The learned wanted, learners need not apply

Back in the bad old days before the Internet was ubiquitous, I was the sysop of the Genealogy Roundtable on GENIE (General Electric Network for Information Exchange).  It had a very primitive typed command interface that many users had difficulty mastering.

One user either couldn't print or couldn't save a file from the Genealogy Roundtable.  My being in the Twin Cities and he being in Cleveland made it very difficult for me to know exactly what was on his screen.  I went to Cleveland for personal reasons and as a side trip, went to his house.  I forget what terms were on his screen, but he had a completely different idea what those terms meant than I did.  Once I explained them to him, he was able to do what he wanted.

During this same period, I wrote a genealogy program called Family Events.  One user complained that certain printed charts had lines that shouldn't be there.  I couldn't visualize or understand his problem because my printed charts looked OK.  It wasn't until we were both at the same genealogy conference that I understood the problem.  He was using a non-Apple printer and I was using an Apple printer.  As a shortcut I had given unneeded lines a negative length.  The Apple printer didn't print these lines; the non-Apple printer printed them as long extraneous lines.  I think once back home I recoded the problem in about an hour.

It's sort of like the urban legend of the kid who solves the problem of the truck jammed under a bridge: let some air out of the tires.

Once I wrote the above paragraph I thought of a related subject that I wanted to write about - the "shortage" of "high-tech" workers.  From this thought, I changed the title of this entry from "More on problem solving" to "The learned wanted, learners need not apply".  This "shortage" has been going on for decades.

The basic problem is that too many employers want somebody who can begin working on complex problems on day one.  Once those problems are solved, you may be replaced by someone who can begin working on the new problems on day one.

I've never had a job that I did not require some training after I was hired – from grocery clerk to bus driver to main-frame computer programmer.  My very first computer job I had to teach myself the basics of programming the company's computer.  For my nearly 20-year job with Univac it was constant change and new things to learn.  I didn't know FORTRAN, but I was set to finding and correcting errors in the compiler and its library.  In fact, our supervisor, John Macgowan, never did learn how to write a FORTRAN program, but he was a real whiz at finding and correcting errors in the compiler.  I won't bore you with the details, but it was nearly 20 years of constant learning and change.  I burned out when microcomputers came on the scene and I didn't feel like Univac was keeping up.  So, I started my own company and learned how to program several microcomputers without the benefit of special training.

What I didn't learn was how to run a business.  Then I learned that businesses don't want new employees who will learn.  That is, learners need not apply, we want the learned.

See "So-called high tech shortage".

Quote of the day: Our Education System

"Everybody is a genius.  But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid."
- Albert Einstein
Posted by a relative on Facebook from "Everyday Humor"

On the other hand, sometimes we are our own worst enemies for learning.  How many people do you know who say, "I was never good at…"  Consider most Americans image of their foreign language ability.  If you ask them what a Mexican calls a hat or an afternoon nap, most can correctly answer (fill in the blank).  Or how the French say "goodbye" or what a Swedish buffet is called, or …  I guess that most Americans know at least ten words in each of at least ten languages.  Da?

See "You can speak foreign languages".

Quote of the day - Education

"To succeed, students must become thinkers, not just test-takers."
– "The secret to fixing bad schools", David L. Kirp, New York Times, 2013-02-09

I posted a comment to the article with the above quote and

"That sentence should be engraved in the head of anyone who wants successful students."

As of 8:30 this morning it had received 45 recommendations!  Gosh, if I could only have that readership here!

A former teacher replied to my post that I had beat him or her to a similar post and added

"As a teacher for 27 years, I know for a fact, that exam scores are the least important indicator of how well a student is learning."

147 comments have been posted to the article.  Three included that pre–school education may be expensive, but not as expensive as prisons.

I didn't post it, but many have written elsewhere that you pay something now or pay a lot more later.  It is often considered investing, but too many people don't think of government spending as investment, as they cruise down the interstate built with government money, as they enjoy a game in a tax-supported stadium, or as they have no concern about food-safety because of government inspections.

Why Read?

Fact: Reading can make you a better conversationalist.

Fact: Neighbors will never complain that your book is too loud.

Fact: Knowledge by osmosis has not yet been perfected. You'd better read.

Fact: Books have stopped bullets - reading might save your life.

Fact: Dinosaurs didn't read. Look what happened to them.

From an email from ABE Books.

Quote of the day – Learning

"Learning isn't a set of things that we know but a world that we enter."
– Adam Gopnik, "Broken Kingdom, Fifty Years of 'The Phantom Tollbooth'", The New Yorker, 2011-10-17

"The Phantom Tollbooth" is a children's book written by Norton Juster and illustrated by Jules Feiffer. It has sold over four million copies.

The article itself was a world that I entered by serendipity. I was cleaning my desk and The New Yorker was open to an article about Fukushima. As I closed the magazine, I saw the above article. Now I have to read the next article, "History: The Customer Reviews" by Patricia Pearson.

You really are good at foreign languages

How often have you heard people say, "I never was any good with foreign languages!"  But any of us who read a lot or listen a lot, know lots of foreign words and phrases as part of our own language.

Consider the following:

Oui, non, savoir faire, coup d'état, menu, restaurant, merci beaucoup, la plume de ma tante, père, mère, soirée, bon jour, monsieur, madame, mademoiselle, garçon, parlez vous français

Si, gracias, señor, señora, señorita, taco, burrito, chili, sombrero, serape, fiesta, siesta, madre, padre, muchacho, muchacha, piñata, guerrilla, mesa

Ja, nein, Blitzkrieg, danke, sprechen sie Deutsch, guten morgen, auf Wiedersehen, angst

Da, nyet, troika, glasnost, perestroika, tsar, soviet, sputnik, vodka, tundra

Smörgåsbord, fjörd, tack, Viking, ski, lingon, orienteering, ombudsman, moped

Judo, karate, karaoke, sumo, sushi, tofu, miso, manga, sake, kimono, samurai, futon, tsunami

Si, no, italiano, spaghetti, opera, pasta, forte, piano, ciao, arrivederci, buon giorno, vino

I bet you know over 90% of these words and can identify each of the groups.

Interestingly, Apple's TextEdit only flagged five words as not in its dictionary; these were burrito, chili, serape, nyet, and fjörd.  TextEdit was happy when I spelled fjörd as fjord. In fact, TextEdit insisted on changing it as I typed.  Microsoft's Word is a bit fussier; it didn't recognize any of the words that contained diacritical marks, like in garçon, señor, and smörgåsbord.

See, you're also smarter than a computer.  You could recognize all the words.

Next time somebody says they have never been good at whatever, reply that they just haven't spent enough time and interest learning that whatever.

Ciao, amici miei!

Learning to sing should be easier than learning the alphabet

As I was driving to my voice lesson, I considered that there were only 25 sounds in a two-octave range: C-Db-D-Eb-E-F-Gb-G-Ab-A-Bb-B-C-… and 12 to the next C. If you work at it, you can memorize a few notes, sing one of them, walk to a piano, press that note, and find you are right on.

Well, why not work on memorizing all 25? Since as a struggling kindergardener you memorized 26 letters in the alphabet, shouldn't you as an intelligent adult be able to memorize all 25 sounds in a two-octave range. Even fewer sounds if you can't manage two octaves, yet!

A trick is to memorize a song and use the starting note as your first "memorized note". I can do it with the first note of Arirang, maybe three out of four times. Only 24 to go!

The End of Ignorance

I've long thought that all of us, myself included, don't learn all that we could as well as we could. Today I did have the importance of one learning tool reinforced - serendipity!

I was wandering around the web and decided to visit The Huffington Post, and I stumbled on a sidebar item, "Math is not hard: A Simple Method…" whose full title is "Math Is Not Hard: A Simple Method That is Changing The World", by Julia Moulden.

It is about John Mighton, a man who had his own struggles with learning. Mighton was a playwright who supplemented his income as a tutor. That led to his deciding to be a mathematician. But his struggles with the subject almost made him give up. Remembering some of his tutoring experiences, he broke things down into small increments and went on to get a Ph.D.

He started a not-for-profit organization to promote a different way of teaching math - http://jumpmath.org.

He has written two books whose title alone should lead us to rethink teaching and our own learning - "The End of Ignorance" and "The Myth of Ability".

If you read Julia Moulden's article, be sure to follow as many links as you can, including the one to Thomas Friedman's article, "The New Untouchables", New York Times, 2009-10-21. I was going to write a blog about Friedman's article but as usual didn't find a round tuit. Ah, that's the secret of learning, finding round tuits:)

Math Is Not Hard: A Simple Method That Is Changing The World

The following is my comment to Julia Moulden's column of the same title. The above picture was added by the Huffington Post when I checked that I wanted my comment posted on my blog.

I've long thought that most of us can learn more than we do. Years ago I heard a radio interview where the speaker had a boy tell him, "I'm dumb" and the man replied, "Who told you that." Most of us have had people tell us that they were never any good in math, foreign languages, music, or whatever. The true answer is that they didn't have enough interest to invest some time in the subject.

I have proven it with my own increased singing ability. I once was told that I was hopeless. After years of my taking voice lessons, that same person is delighted with my ability. No, nobody is going to pay me to sing, but I have been asked back to sing solos.

I wrote about some of this experience in "Men Can Sing", http://www.cpinternet.com/~mdmagree/men_can_sing_2005-02-03.html

If you are interested in a subject, start somewhere. Read about it, get lessons on it, just do something. And be willing to change and correct yourself.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Misuse of statistics?

Stephen J. Schroeder-Davis wrote a generally good article about "gifted students" being "left behind", "Federal rules leave gifted kids behind", but I have a few bones to pick.

He wrote:

"There are no provisions in NCLB to support gifted students, and these student receive less than 3 cents of every $100 in federal education dollars."

First, are federal dollars the only available money for education? I hope not.

Second, does every student need the same amount of resources to get a good education? For example, advanced students can often be given an assignment and go off by themselves to do it. I would hope that teachers would still be available to answer questions. On the other hand, "average" students would need more attention and help. "Slow" students might need one-on-one assistance.

Third, he assumes that all students should make the same amount of progress throughout their education. He cites a study that low achieving students "were progressing in reading at five times the rate of high-achieving students". Is progress in reading unlimited? If the low-achieving students move from 100 words per minute to 500 wpm, does it follow that the high-achieving students should move from 800 wpm to more than 4000 wpm? Few schools have ever been equipped to teach the techniques to read at that rate.

Fourth, we overuse the word "gifted". Advanced students may have very supportive parents who encourage them to learn. OK, good parents are a "gift". These advanced students may have worked harder earlier and have a good base to learn at faster rates later. Sort of the more you learn, the easier it is to learn more.

I do agree with the author that advanced students could be given many more opportunities to learn as much as they can. It is no fun to sit in a high-school class with people who stumble over book reports. We have cut off many classes that not only would give advanced students more opportunities for learning, but that would give many other students opportunities to expand their interests and abilities. In the interest of low taxes we have considered libraries, foreign languages, music, arts, and other creative subjects as frills. These have been touted by many as keeping young minds more active and receptive to other learning experiences.

Oh, well! I guess we get what we pay for.

Do you see patterns or atoms?

Your thinking and learning is determined by your ability to see patterns. The more data you can put into a pattern, the quicker you can absorb new data, the more data you can put in memory, and the better you will be able to manipulate data.

Seeing patterns or "chunking" is one of the things that people who have superior performance in any field do according to Geoff Colvin in "Talent is Overrated". One of his examples is master chess players. Most of us look at the pieces on a board and try to sort everything out. A good chess player sees positions and calls on his or her memory of how similar positions have been played in the past.

Think of chunking in a more mundane field: your own reading. Do you look at each letter and tell yourself that it is a b because it has a vertical line and a curve to right and you know it's not a d, p, or q. Maybe you did that when you learned to read. But as you became more skilled you saw whole words and even started seeing whole phrases. Why do you think so many typos get missed? Editors look at big chunks and miss some detail that they glossed over.

Warning! Seeing bigger and bigger chunks takes lots of work. All your need is motivation and time. But you may be surprised at your gains beyond the material at hand.