A good book and it discusses how adding MORE programmers to a task means the project will take LONGER to complete.
So, adding more programmers to a late project, and not slipping the date even more to account for them, [b]probably[/b] means that the final result [b]will[/b] suck.
From what I've seen, the book is pretty much dead on with this one. I do wonder if having people leave a project mid-stream and adding new people to it makes it even longer. Isn't this part of the picture with Microsoft? I've heard of a lot of developers leaving to go to other places. Some of them must of have deeply ingrained in the Vista project(s). Coming in half-way through a project and expected to continue where someone left off is a complete mess, especially when you can't contact the person to get any info about their undocumented code.
Here is your misunderstanding: You are NOT paying to be taught by a teacher. You are paying for the opportunity to learn and demonstrate mastery of a subject. That is all on you. To facilitate this process, you are armed with an instructor, tutors, a library, your peers in and outside of the classrom.
Thanks for the great response and putting it in different terms than I've heard before. I'll definitely be incorportaing everything you've said into how I view things in the future.
Now yes you are right, I am not paying solely to be taught by a teacher, but I do think that the teacher is without a doubt the most essential part of the process. What concerns me most is that there's a really strong attitude in academia about how students are stupid, can't accurately evaluate professors, are lazy, and about how teachers are all knowing, are the master of the classroom, have a complete say in how a course goes... As a student, paying for a chance to learn something, it's infuriating for a teacher to tell us again and again that we can't cover certain material in the class because we don't have time, then turn around and do the exact same lecture three times (with the exact same slides) on material that's really basic and simple -- and not because students were having a difficult time with the topic, but because the teacher wasn't organized and forgot that we already covered the lecture. It's infuriating for a teacher to give out low grades that are purely subjective and then not be able to back it up when asked about why (and the same is true for teachers that give out high grades without being able to explain why). To me, this is REALLY BAD teaching. Am I saying that teachers should spoon-feed students and give high grades because the student paid for it? Hell no. That's probably the most offensive thing a teacher could do.
I've seen time and time again this attitude from professors like they don't have to take responsibility for what they do in the classroom. It's almost like they are entitled to do a really crappy job presenting the information, be flat out rude to students, play favorites with grades/attention, slam students that ask questions that are relevant to the topic (but the teacher can't answer), not respond to emails, etc... I've seen way too many teachers act unprofessionally in their classes and even become a huge barrier to the learning process. I think that one possible solution is for teachers to start seeing themselves as providing a service. I'm hoping that it would shift the discussion of blaming lazy students as being the problem and start focusing on what they can do better to improve the opportunity to learn. I'd love it if more teachers would start being accountable for what they do during the semester. But perhaps going the "teacher as a service" route isn't the best solution. I don't know for sure. I do know that I've seen a lot of *REALLY BAD* teaching and I think something needs to change.
>> The professor is a professional teacher paid to teach, and the student is the one receiving his services. I'll never understand why the student should be the only one responsible for his learning, when the teacher is the one getting paid.
This is a classic example of the school-as-service-corporation attitude that many Gen Y kids* have
Now what I don't understand is that if I'm a student, I'm paying to take a course, I'm paying to learn the material in the course, and I'm paying to be taught by a teacher. How is this not a service? And how is it that if I pay for something and have a certain level of expectation as to what I receive translate into "entitlement"? If I'm paying a lot of money for something, you better believe that I want it done well (and by "done well" I mean either stellar teaching or a solid ass kicking that brings me to a new level of knowledge).
Actually he's paid to do research and asked to teach on the side.
This is true far too often. Sucks for the student a lot of the time. I just wish there was some sort of discussion about ethics in the university setting. Is it really appropriate/ethical for someone to be working a job where there's a solid portion of it they do REALLY BADLY? Or even what's ethical for professors in general. I've had teachers in the past teach stuff wrong. Then re-teach it different, but still wrong. The didn't know the material. I've had teachers announce on the first day of class that there is an extra weekly class meeting that we are all required to go to despite the fact that this was not listed anywhere in official registrar time schedules (and to think that I moved to a new city to attend this program because it was clear that we had Friday's off -- I needed the day to work and pay bills or else I couldn't do school). Another teacher actually thought it was appropriate to use an entire class, for the entire semester, for an experiment he was running that wasn't even related to the course material. And he even admitted that there was a good chance that the students wouldn't learn nearly as much from what he was doing. It was clear that not once did he stop to ask if this was ethical.
The school backed me up with this student 100%. You want to know why? Because the kid was a spoiled jackass who deserved to fail a class and learn a lesson about respect. That's not me being pompous, it's me putting a stupid kid in his place.
Take a look a the bolded phrases. It's quite clear how someone could think that you are incredibly immature, unprofessional, and well, a "self-absorbed asshole". And funny that you should focus on teaching him about respect, eh? Take a look at the way you are talking about a 19-year-old.
You know NOTHING about what the student's complaint was. You know nothing about the way I was treated. Yet you assume I was a pompous and self absorbed asshole because I removed a student who not only questioned my authority, but disrupted my classroom and negatively affected the learning experiences of the other twenty people in the room. Be careful when you make assumptions about things you don't know, you might find you come across as the self centered, pompous one.
Is this how you behave when you teach and interact with your students? If so, it's clear why you would have a student act up, and it's clear that something like this will happen again. Why? Because it's completely manipulative. Squash someone by saying they are assuming and that they don't know anything. Then pull out the "but what about my feelings!" card. And finish it by spinning it around and call them self-centered and pompous. Why? Because the poster questioned your authority? Maybe your energy would be better spent looking inwards at ways you can improve and deal with "kids" effectively rather than how you are right.
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A good book and it discusses how adding MORE programmers to a task means the project will take LONGER to complete.
So, adding more programmers to a late project, and not slipping the date even more to account for them, [b]probably[/b] means that the final result [b]will[/b] suck.
From what I've seen, the book is pretty much dead on with this one. I do wonder if having people leave a project mid-stream and adding new people to it makes it even longer. Isn't this part of the picture with Microsoft? I've heard of a lot of developers leaving to go to other places. Some of them must of have deeply ingrained in the Vista project(s). Coming in half-way through a project and expected to continue where someone left off is a complete mess, especially when you can't contact the person to get any info about their undocumented code.
Here is your misunderstanding: You are NOT paying to be taught by a teacher. You are paying for the opportunity to learn and demonstrate mastery of a subject. That is all on you. To facilitate this process, you are armed with an instructor, tutors, a library, your peers in and outside of the classrom.
Thanks for the great response and putting it in different terms than I've heard before. I'll definitely be incorportaing everything you've said into how I view things in the future.
Now yes you are right, I am not paying solely to be taught by a teacher, but I do think that the teacher is without a doubt the most essential part of the process. What concerns me most is that
there's a really strong attitude in academia about how students are stupid, can't accurately evaluate professors, are lazy, and about how teachers are all knowing, are the master of the classroom, have a complete say in how a course goes... As a student, paying for a chance to learn something, it's infuriating for a teacher to tell us again and again that we can't cover certain material in the class because we don't have time, then turn around and do the exact same lecture three times (with the exact same slides) on material that's really basic and simple -- and not because students were having a difficult time with the topic, but because the teacher wasn't organized and forgot that we already covered the lecture. It's infuriating for a teacher to give out low grades that are purely subjective and then not be able to back it up when asked about why (and the same is true for teachers that give out high grades without being able to explain why). To me, this is REALLY BAD teaching. Am I saying that teachers should spoon-feed students and give high grades because the student paid for it? Hell no. That's probably the most offensive thing a teacher could do.
I've seen time and time again this attitude from professors like they don't have to take responsibility for what they do in the classroom. It's almost like they are entitled to do a really crappy job presenting the information, be flat out rude to students, play favorites with grades/attention, slam students that ask questions that are relevant to the topic (but the teacher can't answer), not respond to emails, etc... I've seen way too many teachers act unprofessionally in their classes and even become a huge barrier to the learning process. I think that one possible solution is for teachers to start seeing themselves as providing a service. I'm hoping that it would shift the discussion of blaming lazy students as being the problem and start focusing on what they can do better to improve the opportunity to learn. I'd love it if more teachers would start being accountable for what they do during the semester. But perhaps going the "teacher as a service" route isn't the best solution. I don't know for sure. I do know that I've seen a lot of *REALLY BAD* teaching and I think something needs to change.
>> The professor is a professional teacher paid to teach, and the student is the one receiving his services. I'll never understand why the student should be the only one responsible for his learning, when the teacher is the one getting paid.
This is a classic example of the school-as-service-corporation attitude that many Gen Y kids* have
Now what I don't understand is that if I'm a student, I'm paying to take a course, I'm paying to learn the material in the course, and I'm paying to be taught by a teacher. How is this not a service? And how is it that if I pay for something and have a certain level of expectation as to what I receive translate into "entitlement"? If I'm paying a lot of money for something, you better believe that I want it done well (and by "done well" I mean either stellar teaching or a solid ass kicking that brings me to a new level of knowledge).
Actually he's paid to do research and asked to teach on the side.
This is true far too often. Sucks for the student a lot of the time. I just wish there was some sort of discussion about ethics in the university setting. Is it really appropriate/ethical for someone to be working a job where there's a solid portion of it they do REALLY BADLY? Or even what's ethical for professors in general. I've had teachers in the past teach stuff wrong. Then re-teach it different, but still wrong. The didn't know the material. I've had teachers announce on the first day of class that there is an extra weekly class meeting that we are all required to go to despite the fact that this was not listed anywhere in official registrar time schedules (and to think that I moved to a new city to attend this program because it was clear that we had Friday's off -- I needed the day to work and pay bills or else I couldn't do school). Another teacher actually thought it was appropriate to use an entire class, for the entire semester, for an experiment he was running that wasn't even related to the course material. And he even admitted that there was a good chance that the students wouldn't learn nearly as much from what he was doing. It was clear that not once did he stop to ask if this was ethical.
The school backed me up with this student 100%. You want to know why? Because the kid was a spoiled jackass who deserved to fail a class and learn a lesson about respect. That's not me being pompous, it's me putting a stupid kid in his place.
Take a look a the bolded phrases. It's quite clear how someone could think that you are incredibly immature, unprofessional, and well, a "self-absorbed asshole". And funny that you should focus on teaching him about respect, eh? Take a look at the way you are talking about a 19-year-old.
You know NOTHING about what the student's complaint was. You know nothing about the way I was treated. Yet you assume I was a pompous and self absorbed asshole because I removed a student who not only questioned my authority, but disrupted my classroom and negatively affected the learning experiences of the other twenty people in the room. Be careful when you make assumptions about things you don't know, you might find you come across as the self centered, pompous one.
Is this how you behave when you teach and interact with your students? If so, it's clear why you would have a student act up, and it's clear that something like this will happen again. Why? Because it's completely manipulative. Squash someone by saying they are assuming and that they don't know anything. Then pull out the "but what about my feelings!" card. And finish it by spinning it around and call them self-centered and pompous. Why? Because the poster questioned your authority? Maybe your energy would be better spent looking inwards at ways you can improve and deal with "kids" effectively rather than how you are right.