According to professor Goldberg missing basics, in which he believes engineers aren't prepared to ask, label, model, decompose, measure, visualize and communicate, I would doubt, as future engineer, in some of this basics like asking, measuring, visualizing and communicating.
Although I agree in certain way that us, as engineers don;t know how to ask, during my education received in Colombia they do taught us how to ask. Asking was taught to us also as a possibility to open doors, to understand, to learn and to go beyond the knowledge of what is being told and heard. Asking is one step of the modern education in Colombia, we believe that without asking education and learning would not exist. The teacher or the lecturer aren't always right, they also are humans and they can commit mistakes, that is why asking i s so important in our life.
Measuring, is one of the basics and skills that every student should have, or at least a great proportion of them. This basic is such an important one, due in any field research or just in a lab, that at least once in a lifetime an student has had one of those(we did a lot at school). Measuring needs to be known, so that an experiment can be done, or data can be recollected, and results and conclusions could be drawn afterwards, referring to precision or accuracy, between others.
Visualizing, was also taught to us by the simple fact of doing summaries and drawing conclusions about reading or based on works. How to draw sketches and diagrams was always a really good way to remember things and to understand ideas much clearer, sometimes ideas from a causal chain situation.
At last, we have Communication. To finish, to conclude and to draw conclusions and results was always a higher step taught to us in Philosophy class(from where all the behind basics come from for Prof. Goldberg). Finding the way to express the others our ideas, always led to a discussion, which in a causal way, led to results and general ideas that made thing much easier.
Although I disagree in the way Prof. Goldberg thinks that we lack of some of this missing basics, and that engineers are only made up from math, science and engineering sciences, reinforcing this basics is never bad and learning new ones like labeling, modeling, and decomposing is much better, I believe that by reinforcing this basics that some of us might have and others don't, will make us much better engineers.
I think what Prof. Goldberg want to deliver to us is that we, as future engineers who just began our university study, has the opportunity to develop those so-called "Missing Basics" during the following years while we are studying math and science instead of catching up those skill after we take a job and step into the society because since then it will be too late to modify the way we behave. As you mentioned, some of the engineers may have the basics while others do not; those engineers who possess the "Missing basics" mostly start building these skills long before they dabble into the society, for instance they may start when they were at the same age as we are, so that after four-year learning, they do not only command the scientific theories but also gain a strong ability of social working and communication ect.
ResponderEliminarI like your arrangement of how to enhance the three of "Missing Basics" step by step. These three skills you chose are the basics among the "Missing basics", therefore improving these skills can construct you a solid foundation and assist your further development of other more crucial skills. However, in my opinion, shyness is not necessarily to be eliminated to achieve fluency. Shyness may be the result of inborn character or environmental influnce, it is not an easy job to remove this quality at the time we almost reach our maturity. Nevertheless, other methods to reinforce influency can be reading more intuitive articals especially the arguments containing intensive reasoning or trying to express more objective opinions and bringing up critical questions in class. Finally, the hardest part is to enhance the sense of teamwork which requires both fluency and communication skills you are going to develop in step one and step two. Though it is complicated to improve teamwork and I have no concrete idea of how to enhance this skill in what method, we can learn our own way that fit ourselves and accomplish this tough job.
ResponderEliminarI agree without when you say that some of the "missing basics" are covered in a standard education. Just like you, I feel that I was also taught how to ask questions in grade school. Teachers always pushed students to as a clear and concise question so that they would best be able to help us. You also mentioned the fact that you learned how to visualize. This is where I feel my education differs from yours. I an a visual thinker so visualization is not that hard for me but I feel visualization becomes a missing basic when an engineer cannot see the end result to a problem. It is important for an engineer to be able to brain storm and visualize a solution to a problem because it no vision is created a solution can't be found. Next you mentioned communication. In a standard American education we are not taught what I will call "proper" communication skills. As an individual I know how to communicate with others but I don't know if I am ready to communicate my ideas at a professional level. There are certain terminologies which simply aren't acceptable in the work force and so one must learn how to avoid those sayings in order to sound knowledgeable. Lastly, I would just like to say that I feel you steps for filling the wholes is very clear concise and well thought out. I love how you build each step of the others in order to have a simple but effective plan.
ResponderEliminarI like the way you modeled this blog post.Like I said in my blog post all we learnt in India was the professor is always right no matter what.In our finals too we had to write whatever the professor told us , else we would be failed or not graded.This was one of the primary reasons I left my country and came to U.S.A. for education.After I read through your blog posts I realized that, yes indeed we are not missing all the "The Missing Basics".
ResponderEliminarThe one good thing about Indian Education was that we were forced to work in groups and teams as the professors in our High schools in the junior and senior years never taught us ,so we ended up either studying by ourselves (which is a really bad idea) or worked with the other students in the class to learn the stuff through the textbooks or Google or their experiences.This enabled us to be good team players and also good communicators since we always had to communicate with the other students about our problems or try explaining our solutions to them.
I would like to conclude by saying I wish that Indian teachers learn from Colombian teachers and allow us to question them and question the world..