represents
Everyman's "head" (skull). We're each a virtual president in our
democracy. That's the "doctrine" I've been spelling out, have web pages
about, would say that anyone familiar with my views *at all* knows about me
or is learning.
Kirby
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