Re:Valedictorian Speaks Out Against Schooling in Graduation ...
by mkr-hn on Wednesday August 04, 2010 @08:58AM
(#1574362)
I don't know if it's this way at every level, but the one quarter of an MSNA (I think that's the acronym) prep course I had to take in tech school was chapter after chapter of lists of steps. If that's the way the other three quarters are, I don't know how a Windows administrator fresh out of school could handle an unexpected situation.
"Go through these menus to achieve x" won't help you when some joker breaks explorer and forces you to work with the command line.
Either way, I'm glad I went the Linux admin route. The instructor for the classes was about as quirky as you'd expect a Linux admin teacher to be, and all four quarters were a load of fun.
If any of my grade school classes had been like that, I wouldn't have hated it so much.
There certainly are lazy people claiming to be smarter than those with good grades.
But in my experience, the students with perfect grades are far more likely to excel at school than at anything else.
When I started teaching at NYU, I ran into a lot of these students. They typically rocked my calculus 1-2 classes; they took calculus in high school but wanted to maintain a 4.0 GPA so they took it again in college.
Even in school, past a certain point, it doesn't serve them well. In Calc 3 or Linear Algebra (two more advanced classes I've taught), you must think for yourself to pass, rather than just applying the differentiation algorithm. That's when the 4.0's get pwned.
It gets even worse when I interview them for a job and ask them an open ended question: "Looking at XXX data, how can you estimate YYY? What other data would be useful?"
Many of them are reasonably smart. But they've spent years preparing themselves for schooling, not for actually building things. I'll take the kid with lower grades + open source project any day .