Send Ken To College

In my ongoing effort to put off my homework as long as possible, I found myself reading through an old copy of Communications of the ACM.  It was the July/August 2008 edition and in it was an article written by Rick Rashid.  Mr. Rashid, a senior VP at Microsoft, was talking about how to inspire a new generation of computer scientists. 

Apparently computer science suffers from the image that it is nothing but a bunch of solitary, male, geeks sitting around gobbling junk food, swilling caffeinated beverages and hammering out cryptic looking code.  This image crisis seems to be discouraging women from entering the field.  

Mr. Rashid talks about a number of meetings that he had with high school and college students that were interested in computer science.  His goal was to find out what motivates and inspires them and to get feedback as to how to motivate and inspire others to enter the field.  One of the students that he mentions is Evie Powell, a PhD candidate in game design at UNC-Charlotte.  Evie lists one of her big motivations as a professor that taught an introductory game design class.  That one little spark has motivated her to grad school, has motivated her to be active in the STARS Alliance among other things.

Some days it takes a Herculean effort for me to drive 60 miles to school just to set through a few classes.  I think part of the problem is that I have yet to find a professor that is really all that enthusiastic about their subject matter.  In fact many of them seem like it is a major chore to get up in front of a class and teach.  You can not help but get the impression that they have their PhD so that is all they feel to be important.  Dr. Gray was probably as close to a motivational professor that I had, or will have in the near future, in the computer science department.

It is a sad state of affairs when my favorite class this semester is a general physics class.  I wonder what the professors are like in the Art department…

It seems to me that their are a large number of professors out there that seriously abuse their power.  My General Physics professor is one such person. 

The other day he handed back my homework.  I am looking it over and notice that he deducted a point because I did not label my numbers with units.  I mean like how unfair is this.  He spent how many years working on his PhD and he does not know that acceleration is measured in m/s/s?  Why should I have to tell him?

…and don’t even get me started on how unfair it was that he marked points off because I got a slightly wrong answer on part 1 of a 4 part question and each subsequent answer was then wrong.  Can he not see how I worked out the problem and give me full credit even if the real answer is about 1/4 of what I got?

I think it is about time to complain to the administration about this!