So I’m in Washington, DC, this week and got into town in time to catch some of Newt Gingrich’s “American Solutions” workshop. Some 100 people were there in person…and some 6,000 were watching it live on the ‘net. It was vintage Newt.
If the country can have a Surgeon General, then I suggest perhaps the next Republican president create a Professor General and name Gingrich to the post…unless, of course, former Speaker Gingrich IS the next Republican president, in which case the position would be redundant. But I digress.
Of course, as a former professor Gingrich excels in the art of teaching about America, its history and its government. And when it comes to ideas on changing public policy, no one can hold a candle to him. The man comes up with more new ideas for transforming government before breakfast than most politicians come up with in a career.
And he has an innate ability to ‘splain those ideas in a way that not only the average Joe can comprehend, but in a way that excites the average Joe’s imagination. Newt is intelligent, informative and entertaining in a way few politicians can ever even hope of emulating.
And I’m not even being paid to say all this. I am because he is. I’ll give you one small example from the short time I was at the workshop.
In explaining how liberals and government always seem to get it backwards, he pointed to the fact that the education establishment has been trying for the past several years to put computers in the classroom…when they really should be trying to put the classroom in computers. Gingrich pointed out that kids today are using i-Phones, i-Pods, color TVs, DVDs, CD’s and Internet games…ALL BY THE TIME THEY’RE FIVE!
Then at around age six we send them to a room with a blackboard and call it “education.”
No, says the former Speaker, “it’s boring.” No wonder kids turn off and tune out.
Um, yeah. Why hasn’t the education establishment figured that out?
Posted on July 23rd, 2007 by Chuck Muth
Filed under: National
That was awesome… we watched it on my husbands computer!!!
Hey shithead, don’t come back.
I have a degree in mathematics. I’ve made my living for the last 28 years as a software engineer. One of the things I do especially well is identify good engineering horseflesh when it comes time to build a development team. I’ve built several great teams.
Recruiters (headhunters) have a hard time with me because of my “really tough interview.” What do I ask? I ask engineering candidates, most of whom have college degrees, many of whom have several, to do a little arithmetic. There’s a little algebra in there. They’ll need to know some basic data structures and how they behave in time and space. They’ll have to use this knowledge to solve some simple design problems.
There are no trick questions in my interview. Only one of my usual questions requires what one might call a “flash of insight” to get to a full solution, and I’m very willing to supply that flash: all I ask in return is that people explain the flash to me once I’ve given it to them.
What I really need is people who a) know the basic properties of math and computer science, and b) can see those basic properties at work in the world around them, and c) can talk with me and work with me to solve some very realistic and *extremely simple problems*, and d) care enough to do it well, and e) maybe even enjoy it.
I interview lots of people. I don’t make very many offers. Sometimes I get a little depressed because we can go for months, interviewing several people a week, sometimes several people a day, without getting a hit. Most people, I’m sad to say, just never get it.
When I hear people talk about putting computers in schools, I have to wonder why. Everybody has computers these days. Everybody can use a simple word processor, many can use a spreadsheet, everyone uses Google. Most kids learn this stuff from their friends, siblings, parents, or, heaven forbid, from reading the manuals, and a lot of them are very motivated to do so. Classes in Microsoft Word and its ilk are classes in transitory and obsolescent skills, are probably pretty boring, and not very helpful. Some schools actually teach programming, although I’d really like to upend most of the curricula I’ve seen, and teach this to a whole lot more kids, not because they’ll all be software engineers, but because we all have to know what a computer is and does to get along these days. Knowing how to insert a disk and run MS Word doesn’t count.
What do I think we should be teaching our kids in school? English and foreign languages, literature (I can give you a short list if you want it), math math math, composition, more literature, chemistry and physics, more literature, biology including the evil E-word, history and geography, programming, more math, and maybe a little literature, too. That’s for starters. Will computers figure into this? Sure. So will air and water. There’s some room in there for that newfangled video editing, closely coupled to a teacher who’s really trying to teach the kids about literature. And music if they’re good.
Of course, this assumes you have teachers who actually know something, can teach it, and need to teach it well like they need to take their next breath. And it really really really helps if the kids parents are the same way. Passing along our very complex culture is an enormously important task that falls on all of our shoulders. Computers are merely what the management guys call a “nice to have”.
In point of fact, most of the really interesting stuff that happens in my part of the engineering business happens on whiteboards. Well, actually, it happens in that quiet place between the ears of a person with a well-stocked head, and it eventually ends up on a whiteboard somewhere. If you think that education means allowing our kids to extort entertainment out of us under the guise of learning things worth knowing, I think you’re wrong, and it’s me who’s doing the hiring on the other end of things.
Mr. Abell: You submitted an excellent posting. I agree with what you said, but I was more impressed by how you said it. For years, I’ve heard that a common complaint that people in the “real world” have about people who majored in math, science and engineering disciplines is that they have lousy communication skills (both verbal and written) and can’t express themselves in a way that “normal” people can understand. This description definitely doesn’t apply to you. Your posting was well reasoned and very easy to understand.
Mr. Smith: Thank you. I’m honored by your response.
There are indeed people in technical fields who can’t communicate that the house is on fire. Those people are more rare than is supposed. A more common problem is more subtle, and it’s two-fold:
People in technical fields are often consumed by their work. We see a whole lot of the world around us in terms of our work, and use our technical vocabulary to talk about everyday things. This is frustrating to those who don’t know that vocabulary, and is mistaken for an inability to communicate. The words coming out may be extremely rich, informative, even funny, but lost on most people outside the field.
The other problem usually takes root sometime in childhood, when an aspiring nerd discovers that no one wants to hear what he has to talk about. When he can on rare occasions actually get a slot in a conversation, the result is panic: “Omigosh, how do I say all this stuff I want to communicate in the next three seconds, before people turn off and turn away?” The result is gibberish and an ever-intensifying sense of shame.
It’s hard for everyone, either way. And it’s yet another reason for schools to be hitting on all cylinders. Both speakers and listeners need to be versatile and capable. That’s the work of a lifetime. A good school helps.