Engineering Lack of Curiosity Part II: Dissociation

First part here

They say whoever served in the army does not laugh in the circus. I did not serve in the army, but even the military department fully proved the truth of this statement. The army, which, in theory, should embody strict order, exemplary discipline, universal selflessness and devotion to defending the fatherland, and other good qualities, in fact turns out to be the embodiment of ideas and practices that generally lie, as they say, on the other side of good and evil. This was expressed among the people in sayings like “round – drag, square – roll” and “there are three ways: right, wrong and army” as well as in a whole folklore layer dedicated to painting grass green and sweeping the parade ground with a crowbar.

But today we, oddly enough, will not talk about the army, but about the educational process. Having almost two decades of teaching experience behind me and, at every opportunity, boasting that I am a teacher in the third generation, I already understand that any professional activity is at risk of partially turning into insanity and ridicule, not only the army. This is facilitated by both an increase in the degree of overregulation and, frankly, forgive me, the quality of human material.

All this is complicated and incomprehensible, so let’s look at specific examples.

Our second teaching generation, my father, worked almost all his life at the university, including as a teacher, including a professor. You know the anecdote about how Vovochka came to take the exam, and the teacher asked what his name was and what color the textbook was, which Vovochka was extremely dissatisfied with, they say, “he knocks”. Do you think this is a joke?

And I was present when two young talents came to their father to pass the test, only the questions were “what is my name” and “what is the name of the discipline”. Both talents were very difficult to answer.

Here it is necessary to explain that only a relatively small number of teachers deliberately torture and try to overwhelm students – they are deeply offended by something or someone in life, vindictive and petty bastards, owners of sadistic inclinations who want to hint at an alternative ($$) way of “solving the issue ” or received direct instructions from superiors.

The rest, once and in general, didn’t bother to organize retakes and listen to the endless whining of incapable tailsmen, and they, as best they can, simplify their lives, including in this way. But, as it turns out, sometimes even this does not help.

Another point of pain, especially in the natural sciences, is the approach to solving problems, hammered in by Soviet high school traditions, as substituting the right values ​​into the right places in the formulas. There is enough of this at school, there is no time to explain where these formulas came from, why they are exactly the way they are and not others, when they can be used and when they cannot, and why. The most important topic of the dimensions of quantities is well dealt with if one lesson, or even not a single one. It is bad that unscrupulous teachers transfer this vicious approach to the teaching of disciplines in universities.

And then there is a lecture on the theoretical foundations of radiation, followed by practice to consolidate the material. Well, there are all these Boltzmann constants, Planck’s formula, optical pyrometry equations and stuff like that. An excellent student cheerfully goes to the blackboard to solve an educational problem about the brightness temperature of the filament of a standard incandescent lamp, which is right next to it on a laboratory table and glows dimly.

The excellent student resolutely substitutes the initial data into the formulas, despite the widespread dominance of calculators, makes mistakes somewhere when reducing degrees, gets a result of about a hundred thousand degrees and, pleased with herself, goes to the place. The professor’s bewilderment and frustration are categorically incomprehensible to her – after all, she substituted the necessary values ​​​​into the correct formula! The question of the relationship of such a temperature with the reality surrounding us introduces her into a stupor.

Well, maybe these instrumentalists, engineers, what is the demand from them? Here is the intellectual elite – IT people, yes there! These will show class! Show. A cycle of laboratory works, including those devoted to measuring the maximum (at least estimated, an order of magnitude) data transfer rate through a TCP / IP socket and through a POSIX pipe. No frills, firewalls and other limiting factors, language of choice, strictly localhost.

The intellectual elite, having received the task, writes more or less typical server and client code snippets, launches, establishes a connection between them, sends “hello, world” over it, measures the transfer speed and cheerfully reports, they say, this way and that, the maximum data transfer speed through TCP / IP socket was 25 kilobytes per second. This is already after those who do not understand the difference between a kilobit and a kilobyte, who measure the speed in seconds and other geniuses, were weeded out. In an attempt to reach out to common sense, I ask the question, they say, how do you, dear person, manage to watch YouTube videos with such a speed of the network subsystem, in which the bitrate is a hundred times higher? But the fact that the meaning of this question will be at least understood, I hoped in vain.

With incredible efforts, I manage to bring them to frankness – these are not first-year students – they are often already employed in their future IT specialty, and it turns out that not all of them are even familiar with the concept of “transmission buffer” or overhead, and that when measuring the streaming speed, you need to minimize it. “We weren’t taught that.”

Here’s how it happens? What happened to the labor market, where JSON transfers from one place to another are so in demand without understanding what is happening, and the concept of a transmission buffer needs to be specially taught?

PS Despite repeated, detailed and carefully documented explanations of what is wrong here and how to do it right, what is a buffer and how to measure the speed correctly, as well as the threat of scary anal cars to anyone who intends a transfer rate of less than a megabit per second, today’s record holder has been found, who is trying to get admission to tomorrow’s exam, and on this difficult path he has set a maximum transfer rate of 3 (three) bytes per second. So far, I realized that the speed is somehow not enough, but for an hour now I have been sitting and still trying to understand why.

Stop the Earth, I’ll get off.