RE: Education (Was Re: Techwriting After the Boom)

[Beverly Muntain <muntain -at- gpfn -dot- sk -dot- ca>]

First, I'll address the caluculus in high school question.  I went to high
school in the very early 80's, but it was in an incredibly small town (one
high school, as someone put it, but even smaller than other 'one high
school' towns.)  There was no caluculus.  We had algebra and geo-trig
(only in grade 12).  Now, these were the basis for calculus, of course,
but I unfortunately did not take calculus until 14 years later.

Don't do that.

I not only had to relearn everything I'd learned in high school, I
also had to learn the new stuff being taught in schools 14 years later.
My second calculus class had a professor who kept saying 'well, we won't
cover that because you learned all that last year in high school.'  It was
not fun.  If you have the chance, take calculus as soon as you know the
underlying mathematics.  Then you'll never have to think about them
again.  I went into this, even though a couple of engineers I knew had
told me that they never used calculus in their work.  In fact, one told me
that one professor told him:  Remember all the calculus you've taken so
far?  Well, this is much easier....  Still, I don't regret it.  I learned
that I had a better mind for mathematics than I'd though I had, and wound
up doing better than average in both calculus classes.

Secondly, I would have to say that the most useful courses I ever took
were:

High School English -- I learned how to compose, how to organize
everything in my head and on paper so that I could write a cohesive piece
of whatever.  The in-class essays were instrumental in teaching me to
think on my feet.  Thank you, Mr. Moriarty!

Grade 10 typing -- although I only reached about 32 wpm, I later used it
to get a job that required so much typing I upped it to about 90 wpm.
That was also the first job I'd ever had that used computers.

B.A. in Anthropology:  I learned to think and to put my thoughts down on
paper in meaningful ways.  I learned how to theorize, instead of following
everyone else's theories (I think my university had some really great
anthro teachers at the time -- very few of them insisted you follow their
way of thinking.  I learned various theories, and learned how to choose
the ones that made the most sense for the situation.)

Software Engineering Methodology, a third year computer science course
(much more recent than the others).  Not only did I learn what all went
into a software project, I also learned that I had a skill very few other
students had.  My group project got an A simply because I knew how to
write and put things together in a report.  It opened a whole new world in
the technical field for me.

Beverly Muntain
muntain -at- gpfn -dot- sk -dot- ca


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