What Scala?

[Georg Wrede]

dsimcha wrote:
> == Quote from Walter Bright (newshound1 at digitalmars.com)'s article
>> Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>>> If there's one thing my
>>> school experience taught me, it's that teachers are only interested in
>>> focusing on the low-to-mid-range students.
>> That wasn't my college experience at all (Caltech). I was a
>> low-to-mid-range student there
> 
> ...Which kind of proves the point that the way knowledge/learning in college is
> measured is pretty flawed in that it doesn't predict who will be successful
> afterword.  I just finished undergrad a couple years ago and I feel that the kinds
> of multiple choice exams you get in huge lecture-based classes are good at testing
> rote memorization and superficial understanding and the ability to get inside the
> professor's head, where as what's important is the ability to take your knowledge
> and apply it to something useful or use it to create more knowledge.

Yes, one gets the impression that those who do well in exams simply 
store the stuff in another way in their head. Feels like they've 
developed methods to store it for easy retrieval and rote memorization, 
instead of ever trying to internalize the essence of it. (Sure, some 
kids can manage both, but I wasn't one of them.)

But then, 20 years afterward, ask the three starry eyed ones, what the 
price will be if there is first a 10% price hike and then you get a 10% 
rebate. Since they can't remember the formula by heart anymore, they're 
at a loss with this one. But what does it matter, they've got good 
secure jobs, a nice family and a car as good as their neighbor.

OTOH, to make things really happen, we need the other kind of guys. 
Those of us who want to understand. They're the ones who advance the 
state of the art, and without that, we'd still be traveling on steam 
trains. I just wish there were more schools and pedagogic knowledge (and 
good teachers, of course) to make things interesting and fun for us 
others. But without that, many students get by with so-so grades, having 
invested only 10% of their effort into it. I know I did. What a waste.