188 Teaching Minds

188 Teaching Minds of engineering and after a year allow them to work on designing a 787. Such a project-based, real-world curriculum is, in my mind, an important improvement on the way things are done now in school. At the very beginning of the meeting, this professor said that he hoped the outcome of this high school curriculum redesign meeting would be a curriculum that taught math and science better because the average student at the University of Washington that he encoun- tered had very weak math and science skills. This was not my intent at all and I told him so. I was hoping to allow high school students to have a year-long experience of actually doing engineering so they could decide whether that interested them or at least make use of some of what they learned in their later lives. As far as I’m concerned, there is too much math and science in high school now and I told him so, Since no one ever says things like that, he was quite shocked. I asked him, since he thought entering college students who wished to study aerospace were deficient in math and science, why he didn’t think it was his obligation to teach it to them? He replied that this was the duty of the high schools. His position then was that even though less than 1% of college students would study aerospace engineering, nevertheless every student in the country should be made to learn the math and science they might need just in case they might study aerospace engineering. Of course, this is hardly a unique position. In fact, this stance is exactly the one in place in high schools today. Just in case you some day might need it, we will teach it to you. What is the reasoning behind this point of view? What is really going on here relates strongly to the teaching requirement issue I mentioned earlier. I had a light teaching load. This man certainly teaches more often than I did. To see what his load was, I looked him up on the web. Here are the courses he was teaching in 2007-08 as I wrote this: e AA 430 Finite Element Structural Analysis e AA 432 Composite Materials for Aerospace Structures e AA532 Mechanics of Composite Materials I had guessed what kinds of courses he taught before looking him up. The man is about my age, which means he has seniority, and he is HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023934