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This reminds me of a PPOE where we really tightened up the input editing... User: The system is rejecting all of our data! Us: Well, it's full of errors...
snip Have you said -- and if not, would you be willing to say -- where your nephew goes to school? I'm starting to be mildly curious about the curriculum, and...
In truth I have no solid information about what trade schools teach; what I know is mostly based on their advertisements and on, um, snarky comments by fellow academics contrasting what *we* think we're doing (giving students a conceptual framework they can build on for the rest of their careers) versus what "trade schools" are doing (giving students specific skills that will be useful in the short term but obsolete eventually). It's all too possible that this is a misguided view -- CS academics are apt to snarky about Fortran too, and I know how (not) founded in reality that bias sometimes is.
Then again, if the goal is to put out send workers, it seems to me that it *would* be easy to focus on teaching skills that are useful in the short term rather than on the material needed to actually understand what one is doing. If the goal is to produce someone who can write Visual Basic programs well enough to get a job doing so, is there a strong incentive to make sure the student knows that electricity is slow?
-- B. L. Mbuttingill ObDisclaimer: I don't speak for my employers; they return the favor.
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