Posted on 12/19/2017 2:44:20 PM PST by RicocheT
"The U.S. is about to spend a small fortune on teaching science, technology, engineering and mathematics, or STEM....That’s a good investment in theory, but the American education system is in no position to make the most of it."
"...Students should reach college prepared to take serious science and engineering courses, yet many don’t. Our math teaching is half a century out of date, and without math there is no STEM. Computer science builds on electronics and “discrete mathematics,” as opposed to the classical type leading to calculus."
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
Depends on the candidate and what compromises we’d be willing to make...but we recognize it is a high skill position and they don’t come cheap :)
You’re right! It is especially useful when listening to a political debate or even watching the news and trying to figure out if the story is full of lies or not.
Absolutely by design, the Alinsky method called for the dumbing down of the schools. I think you knew that- you were just being sarcastic?
Thank you for your post. I still haven’t given up hope until we have been completely invaded. And I hope Trump turns things around.
The one semester I taught AP calculus and trig (I couldn’t stomach the rest of the year, being surrounded by liberals was making me ill) I came up with a PowerPoint presentation try and courage the kids to study math related subjects. I had a random list of careers and their entry-level salary is. Then I organized it by highest to lowest. And then I marked those that had a math background. What do you know, they were all at the top! Then I added to each major the average number of job offers given to each graduate. You can guess the results. The research took me hours and hours and hours by the way. But I wanted it to be accurate and to have sources.
Pretty much common sense for those of us here, but these kids brainwashed by liberal teachers had no clue.
So what is the salary range?
STEM without math is STE.
Hey, I got an engineering degree when I was the only woman in the class. I graduated second in my class.
Perhaps but I still view laziness and stupidity is a better explanation. Haven’t met an educrat yet who knows who Alinsky is. I prefer to look for the simples explanation that fits the known facts before I will add another layer of complication. Alinsky is an additional complication.
“Colleges and universities should have to declare data about each discipline: the probability of getting hired in that discipline and what someone can expect to be paid immediately after graduation. ”
I went to a career day seminar, expecting all that information to be there. It was woefully pathetic.
My plan was to major in physics. I was in my first year and since that seminar didn’t give me any real information, I went to the physics department and asked for starting salary of physicists. And then I went to the various engineering departments and asked them. Since the coursework was about the same difficulty, I became an engineer.
Although I agree with you that universities should supply that information, students also need to take some initiative. If they can’t even figure out how much they will make when they graduate and exactly what kind of work they will do, they really don’t even belong in college.
I had a serious argument with my daughter’s classmates on that.
They quoted the administrator as saying that art was essential to life. I said engineering was necessary to build civilization, math to understand it, technical skills to make it. They argued with me more.
Finally, I said, “Cavemen had art, but they lacked antibiotics science discovered, power plants engineers designed and techs built. So no, you can have art before and after civilization, but don’t tell me it is important.”
Agreed. If there was really this unmet demand for STEM graduates, engineers wouldn’t be pushed out at 40.
“Part of the problem is that school districts do not / cannot pay people enough to draw them into education rather than working for Boeing, Microsoft, Amazon, Intel, Lockheed-Martin, GM, Ford, and so forth.”
And even if money is not an issue, the liberal working conditions driveaway anyone with any other option.
I was in Texas when I got my teaching credential, and there was a program in place to convert people from science and math fields into teachers. Well there was a small group of us engineers that decided to take it on. Most were retired, some just wanted to do something different. We all got our pieces of paper and started teaching. Every single one of us quit the first year.
True, but if you want a job that generally pays a lot and is pretty secure, programming is a great way to go.
I’ve already seen departments expand the definition of IT so that data administrators, configuration managers and first level tech support counts towards the women in IT metrics.
I finally learned I had to work lots of problems to survive and sort of thrive in Calc and Difeq. To do that I got the outline series and went to an empty class room with blackboards all the way around where I went ‘round and ‘round the room for three hours every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon after I finished teaching surveying lab.
Hardly ever used it again but I did use a lot of Algebra, Trig, Numerical Methods and Statistics over the years. I worked with some Phds in controls and found they used quite a bit of calculus. One of the sharpest controls guys I worked with though was a young BS in EE.
No argument there. I got a B.S.E.E. degree in 1982 - unbelievable return on investment!
OK you are right as far as it goes to the teachers. Even most administrators. But I know someone higher up is the one that planned the dumbing down. it didn’t just happen, because it happened in every single state at about the same time, Slowly reducing our schools into babysitting camps. And liberal indoctrination camps. Teachers and even administrators just do as they are told. They are indeed useful idiots. And as you said, lazy. They’re willing to do the least amount of work and are very happy to get to do less.
There is that, yes, throughout the public school system. Do you think that might change if wages were higher???
congrats!
There’s nothing that I like better than sitting around talking to a bunch of engineers. The humor can get pretty Bizzarre but absolutely hysterical. And anyone else listening in has no clue why we were even laughing :-)
I have practiced as a petroleum engineer for 40 years. Much of it was doing mechinacial, hydraulic and electrical engineering related work though I am a civil engineer by degree. Innovation, the ability to see things in three dimensions before you build them, to have a sense of machines and how they work and a natural curiosity to learn more are still necessary. Much of my career was spent in subsea operations combining cutting edge technologies to create new solutions as we moved from 1,000 feet of water to 10,000 feet.
I do not think you can be an engineer without wanting to constantly learn. Without that you are a technician waiting on engineers to create a new process or solution for you to follow or execute.
probably not. All of us were willing to take the wages that were being paid. We were engineers of course :-) so we had already checked out the benefits, the pay, etc. But it was the working conditions that drove us away. Not being able to discipline, having pretty much no standards, having kids with all different abilities coming in yet being expected to teach them at the same level.
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