Being in College

This semester I'm taking two "non-language" classes. The hope is that I'll be able to practice my listening and speaking in contexts that aren't exclusively language focused. This is, obviously, a little harder than my usual language class but it's more fun since I get to see language in action.

My first class was my computer science class. The first thing I noticed was the relationship between the teacher and the students. First, she lectured them about coming in on time (they still come in late). It's interesting how most of these students are 18 or 19 (or 20) but they still get treated like seniors or juniors in high school. There was this one point where she basically said: "I know you guys are all lazy..." and I totally snorted in class and these girls stared at me. Haha.

Second, a lot of the interaction reflects a rote learning style. The teacher asks a question, and if the answer is obvious, everyone answers in semi-unison. Or if the teacher is repeating a point, she'll ask a question and then proceed to answer it herself with everyone joining in unison.

There is a complete emphasis on practicality. This is fine, but when I was in college the emphasis was completely different. There was an attempt to make the concepts taught language agnostic and we used an "unpractical" language (Scheme) to get us to focus on the concepts instead of the implementation. The emphasis on practicality means that they talk a lot about C language constructs, how to use Borland's C compiler and the importance of programming in Windows. The computer lab totally reflects this emphasis on practicality: there's no internet access in it and the machines are all running these old (probably pirated) copies of XP with old copies of Visual FoxPro, Visual * programming tools, Borland, etc.

It made really thankful for UNIX and how I got started on UNIX; I felt a lot of the concepts and tools learned were useful in a way that transcended the specific idiosyncrasies of each tool. I certainly don't feel that way here.

As we think about developing relationships and possibly hiring here, it makes me a little apprehensive; there was a huge learning curve for me in going from the university to working. I appreciated the work ethic (e.g. staying up all night, being committed to deadlines, etc) that being at Cal gave me (I was a lazy bum in high school). With all the culturally acceptable plagiarism here as well as varying degrees of work ethic, I hope we can find the right folks to network with here.

Basketball class... that's for another post!