Replies

Find a way to teach engineering to verbally oriented students who can't learn math by sense of smell.

I think that Kern he is bitter because he didn't have the 'knack'. Verbally oriented individuals should become english majors, history majors, lawyers, etc and I commend engineering departments that weed out all the non-hackers, because if an english teacher screws up a sentence, you just have a screwed up sentence, but if an engineer screws up, a bridge could collapse or an airplane could fall out of the sky and kill a few people.

The Knack

Back when I was an engineering student, there was a legend about an old civil engineering professor who had a unique grading system. His tests consisted of four questions, each graded all-or-nothing. If you answered four of the four correctly, it was an A, 3 was a B, 2 was a C, 1 was a D, and none correct was an F. One student asked him, after a disappointing result, why partial credit wasn't awarded. The professor stated, "If you build a bridge, and it falls down, no partial credit".

Find a way to teach engineering to verbally oriented students who can't learn math by sense of smell.

In many ways I agree: Don't know his school (deliberately concealed! - which is a politically correct way to conceal poor performance, and NOT engineeringly accurate way of concealing FEEDBACK and getting improvement in their product!), but you don't need to know math to be an engineer.

you have to LIVE IT, to understand it intuitively and to be able to USE IT without thinking and fighting it.

Granted math majors, then physics majors, then engineering majors treat math differently in each field - with engineers using it as brute force rather than intrically and intimiately, and we engineers don't play with math the way math majors do (I have a Math/Physics double BS as a daughter, so I know all three disciplines.)

But you have to understand and sense inside your head to movement of the steel, the flow of a current ina wire network, the compression of a screw thread inside a bolt, or the twist of an airflow in an HVAC duct as you design circuits and dams and buildings.

Or they break.

I am an engineer by early training. The academic system for engineers is set up for nerds and dweebs who are unable to explain to anyone, least of all themselves, why the bridge collapsed, or the airplane fell from the sky, which they do with some, but hopefully rare, regularity.

Our politically correct writer of the article posted also failed to mention that today, most of the teaching assistants who make the nerds' and dweebs' lives living hell are from points east where speek Engrish is unkown aht foam.

However, you cannot beat the mental discipline and internal logic of scientific and mathematical study. Kern's Komplaint about the math teacher is ridiculous. It's math dude. You learn it in the wee hours of the morning working the problems.

Now there is absolutely nothing to preclude the study of the liberal arts (of which mathematics is one) by engineers. In fact, with our powers of study, logic, and concentration, I dare say we could complete the classwork of the average lackadaisacal 4-year liberal arts dolt in two semesters.

In my day, and at my school, certain liberal arts courses were required of everyone. Fooey! Nowadays, nobody knows nothing.