Day 37: On Reading

2 Responses to Day 37: On Reading

1. Anita Lewis says:

   April 30, 2011 at 6:06 pm

   I’m happy to find the Hugo nominated story that you read and StarShipSofa for my podcatcher. It’s definitely worth listening to the weather report in Colorado to get these nuggets! 😉

   Reading – the thing about learning to read by age 10 and then reading to learn brings warmth to my heart and gratitude for a wrinkled, white-haired 6th grade teacher named Mrs. McEndarfer. She had a little library right in the back of the room and she turned me on to reading for fun. She did lots of little entertaining things. She smiled and I knew she just loved what she was doing. My grades went from C to A and I loved to learn. It pretty much didn’t matter much what the teacher was like after that.

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2. Tara Li says:

   May 1, 2011 at 6:04 am

   Once upon a time, I found myself wondering, like you, about the value of a degree. This was before the coming of the 2 year Associate’s Degree that is so very popular now.

   Basically, I attended High School, got signed up for college somehow (I don’t actually remember filling out the application for the college I got in, but I got an acceptance letter, so somehow, it happened…) And my field was Computer Science – this was really expected of me, as I’d had a TRS-80 Model I since 7th or 8th Grade (Thanksgiving, ’79, is when I remember getting it).

   And I found it very brutally theoretical. Oh, sure, I had FORTRAN, and COBOL, and Pascal classes, and even Sys/370 Assembly Language. I had math classes – Calc I (Differential Calculus) and Linear Algebra. I had the scattershot of classes to make one “well-rounded”. But the exercises were tiny – and unconnected. The Calc teacher showed us how to figure certain derivatives – but she did it by multiplying through by some trigonometric identity that she seemed to have handed down by a voice from God in her head – asking her *how* she found that trig identity to use was answered by “because it simplifies the equation”.

   The computer classes were likewise – write a program to show off this built-in function, or to call the specified library out of the standard OS bank of libraries. Looking forward, I saw nothing about how to develop a program that was going to be on the scale of something to run a bank, or a business, or a school. Nothing that gave me any hope that it would help me figure out how to break down a project into the pieces needed – the kinds of things that we now realize are needed for practical programming, rather than academic programs for idealized computers with infinite memory or infinite time to run the program…

   By my 6th semester – second half of my third year – I had the nominal number of credits needed to graduate, but not all of the required courses – and the required courses just didn’t seem like they were going to help me any further. So I more or less quit, and spent a semester on campus without actually going to classes. I spent time in the Library, or hanging with friends, or exploring labs that were empty but unlocked (and damn, there’s a lot of them even on a campus of only 8K people)… Do you know how hard it is to finish a semester with a 0.0 GPA when you made the mistake of attending the first 3 or 4 weeks of classes? There were teachers *DESPERATE* to figure out some way to give me a D.

   I went to Basic Training for the National Guard, as I hadn’t finished out my time in ROTC, and then with the money saved up from that – I went to the local Vo-Tech school. And in one year there, I found a lot of what I was looking for – classes that focused on *doing* things, and not just theorizing about them. Coursework that built on earlier courses – an introduction to Accounting turned into a later course where the business owner expanded to have employees, so now he needed payroll accounting. The database class used dBase III to build databases – not the theoretical SQL databases with perfectly sorted relational coherency because of *course* you’re never going to run into two people with the exact same name…

   One year of Vo-Tech, and I felt like I learned more than I had learned in 3 years of the traditional college. Oh, sure, the English 103 class at college had had me read Updike’s “A&P”, which I found a fascinating story, and some poetry I’ve come to love, but I was always an avid reader anyway – you know the kind, works his way through the encyclopedia starting at age 5?

   I think, though, that a lot of the difference was in the teachers. One rule of the Vo-Tech was that no teacher was hired unless they’d worked in the industry involved for at least 5 years. It codified for me that there’s a vast difference between the theory of academic life, and the hard metal of practical life. It’s why I find writer’s words of what they do in their books more interesting than the critical analysis of the English Professor – even the ones who supposedly have written and sold prize-winning books (though as far as I could find, about the only ones who read them were assigned the book by their Professor, or it was done in one of those “Book Clubs” that normally seems to use books I’ve never heard of.)

   That’s why I listen to this podcast – because even as you ramble, you reveal how you build your books, and confirm that you were trying to communicate what I got from your stories. (Even if I disagree on the need for the Article 37 incident, it *is* your story.)

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