Re: [ba-unrev-talk] Humble pie in academia
Dennis. (01)
Thanks for the empathy and welcome to the fellowship. (02)
On the trivial side, ls ???? will do just fine. The examiner may object
that with the four-letter directory names come all the directory's
content , not just the four-letter content. (03)
Apparently, I do much of that lurking into what is unsaid and in the
process: (a) lose a lot of time, (b) burn up energy wastefully, (c) find
all sorts of errors in the textbooks, (d) find that textbook authors
have a poor grasp of logical expose of the material, (e, f, g, h, ...
notably that instructors' errors readily become students' errors at exam
time.) (04)
I believe it important that textbooks go electronic as soon as possible
so that all their faults can be quickly eliminated. Textbook publishers
have there sales representatives all over teachers' offices while the
actual users are left out of the picture. I also believe that teachers
(professors) ought to have read the books they assign to students. (05)
In both my courses, the teachers declared right off the bat that the
books assigned were not their choice and, in fact, found them bad. While
one course still follows the assigned book, the other has run totally
away from it and thereby leaving students utterly dependent on hastely
scribbled notes taken during rapid-fire talk. Those are evening students
holding down jobs during the day. The experience makes me wonder how bad
a teacher I was in my day! Anyway, there is much to be learned here
besides the course content. (06)
Henry (07)
P.S. For your Java course, don't buy Lambert & Osborne. I could write a
book about its deficiencies. To think how much the wretched authors have
put into it! (08)
Dennis E. Hamilton wrote: (09)
>Well, we could go off and talk about toolcraft and the pitfalls thereof, as
>well as focusing on syntactic versus semantic knowledge and other things.
>For example, one usually learns how to solve problems like the one given by
>trial and error in current settings. I can't do that here so I will simply
>take a parachuteless plunge:
>
>I would have thought something like
>
> ls ????
>
>would do the job, but I don't know for sure whether it will find matches on
>names with fewer than 4 characters. Then I wonder if it will also pick up
>directory names and whether that is allowed in an answer. Then I wonder
>which shell is being used and how that impacts the answer. And what are the
>Unix regular-expressions in filenames rules these days?
>
>Sometimes, being an old fart means I know too much about what is lurking
>left in the unsaid and I'm left wondering where a fresh student doesn't
>even have such distractions in the way.
>
>And sometimes exams aren't very well thought out and we're playing stump the
>student rather than eliciting some measure of the desired comprehension of
>the subject.
>
>But, you know, apropos the subject matter of ba-unrev, maybe it has us look
>at what exactly *is* knowledge and where does (which kind of) it matter?
>
>-- Dennis
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: owner-ba-unrev-talk@bootstrap.org
>[mailto:owner-ba-unrev-talk@bootstrap.org]On Behalf Of Henry K van Eyken
>Sent: Monday, October 14, 2002 04:25
>To: ba-unrev-talk@bootstrap.org
>Subject: [ba-unrev-talk] Humble pie in academia
>
>[ ... ]
>
>Henry
>
>N.B. Simple sample question from the UNIX exam: give a command to
>seggregate from a list of files those with four-character names. (By
>straight file manipulation; no scripts.)
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> (010)