On Thursday 13 November 2003 10:41, Brian Baquiran wrote: > > How come they're so good, and we're so bad? > > I blame the teachers.
nothing interesting is ever so simple. parents are partly to blame. they listen to predictions that computers (or nursing, or medicine, or PT, or whatever the flavor of the year is) is going to be a big moneymaker, and they force their children to take those courses even if they're not necessarily fit for the course. the economy is partly to blame. everyone wants to study something that gives them a chance to go overseas since local wages are so bad. this is related to a previous post too about janitors, taxi cab drivers and college educations. education is considered a prerequisite for ambitions to join or remain in the middle class (or to move higher). people try to optimize their chances by choosing a course that might help their economic situation, even if they are not going to use their course after they graduate. a lot of computer schools are to blame too. they sell seats in their programs to anyone who can afford the tuition. and then you get people who, when they graduate, are competent only to reinstall windows and install CounterStrike at internet cafes. a lot of people studying computer subjects in computer schools are just deadwood. they will never amount to much in higher computer work. they're competent enough at the low level stuff (installing drivers, installing software, formatting and reinstalling windows, installing modems and printers), but as programmers or designers they will just never be any good. because education is not enough, desire and a certain level of inherent talent are requirements too. and let's not forget microsoft, which (with visual studio and the OS) make programming appear so simple that students get seduced into thinking that they can program, even though all they did was link a bunch of controls together without understanding anything. i tutored a student lately who couldn't even understand how to open a file, read the contents, and store the contents in a textbox. but she was convinced that she could program because she'd previously used some database controls to connect to and show the contents of a table in an access database. i could go on, but i'm exhausted :). tiger -- Gerald Timothy Quimpo gquimpo*hotmail.com tiger*sni*ph http://bopolissimus.sni.ph Public Key: "gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys 672F4C78" Premature optimization is the root of all evil. Donald Knuth -- Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List [EMAIL PROTECTED] (#PLUG @ irc.free.net.ph) Official Website: http://plug.linux.org.ph Searchable Archives: http://marc.free.net.ph . To leave, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/plug . Are you a Linux newbie? To join the newbie list, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/ph-linux-newbie
