For Jeffrey Kaplan (aka Tigole): With Blizzard always concurrently developing their games for both Windows and Mac, are we ever going to see any distribution of Linux supported natively? With Linux being not far behind Mac in usage and the fact that Blizzard has already done most of the hard work with maintaining an abstract cross-platform code base, it seems strange that - at minimum - World of Warcraft has not had a native port to Linux.
Trying to teach in fuzzy alternate ways, teaching by trickery, emphasizing word problems or case study, teaching two or three paths at the same time, all of that stuff does not work for technical and mathematical subjects, pure and simple. Actually, I tend to disagree with that point. While it is my opinion - as well as the opinion of many other well-educated professors and other academic teachers - that everyone doesn't learn the same way. Myself in high school I often found it extremely difficult to learn in linear ways. While I agree that teaching 'fuzziness' or 'trickery' isn't the correct path, I do however believe that myself and many others alternates ways (taught at the time of the original lecture) can often be very helpful to people. Instead of teaching your students that this is the way that you do it, I believe it's equally more important to show how else the problem can be solves, or how it is incorrectly solved.
Word problems, hmm. While I consider myself fairly good at English and other subjects, I've never found a good crossing between words and mathematical problems to form a word problem. Although, I have seen people outside of myself learn from those types of problems.
In today's society everyone expects you to be in the norm (such as the professor indicated in the above quoted excerpt). In-fact I 'blame' (and I use the word lightly) these differences in education teaching to be the reason I was unable to successfully go to college straight out of high school. Additionally for me I found that college was basically a whole lot of homework and very little lecture. Sure, it may be a scientific 'fact' that most (99.99999%) people learn better from homework rather than lecture, or at least retain the knowledge better via homework after a lecture. However my situation is different, I've always learned from lecture.
Again, in high school I found that I always learned the subject better by listening to the teacher and NOT taking notes. Often my grades were very bad because of the homework that was never done, however I made up for that lack from acing my tests.
Point being: don't generalize, professor. While 99.99999% of the population seems like a good enough statistic for you, some of the brightest minds out there don't learn the same way as you.
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For Jeffrey Kaplan (aka Tigole): With Blizzard always concurrently developing their games for both Windows and Mac, are we ever going to see any distribution of Linux supported natively? With Linux being not far behind Mac in usage and the fact that Blizzard has already done most of the hard work with maintaining an abstract cross-platform code base, it seems strange that - at minimum - World of Warcraft has not had a native port to Linux.