Necessary things

    or What needs to be taken in the beak from higher education?

    Introduction



    Articles on higher education periodically appear on Habré, around which disputes erupt over whether a person needs higher education as such. But what if we consider VO not as an existing system of universities with their educational standards, but as something else?

    The Law of Ukraine “On Higher Education” (I think the laws of other countries more or less agree with it) defines VO as a system of knowledge, skills, and personal qualities necessary for successful occupation by a certain type of intellectual activity (well, in fact, of course, longer and dreary, but the essence is approximately the same).

    We will leave aside personal qualities (well, not ethical lessons to develop them?). We restrict ourselves to information technology as a type of intellectual activity (firstly, I know this area from my own experience, and not from guesses and books, and secondly, for some areas, some postulates may not be applicable). We agree that the knowledge and skills that each person needs to work is best acquired in the process of work - especially in IT, where current technologies change quickly enough. So what skills and abilities remain in the bottom line - what should VO teach? No, do not "learn to learn", although this too.

    In this article, I will try to answer this question, reinforcing the answers with gadgets from life, and reflect on how VO that gives these skills should look.

    1. Read



    I can read, but what I’ve read in my head doesn’t stop
    L. Barfus “Sexual neurosis of our parents”


    Universal literacy does not cancel the fact that surprisingly many people just don’t know how to read so that it lingers in my head. I think the importance of the skill does not need to be proved - the oral transfer of knowledge has long been a thing of the past, the book is the source of knowledge, and so on in the same spirit.

    Life example


    One of the types of competitions at TopCoder are Marathons - two-week optimization tasks. A visualizer is attached to the task - an applet for local testing of the solution. The visualizer, in turn, comes with a bunch of documentation - a verbal description of use, pseudo-code, a list of commands to run, examples in all languages, and finally, old forums! And still it doesn’t help: almost every match people ask: how to launch it? You quote the documentation verbatim to them - oh, it worked, thanks! That is, they can read the answer to a specific question, but they can’t master it from two pages of the documentation.

    As implemented now


    Theoretically, modern education requires a student to read (books and abstracts) and use read (in control and exams). In practice, this often degenerates into mechanical reproduction.

    If repetition is the mother of learning,
    then the parrot is his father!

    D. Kimelfeld “Talking Parrot” You must

    admit that very often the information given in the text is also asked - the student does not have to prove that he understood it or put it into practice. Practical exercises conducted in parallel with lectures usually explain the material again, slowly and with examples, and this is a completely different type of knowledge.

    How can I implement


    Issue a text explaining some practical skill, and require the student to use it. To test the ability - to limit the time to work with the text and demonstrate the use of one lesson, without access to the Internet and consultation with classmates - the same exam.

    The difficulty is that the skill must be guaranteed to be new to the student, and the text should be close enough to reality, that is, describing not only this skill, but also a dozen, and requiring the thought of some details or their experimental conclusion.

    Esoteric and marginal programming languages ​​are great for this - with limited documentation, non-obvious implementation nuances, an easy way to check details in the form of an interpreter, and an obvious way of applying in the form of a working program.

    2. To write



    Even in his silence, spelling errors were heard
    Stanislav Jerzy Lets

    On the ability to express your thoughts - including in writing - we will discuss the next paragraph, but before this we can not fail to mention the banal ability to write without conspicuous errors. Oddly enough, even with the current dominance of automatic spellcheckers, people continue to write with errors. Particularly outstanding specimens defend their right to make mistakes - they say, while the thought can be understood, its form is not so fundamental. In this matter, I am categorically old-fashioned - a person’s attitude to the things he has written demonstrates his attitude to the readers of these things.

    Language is generated by thinking and breeds thinking
    Pierre Abelard

    In addition, I adhere to the point of view that a person who does not speak his native language sufficiently even to express his own thoughts in an appropriate form, most likely simply will not give rise to a thought worth expression. Do not get me wrong - I admit exceptions, but so far have not met a single one.

    Life example


    You don’t have to go far for examples - even on Habré there are more than enough of them. A person can consider himself a great authority and practically a teacher of life, but personally I can’t take seriously a person who makes about five errors in two lines, and I close the topic without reading it to the end when I see something like “Sodom and Gamora”.

    I know at least one person who not only writes business letters with errors, but also categorically refuses to correct them. “I am a programmer, I don’t need this!” Is an ironic argument, but I really shudder at the thought of how impressed his opuses are with the people with whom he corresponded.

    Yes, sometimes I also make mistakes, but I flatter myself the hope that this is the exception rather than the rule. And yes, I write this without spelling :-)

    As implemented now


    Yes, in principle, no way. Learning Russian / Ukrainian as a subject ends at school, the best thing that was in the university about this is “Business Ukrainian”, a wonderful subject that requires writing as many as six (checked) pages of text per semester and paying more attention to their careful storage in a folder .

    Theoretically, reading primary sources on philosophy / psychology / what-else-can still contribute to the development of literacy, coupled with vocabulary, in practice, students make every effort to avoid this reading and the hypothetical benefit from it. Writing abstracts does not develop the ability to write in any way, but rather the opposite - when you write in a hurry, commas and letters are lost by themselves. Various kinds of essays, term papers, diplomas and so on. neither spelling nor artistic value is checked.

    How can I implement


    Write. Stupidly to write. Well, what else can you do here? To write dictations (just not like in childhood, with a teacher singing out all the dangerous places with her voice, but seriously), writing and writing, reading books with normal verified grammar (and not just translated manuals and obviously illiterate forums).

    Just first, you need to somehow convey to the student the idea that his written speech is the same evidence “for” or “against” him as his resume. Hell, no one asks you to write poetry - the exaggerated demands of some girls can be rejected as violating the Geneva Convention - but everyone must be able to write prose!

    3. talk



    How does the heart express itself?
    How else to understand you?
    Will he understand how you live?
    A spoken thought is a lie.

    Fedor Tyutchev “SILENTIUM!”

    A person should be able to convey his thoughts to the interlocutor. Before proudly declaring “It’s my business to state, and who understands it is his personal tragedy”, think about how many times in the last week you spent time explaining something to an employee and making sure that he understood you exactly the way you did you want What, not once? So you were on vacation or working alone.

    As soon as the number of people in the cell of society exceeds unity, the question of communication arises. If people are inclined to the same thing, they think, they have similar experience and goals, this question may not arise or be quickly resolved, but as soon as differences begin in something, problems begin. But very few people realize that the interlocutor thinks differently than he does, he has other silences and associative ranks, and to clarify the thought you need to make more efforts than just to state it.

    Life example


    I explain things, probably, from the seventh grade. School topics - to classmates, “what programming is” - to a girlfriend-artist (by the way, it didn’t succeed), especially vile things from the institute course - to classmates (alas, the role of the elder and excellent student obliged me a lot). I have never been engaged in tutoring as such, but I learned to convey the thought to others for a long time, although not quite consciously.

    Nevertheless, now and again I come across the fact that adult intelligent people (alas, including me) simply do not understand each other, and it takes hours to ensure that all participants in the negotiations come to the same vision of the problem. If at the same time some of them are foreigners, it’s a matter of general seams - not only due to the language, but also due to the very different meaning invested in (it would seem)
    the same words. But this is a separate, difficult case.

    As implemented now


    No way. The modern VO scheme does not imply that a student should explain something to someone. At the exam, he does not so much explain the question as he proves that he understands it himself - we are talking about things known to the teacher, and there is practically no element of explanation. A student is always the receiver of explanations, and never their source.

    The closest approach to what is required is the collective work of students discussing material or helping each other sort it out. Strictly speaking, this is optional, and the burden (and benefit) of the explanation goes to the best student in the group.
    How can I implement


    To force the student to explain something to someone - to someone who initially did not know this “something”.

    The easiest way is to divide students of different years of study into pairs and instruct the senior to explain something to the younger. The topic should be moderately complex (i.e. accessible to understanding), but not trivial (i.e. requiring some effort to learn - contain new paradigms, concepts, techniques, etc.). After that, check the understanding of the junior and do not count the skill of the elder until the younger understand.

    The list goes on and on, but these three whales for one post are probably enough.

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