Another fun day of study, but no job prospects. I cannot seem to find any real definitive rates of pay for graduates of the course I am taking. I have no intention of working in that field, but I would like to know what the jobs pay. We have some new neighbors, and it is easy to tell already they mean trouble for the whole neighborhood. Noisy, obnoxious and they argue rather loudly late into the night. It is only a matter of time until the police are here on a regular basis. Hopefully, they won’t last long but they will cause trouble meanwhile, mark my words.
The Hippie called to vent a little. He can really sweat the small things, but smoothes everything out given a little time to let the dust settle. It sounds like he’s got this real flakey lawyer who barely makes deadlines. Meanwhile he is juggling the yoga lessons, guitar lessons, the band, the contract at Kolb Park and getting out of the sober house. If he isn’t careful, he’ll start doing as many things as I do, and that is not recommended. Not if you want to live forever. I dug out our old song list from 2000/01. Want to see it?Is that [list] 1960s enough? There are some tunes there I did not hear until this century. Mainly they are draggy blues tunes that could not hold my interest long enough. Others, I recognize little bits of it as we play them, usually the first part of the chorus. Well, I never heard most of those Patsy Cline songs until I met Robyn twenty years later. [Author’s note: by publication time (2008) I was playing less than five from this list.]
I drove to the special Network class this week. The instructor is trying to save time by doubling up the two half-empty classrooms. This is causing my first criticism of this class. What is happening, beside the disruption of my schedule, is that the entire academic part of the class is being taught in one long stretch. This is how one learns medicine, or accounting. This is a trade course and should have a better balance between theory and practice. As it is, we have covered 250 pages of the textbook that demands hours of reading and study, but we have not touched a computer yet. I am used to study marathons and have 8 hours a day to study. The pace on the others is brutal. I also know that without practical application within the same day much of the book learning will not stay with you. The phone company used to pull this one on us. “What do you mean you don’t know how to work this equipment? You took the course just two years ago.”
All I can tell you is if we are, in this course, going to learn anything useful about repairing and building computers, we had damn well better get a move on. [Author’s note: in the end, it transpired that this school was using the government program to sucker students into signing up for very expensive programs, an activity expressly forbidden by the guidelines. I turned the school in and they were cut off from government funds. They were trying to spoonfeed me.]
The instructor is also playing it safe. Nobody fails this course due to anything he did not cover, he is very careful about that eventuality. This makes the course drag out for the rest of us. He follows the textbook almost word for word. Since I am one of ‘those’, the people who read the chapter before arriving for class, I notice immediately when someone is parroting the book. If you’ve read my writings from the 1980s, you’ll remember my same criticisms back then.
These type of instructors are very highly accredited but I learn the least from them. Several times today he ‘explained’ things in a circle, such as stating that an Internet Protocol was a protocol that works on the internet. Hey, I don’t pay big bucks for that kind of nonsense. I won’t complain until I see how he is teaching the practical. Maybe he shines. During break, I’ve predicted that tomorrow he will start by explaining a daisy wheel printer and then move to ink jet, and then bubble jet. Because that is the order of things in the textbook. I expect a good instructor to reword the text, offering gems of insight, presenting techniques that make memorization easier, and being extra careful never to use unfamiliar words. Today he told us that network computers need a ‘client’. And left it hanging there.
Traffic was surprisingly light and I spent the hour listening to tapes with all the bass lines I have long since forgotten. And planning some scripts for my little movie idea about a real holiday in Florida. [The project became too time-consuming.] I need one of those voice changers, since I know my voice is very distinct no matter what I do. Studs Terkel, and all my other reading goes on hold until graduation. Nothing but short range stuff meanwhile.
Wouldn’t you know it, there is a watch repair class for $73, the first such course I’ve ever seen in Florida. It is on Wednesday nights so I have to miss it, just knowing it will not be offered again. I knew and said good old mechanical watches would make a comeback. Such workmanship is worth hundreds these days. Actually, it is not, a better explanation is that we’ve allowed prices of staples to inflate so much that nobody can afford to do the work for less than hundreds. A rare dime sold today for 1.37 million dollars. Coincidence?
Back to studying. If it turns out all the book work was crammed into the first few weeks, I may complain. That is not how one learns a trade. The correct way is a little theory, then immediately a little practice. This is a modem followed right next by this is how you set it, configure it, install it and test it. So far we have covered modems, cards, cables, ports, drive configurations, networks, cases, connectors, board forms, slots, sockets, RAM cards, processors, chips, graphics cards, monitors, hex numbering, IRQs, bussing, IDE/ATA systems, jumpering and redundancy at blinding speed without any letup.
Can you imagine trying to memorize all this material if you were working full time? It has to be rote memorized, because we have not yet even touched any hardware to relate the learning experience in a practical way. Which make and model of computer uses a 478 pin socket? What year? What was the clocking speeds? Which video card and what resolution? This gets impossible very quickly.
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