J.P. Cummins

School Frustrations Explained

The past two semesters, I've become increasingly frustrated with college. The main reasons being:
  • Senioritis
  • I'd rather be programming my own stuff at work or on my own
  • I took too many hours and worked too much (I was defiantly burnt out last year)
  • Homework assignments were not interesting
In a previous blog entry, I ranted about my networking teacher and how I didn't like the class. Well, I'm going to retract many of the comments I made. Tonight I reread that post and realized that I shouldn't have been so harsh. The teacher is new and is actually doing a good job. She has really surprised me.

On my previous post, Jerry commented,"Hmmm… I had a two students in CS130 last semester that were complete opposites in their attitude toward the class. Both have skills way beyond the scope of the class however, one got an ‘A’ and the other a ‘F’. At one point the student who failed emailed me and basiclly tried to claim that he wasn’t doing any of the assignments or attending class because none of the material was interesting or challenging to him. The student who got the ‘A’ never complained about the class and always went way above and beyond the assignments. He made the most of his sitution."

In a way, I can kind of see the second student's point.  Not everyone cares about grades; it's not a motivating factor. I wish I could just sit in class and absorb the information and not have to do any homework.

Posted by J.P. Cummins on

Comments

Andrew

It seems moot to "prove" to somebody you are capable of something.

Also, when do you grad? Send me your resume NOW if soon. I'll put it in the system up here.

jipsta

I hope to graduate this December

Jerry

School Frustrations... Yeah, I know about those. This past week was a real bitch and while I still have a ton of things to get done this weekend I took (am still taking) some time to play. The ACM Virtualization presentation Kirk put together last Wed (08 Mar 06) really impressed me. I went to vmware.com to download the server software and immediately got distracted by the Virtual Application challenge. $200,000 is one hell of a distraction. Anyway, I ended up downloading the VMware-player and the sample Browser Application. The sample Browser Application is only a 250 MB zip file that contains an Ubuntu disto with Firefox setup ready to go. Installation, execution, installing XMMS and Eric Python IDE, and downloading some MP3s took less than 45 minutes. This is with me playing around while doing this. This FUCKING Rocks! Thanks for answering all the questions I asked you since I came in to Kirk's presentation late. To everyone reading this download & install VMware-player (28 MB) and the sample Browser Application (250 MB). Very cool shit.

Okay, a brief statement about the 'F' guy. Paul Graham probably best conveys my thoughts about this in his essay, "How to Do What You Love," . Graham points out that as kids we get the idea that work is not fun, but tedious. To some extent that is true but the thing to do is make work somewhat fun. So 'F' guy needed to write a little program that creates a picture collage. The tedious part would be making sure it met the assignment specs. The fun part would be adding a GUI or making the code generic and able to handle any picture choosen or lots of things. The 'A' guy wrote his own code to read BMP files (JES's picture reader only accepts JPG or GIF files).

I try to encourage students to go beyond the minimum. But most people don't understand the value of such effort until they are almost finished with a CS program. In that same vein, I inquired about possibly teaching a section of CS 226 as a Functional Programming course using Python or Scheme and it was immediately shot down. The reasoning being that there would be no interest. The thing that really bums me out is that it is true.
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