Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips One way to write is to first write a list of questions, set the questions some place you can see them, and answer all the questions. I continue to work with college students on their writing, and they continue to teach me. A recent assignment the students were working involved answering a […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Perhaps we should stop teaching kids to find the answers and switch to teaching them how to find the questions. I read much these days from older people complaining about how younger people just look up the answers on Google. These younger people don’t know anything; they don’t learn anything. Well, the […]

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by Dwayne Phillips We often create systems and then complain how persons act in our systems. Many years ago, I attended college. I often heard professors complain, You aren’t interested in learning, all you are only in search of the almighty grade! I found that us students were guilty. We did worry about our grades. […]

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by Dwayne Phillips You aren’t going to need it should be applied to the Common Core for education. I now delve into something for which I evidently have no expertise: arithmetic. I also delve into another topic for which I evidently have no expertise: education. Allow me to preface my ignorant rant by writing that […]

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by Dwayne Phillips We have a #1 response of any bureaucracy in the 21st century. Any time a bureaucracy has a flub up (technical term), the response is the same: We will address this item as we change the training. This is the #1 response to any situation in the 21st century. Gosh. At least […]

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by Dwayne Phillips I take a Udacity.com online course and find good, bad, and ugly. I recently took an online course from udacity.com. As the post title suggests, I found… The Good: I was excited about the nanodegree program that udacity—one of the big players in MOOC—was about to offer. Companies were creating courses to […]

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by Dwayne Phillips I still learn new things. I still want to learn new things. I recently learned how to make the em dash and en dash characters in OS X with keyboard shortcuts. I no longer have to go to the “insert symbols” function to insert these special characters. One of the disappointing results […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Many people love a classroom that has lots of class discussion, a.k.a., the discussion class. What, however, is the goal of a class? I am one of those irritating people who ask, What was the goal? I often hear people say, “It was a great event. There was lots of fill-in-the-blank-with-something-that-someone-would-consider-wonderful-at-some-time-in-some-place.” I […]

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by Dwayne Phillips There is something about attempting to write a longer piece that makes writing a sentence much more difficult. I’ll start with something that is probably obvious to everyone else in the world: Writing doesn’t scale. Explanation: People who can write a two-page piece, flop when they attempt to write a 20-page piece. […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Just about anyone can learn to program a computer. Not many people earn degrees in Computer Science. I first noticed the above statement in 1978 (yes, I am that old). Students were telling me how they loved to write computer programs. We were taught something called PL/I in those days. Then the […]

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