Hammering on about Paragraphs

[Richmond Mathewson]

JLG wrote:

"I'm surprised this professor was so uninformed."

Gosh!

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IT'S RANT TIME AGAIN
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I have a bachelor's degree from a top University (Durham, England),
an M.A. from SIUC, and an MSc from a place in my own country (Scotland) 
which was set up by Tony Blair and his merry men when they determined
that 80% of school leavers should go to 'University'. 
Apart from the obvious jokes about a downward slide and my 
getting a PhD from a telephone booth:

While at 'that place' I had to attend lectures on Visual Basic 5 where the
teacher was trying to teach concepts my Maths teacher taught me when
I was 14 (1976) with only the benefit of a chalkboard and one of those
horrible machines where you had to tie your fingers in knots to punch
Hollerith cards. She got annoyed because I spent most of the lectures
sitting at the back working out program schemata on paper and doing
the odd calculation with my slide-rule. This lecturer was just about the
same age as me; she had a BSc from the Open University (England) and
an 'in-house' MSc from 'that place', yet she:

failed to explain what a FOR . . . NEXT loop was [well, unless
all the other students on the MSc course were incredibly stupid - as
about 90% of them asked here to explain it again],

didn't know what my slide-rule was.

Having previously worked, and lectured (in Phonetics) at the University
of St Andrews I was blown away by 'that place'.

I bought a supplement to a computer magazine called something 
like "Microsoft Excel for Baboons"; and found it extremely useful
as the lecturers who were teaching us how to use Excel [this was,
after all, for an MSc in IT and computing] made little or no sense
to me or many of my fellow students.

Quite a few students who had come over to get MSc's from India told
me that they had also learned what was being peddled as MSc stuff in
their first year in High School (i.e. about 2 years younger than when
I learnt it). Most of them went back home to India after the first term.

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One of the most classic moments was when I got so cheesed-off with
VB that I duplicated all the Homework exercises in Runtime Revolution:
then was told that VB 5 was superior because it was "Windows native" as
if that justified everything.

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RANT ENDED
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And the lesson is: Not all Educational Institutions are
created equal!

and further to that: some Universities have "bad" departments that
milk individuals and grant-aiding bodies for socially approved courses
as a way of financing a few high-profile courses that will attract
kudos to the institution.

sincerely, Richmond Mathewson.
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A Thorn in the flesh is better than a failed Systems Development Life Cycle.
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