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You know, in the whole Tech experience, you find that events throughout your day (all of which are, in some form or another, being paid for with your tuition) fall somewheres along a continuum of elegance and civility... and you find things that are way out on opposing ends of the spectrum, even during a single day.
For example, today...
- I was holding office hours, and a student came by to talk to me about a lab he'd missed (and everybody who'd been at the lab, don't tell anybody, had gotten 100; just due to administrative difficulty, we couldn't grade it. Turn it in, get 100)... but he'd tried really hard to be there, and it was something upsetting like that his car broke down. No big deal, says I, the empowered Senior TA! We sat down together, played with UNIX commands for like 45 minutes, taught him what he was supposed to know on the subject, and then sent him on his merry way with 100 lab points to his credit. That seemed pretty decorous -- give somebody a grade that he deserved, at least in terms of effort (he even sent somebody into the lab to say that his car had broken down), and more importantly, get the knowledge out!
- Right after that, we finally got down to business on the independentstudy with Kurt. It took like three weeks to organize, but now we've finally got a stable meeting time. And we just hung out in his office and talked about language, and what it means to do NLU, what makes Natural Language Natural, some different schools of thought and history on the subject... and how it blends into other AI fields and cognitive science and psychology and how important the whole topic of language really is. And Kurt has a Big Boy piggybank on his desk, much like mine. This was the height of Civilized. Independent study with one teacher and one student is exactly the Right Thing for learning something, I'm very well convinced...
- Physics lab is not quite so dignified. The TA, who's a nice enough guy, basically told Tim and me that even though the lab software and hardware was pretty well b0rked (it kept on spitting bizarre numbers at us and would intermittently just Not Work) and deep down inside, we really do know how little balls are supposed to fly through the air, we had to keep taking these measurements and wrestling with the mid-90s era NT4 computers that would occasionally... Just Crash. ... until we put a bunch of numbers that we honestly Did Not Care About into a little HTML form. Gaaah. Lab is barbarous. (because of the extended equipment failure, he did relent a bit... but we were still there 'til 6pm...)
Yah. There's a right way to learn and teach, and a wrong way...
For example, today...
- I was holding office hours, and a student came by to talk to me about a lab he'd missed (and everybody who'd been at the lab, don't tell anybody, had gotten 100; just due to administrative difficulty, we couldn't grade it. Turn it in, get 100)... but he'd tried really hard to be there, and it was something upsetting like that his car broke down. No big deal, says I, the empowered Senior TA! We sat down together, played with UNIX commands for like 45 minutes, taught him what he was supposed to know on the subject, and then sent him on his merry way with 100 lab points to his credit. That seemed pretty decorous -- give somebody a grade that he deserved, at least in terms of effort (he even sent somebody into the lab to say that his car had broken down), and more importantly, get the knowledge out!
- Right after that, we finally got down to business on the independentstudy with Kurt. It took like three weeks to organize, but now we've finally got a stable meeting time. And we just hung out in his office and talked about language, and what it means to do NLU, what makes Natural Language Natural, some different schools of thought and history on the subject... and how it blends into other AI fields and cognitive science and psychology and how important the whole topic of language really is. And Kurt has a Big Boy piggybank on his desk, much like mine. This was the height of Civilized. Independent study with one teacher and one student is exactly the Right Thing for learning something, I'm very well convinced...
- Physics lab is not quite so dignified. The TA, who's a nice enough guy, basically told Tim and me that even though the lab software and hardware was pretty well b0rked (it kept on spitting bizarre numbers at us and would intermittently just Not Work) and deep down inside, we really do know how little balls are supposed to fly through the air, we had to keep taking these measurements and wrestling with the mid-90s era NT4 computers that would occasionally... Just Crash. ... until we put a bunch of numbers that we honestly Did Not Care About into a little HTML form. Gaaah. Lab is barbarous. (because of the extended equipment failure, he did relent a bit... but we were still there 'til 6pm...)
Yah. There's a right way to learn and teach, and a wrong way...
