Why can't people write?

[Dan Hintz]

John,

Get a sundial... it never needs winding and always goes in the right direction ;-) And a child will still understand the clock is right twice a day thing... a digital clock blinks 12:00, so it's still correct twice a day. What if one were to consider the slide rule as nothing more than a generalized E6B?

Oh, and I know what a Smith Chart is... had to use one from time to time when working on antenna stuff.

[Joe Leigh]

Tell them to take their right hand and point to the very top of their head. Now stretch their arm towards the sky, then away from their body towards the side, then towards the ground... that is a clockwise motion. Doing the same with their left hand will be counter-clockwise.

Sounds easy enough..... .......assuming of course that they know their right hand from their left. Or is that unnecessary also?

[Bill Cunningham]

I simply explain that clockwise means rotating in this direction (with hand motions) and counter-clockwise means rotating in that direction. It's no different than if I said rotate a screw alpha or beta, it's simply a convention easy to remember for those who can already read an analog clock... but knowing how to read an analog clock is not a pre-requisite to understanding the concept of counter-rotating directions labeled arbitrarily, as long as the convention is kept the same from person to person.

Would the hand motion be seen from your perspective, or the student's? Ahh Confusion reigns..

Bafflegab can be fun too ! The most interesting one is the descriptive explanation first used at 3 mile Island back in the 70's: "It was simply a energetic disassembly, followed by rapid oxidation"
Translation: It Exploded and Burned!

[John Coloccia]

Or, clockwise is the direction you turn a steering wheel to turn right.

What's interesting about this, though, is that until fairly recently it was truly impossible to describe right and left in any absolute terms. Another way of saying this is that the laws of physics were perfectly symmetrical with respect to right vs left, so there was no way in principle that one could explain the concept of right and left without demonstrating the convention. It was only around 1960 that a violation of this symmetry was found. Now, you can describe an experimental procedure whereby the concept of right and left can be established via fundamental physical laws.

The situation is different for up and down, surprisingly enough. You can very simply define the concept of "down" by reference to gravity at the surface of a spherical body, and "up" is simply the opposite vector, but left and right is attainable only by exotic means (i.e. accelerators, supercooled nuclei, etc....definitely not kitchen table science!).

[Larry Frank]

There have been many valid and funny points in this thread. While I would agree that there are many children who end up with a poor education, there are also many that get an excellent education. There are students leaving high school today with almost a the equivalent of the first year of engineering college. At many high schools the education is there for the taking and it is up to the parents to "encourage" them to take advantage of it.

[Jim Koepke]

(i.e. accelerators, supercooled nuclei, etc....definitely not kitchen table science!).

No, but you could do it in your back yard…

Back Yard Built 9-11-2008.jpg

jtk

[Ernie Miller]

There have been many valid and funny points in this thread. While I would agree that there are many children who end up with a poor education, there are also many that get an excellent education. There are students leaving high school today with almost a the equivalent of the first year of engineering college. At many high schools the education is there for the taking and it is up to the parents to "encourage" them to take advantage of it.

Good point. We must be careful when looking at rankings of high school students from different countries and cultures. In another lifetime when I taught high school choral music, a girl of Asian descent came into my office - crying. When I asked what the problem was, she said she was afraid to go home because she got a 97 on an English exam. She was not allowed to make any mistakes.... period. She eventually became class Salutatorian which was similarly problematic because she didn't become Valedictorian. I learned that this severity is quite common in certain cultures and there is a price to be paid for being on top of the list. Perhaps we need a little more of this "encouragement" - and some other cultures might do with a little less. Sometimes we have to look deeper into the statistics to determine the true cause and effect.

[Van Huskey]

I had a problem with young people, to me that is people under 30 at the time, while trying to explain that a screw with 40 threads per inch could be used to change adjustments on a machine. I tried to explain that turning it 15 minutes or 90° would change the adjustment .00625". They could not figure out what I meant by 15 minutes being the same as 90°. They kind of when nuts when told that turning it 5 minutes would be about .002". One guy suggested that he could unscrew the whole assembly in less than a minute.



Not to be a picker of nits here,

jtk

I suppose this is a nit but I can't help but pick it, or the occasional scab. If someone had used this explanation to explain what you tried to explain in the text above to a group I was in, I would have been the smartbutt who would have raised his hand and pointed out that minutes are 1/60th of a degree and that 15 minutes would not be 90 degrees but .25 degrees and thus 15 minutes of rotation applied to this threaded adjustment would amount to about .0001736" of change....


Oops I didn't even read past this to the very next post!

[Montgomery Scott]

Is it just me, or are these sort of things appearing more often? I fear that a generation of functionally illiterate citizens will leave us with no one to correct the mistakes.

Laziness is my opinion. Many people are fine with not being able to spell or be grammatically correct. Look at how many people on this forum can't spell simple words such as "hobbyist" or, "separate" or use the words "loose" and "lose" of "affect" and "effect" incorrectly?

[Scott Shepherd]

While it's funny (and easy) to call kids today lazy and not so smart, I'd like to pose a different side of the equation. Who raised all those kids to be like that? Other kids? Nope. Parents who are in their 40's, 50's, 60's and 70's now. So want to call them out, stand in front of the mirror and take responsibility for what your generations created!

[Curt Harms]

While it's funny (and easy) to call kids today lazy and not so smart, I'd like to pose a different side of the equation. Who raised all those kids to be like that? Other kids? Nope. Parents who are in their 40's, 50's, 60's and 70's now. So want to call them out, stand in front of the mirror and take responsibility for what your generations created!

You're absolutely right Scott. I doubt you'll have to find time to appear on any TV "news/information" shows to give voice to that position anytime soon, however.

[Matt Meiser]

I was thinking the same thing reading this thread Scott (and Curt.)

[Charlie Reals]

While it's funny (and easy) to call kids today lazy and not so smart, I'd like to pose a different side of the equation. Who raised all those kids to be like that? Other kids? Nope. Parents who are in their 40's, 50's, 60's and 70's now. So want to call them out, stand in front of the mirror and take responsibility for what your generations created!

I will be the first here to stand in the mirror. There were more than a few of us in each of those generations who tried to instill an understanding of the English language in our children. In the 70's I constantly questioned things being done and the evolution of our education system. English is still spoken and taught in our schools. Unfortunately we have allowed internet speak to invade every realm of our society. Read any news item and count the mistakes. In this day and age there is no excuse for it other than laziness. Too lazy to use spell check is real lazy and not funny at all.
As stated above though, one of my pet peeves is the misuse of loose and lose.
Another way of looking at it, we were not speaking the same English in 1960 as our ancestors spoke in 1800, our English has evolved to become a vast mixture of many languages and regional dialects.

[Joyce Baldauf]

In the last week, I have found at least three glaring errors in articles in the New York Times. This is the newspaper that advertises that they have the best reporters in the world, but I guess editors don't matter.

[Joyce Baldauf]

[QUOTE=Belinda Williamson;1621067]Have I mentioned lately how pleasant it is to have coffee shoot out of my nose?

This brought tears to my eyes, I laughed so hard. Thank God I wasn't drinking my coffee!