each semester my son sends me a little pile of course materials from some engineering class or another. he’s studying CompSci at a nice university, i’m naturally curious, and ask a lot of nosy questions. they do usually come pleading for help deciphering some arcane bit of UNIX too. not that i’m particularly helpful, it’s amazing he keeps asking really.
i have roughly the reliability of a old Magic 8-Ball — i give out definite answers about ⅓ of the time and even then only with 50% accuracy. the rest of the time he gets,
“Reply Hazy. Try Again.”
shake shake shake
“Outlook not so good.”
but one thing is consistently true and 100% reliable: my disappointment.
… in the university, … in the professor, … in the course materials, … in education in general, … in … well, you get the drift.
often the entire set of handouts for each lesson could fit nicely in a concise twitter thread. this sort of economy of words was appreciated in the days of heavy textbooks and overpriced xerox copies. but these are free university web pages — let your muse loose professors!
and what’s in those preciously dear words is lousy with bugs spanning the entire entomological gamut: tidy pile of minor typos, a heap technical blunders, and even the occasional infuriatingly wrong-on-internet major fuck up.
when Stack overflow and a bit if Googling provides more accurate and specific info about the topic being “taught,” i often begin to wonder about how little time has been given to this steaming mound of words.
but lest you think i have it out for educators, fear not. i always give busy teachers the benefit of the doubt. my wife is a math teacher after all.
my thoughts are more like…
shake shake shake
“Perhaps the professor was simply out of time. Maybe she dashed off these instructions on her way to class this morning?”
that’s usually when i happen accros a date left to slowly grow stale in some pdf, usually at least five years old. then i experience that sinking horror: this error has frustrated literally hundreds of students. thousands of frustratingly unproductive hours have been wasted fruitlessly typing these non-functional commands. and it could have been prevented with a ten minute proofread.
shake shake shake
“Has even a cursory walkthrough by a TA been attempted? Has not one single student asked about this in five years?”
if these mistakes have been around that long surely those things happened. probably many times. questions were raised, answers were given, notes were taken. but the errors remain.
in the end i simply don’t know the reasons. there are probably many. they probably involve more complex issues than my limited imagination of the topic…
shake shake shake
“Very doubtful.”
shake shake shake
“Concentrate and ask again.”
But of course, the question I ask consistently, accurately, and very loudly is, “How much am I paying for this pile of…”
