Zatera Ul

This guy is getting sympathy from various quarters, because of the execrable teaching he received as a chemical engineering student, but to me it sounds like he wasn’t cut out to be an engineer:

Reader, let us not dwell upon the endless problem sets, the wretched grades, and the weary nights spent screaming at my inscrutable textbooks. Compose in your mind a montage of quizzes covered in red ink, classes wasted in the stupor of incomprehension, and frowning instructors muttering strange incantations in their eerie scientific argot. And of the hands-on laboratory portion of the chemistry class, I will say only that I still hold the record at Smartypants U. for most failed attempts at that hateful titration experiment. (”No - not dark pink! You filthy godless soul-eating beaker! Damn you to hell!”) They assigned grad students to watch me after failure number six. And I still screwed it up.

He mentions twice in the article that he’s verbally-oriented; one occurence is in the quote below:

The United States contains a finite number of smart people, most of whom have options in life besides engineering. You will not produce thronging bevies of pocket-protector-wearing number-jockeys simply by handing out spiffy Space Shuttle patches at the local Science Fair [Z.U.: thank God!]. If you want more engineers in the United States, you must find a way for America’s engineering programs to retain students like, well, me: people smart enough to do the math and motivated enough to at least take a bite at the engineering apple, but turned off by the overwhelming coursework, low grades, and abysmal teaching. Find a way to teach engineering to verbally oriented students who can’t learn math by sense of smell. Demand from (and give to) students an actual mastery of the material, rather than relying on bogus on-the-curve pseudo-grades that hinge upon the amount of partial credit that bored T.A.s choose to dole out. Write textbooks that are more than just glorified problem set manuals. Give grades that will make engineering majors competitive in a grade-inflated environment. Don’t let T.A.s teach unless they can actually teach.

Verbally-oriented engineers?!

In our house, math and verbal skills are neither equally distributed, nor interchangeable. I am very strong in math, but very weak in (spoken) verbal skills. MFH is very strong verbally, but weak in math skills (with the exception of being able to prime-factorize large numbers in his head). So he does the talking, and I do the bookkeeping. It works for us.

It seems that this guy would have been better off if he had followed his strengths (reading and writing) from the beginning. Math was like a foreign language to him (I gather from the article as a whole), so no wonder he was struggling in his science and engineering classes. I’m not using the language metaphor lightly; math really is a language, and a very powerful and expressive one. His TA’s and professors were probably highly fluent in math, and found translating compact, elegant equations into clumsy, imprecise words to be exhaustingly tedious. If I had to say, “The energy of the particle is proportional to the mass of the particle, by a factor corresponding to the square of the speed of light,” instead of “E = mc^2″ every time, I’d go nuts.

As one of my physics classmates said, “Words are what you use when math fails you.”

I suppose that I could have been an English major if I had wanted to, but I can’t imagine having to deal with the endless reading assignments, the wretched search for Overarching Themes and Underlying Metaphors, and the weary nights spent grinding out yet another paper on some long-dead author and the numerous, widely varying criticisms of his work.

One last thing: why didn’t he seek out help from older undergrads in his major? I can’t say that I ever did (or had to, really), but for some people I knew, it was a real life-saver in college.