Re: ??? ??? ???=the nature of students

[Hugh Haskell <hhaskell@mindspring.com>]

> Leigh responded:
>
> For someone who has rebuilt a carburetor I think Hugh does not comprehend
> the problem fully. Most of these kids have never done anything a tenth so
> complicated as that!

My point, exactly. I was not a very mechanically inclined child, and yet I
had done many things by the time I finished HS, that our current HS grad
haven't even though of.

> I think the problem is much more profound than Hugh makes it out to be.

I'm sorry if I left the impression that I was proposing the solution. I
offered only another possible reason to add to the others. I didn't mean to
imply that the increase in complexity was the only reason for the problems
that have been raised with this thread, but it is one of them. When toys
are so expensive that children are not allowed to take them apart, they
don't learn what goes on inside and soon lose interest. Leigh's mention of
tubes in radios and TV sets being easy to test and replace is right in line
with what I was talking about. I used to fix my TV set, but now all I can
do is make fine sounding pronouncements about what is wrong ("Ahem. It must
be the high-voltage rectifier," or "Ahem. I've seen that before. It's the
fly-back transformer." Hell, I don't even know if modern TV sets have those
devices, let alone am I able to repair them.). I built a complete stereo
system way back when--soldered every joint, cut every wire, and screwed in
every screw. I plugged it in and it worked. Some years later I built some
other electronic device (I don't even remember what it was). All I had to
do was connect together a bunch of pre-wired circuit boards. As it
happened, when I plugged it in it didn't work, and since there was nothing
in it that I could fix, once I had checked all my connections, the only
thing left to do was take it to the repair shop and let them "remove and
replace" the circuit board that was bad.

Now I don't mean to imply that our devices don't work better because of
digital technology--they do. And they are easier to repair on those rare
occasions when they need repair. My point is that, for the most part, there
is nothing to see when you open one of them up except incomprehensible
circuit boards. I marvel at what they can do and how well they do it for
the most part, but all those boards look alike and without a lot of
knowledge and sophisticated test equipment (that cannot be found in
supermarkets), there isn't much you can do.

> Of course he is right; the automobile is no longer as approachable as it used
> to be*. However I'd love to have a nickel for every major appliance
> (microwave oven, stereo, etc.) that has been junked by its owner because
> it ceased to work, when often no more than the replacement of a fuse would
> have cured the difficulty. On a microwave oven of mine that has now ceased
> to work altogether I replaced a fuse at least five times over its twenty
> year lifetime. The thing was clearly marked with warnings and the notice
> "No user serviceable parts inside" when a Buss fuse was all it needed. I
> had to remove the cover, however, to replace the fuse. The notice is CYA!

Again, this is my point. Why don't kids learn at some point that those
warnings are CYA? I suspect that they know it, but don't care. While I
enjoy fixing things to a certain extent, I don't get much more thrill out
of changing a fuse than from changing a light bulb.

> I get a buzz out of fixing such things; I want my students to have the
> same experiences. They don't do these things; as Hugh says, at best they
> take them them to repairmen only slightly more competent than themseves,
> who then "Re & re" modules, often more modules than are absolutely
> necessary to fix the device in question. At worst they discard the items
> and purchase new ones
>
> Leigh
>
> *Last month the side window electric winder on my Dodge Caravan gave up.
> I opened up the door and found the difficulty, a single flexible plastic
> toothed rack had fatigued and broken. I decided to have the dealer replace
> it and put the door back together. It cost me C$100 to fix for one broken
> plastic part, incuding our not inconsiderable Canadian taxes.

You're lucky. When I had the same thing happen on my car, the tab came to $500!

Don't get me wrong. Complexity isn't keeping kids from playing with
magnets, or magnifying glasses, or reading an occasional book on astronomy
so they can answer Ludwik's questions in physics class, or any of the
myriad other things that kids still can do if they want to. But children
start to learn about the world around them by dismantling that world, and
the logical place to start that was with their toys. My point is that
complexity, which makes the toys too complicated and expensive to
dismantle, coupled with television which makes children passive, and
combine that with caregivers who don't have time to read to children, which
narrows their horizons, and elementary school teachers who are terrified of
science and thus propagate a severely distorted view of it to their
students, which atrophies their outlook on the world, as well as a dozen
other reasons that others will think of and I haven't, all mean that our
students don't arrive at our door without the common life experiences that
most of us had as children in the pre-electronic age (which, of course,
certainly dates me).

Well, after this rather too long exchange, I think Leigh and I don't
disagree on anything (about this thread). I just hope that Leigh has some
answers to the problem, because, other than adding some commandments to the
ones we already have, I don't have much to offer in the way of solutions.

Hugh

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Hugh Haskell
<mailto://hhaskell@mindspring.com>

The box said "Requires Windows 95 or better." So I bought a Macintosh.
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