--- Martyn Drake martyn@alug.org.uk wrote:

Well, as for education ..

Martyn, First question, whats the tosspot mailing list? Is that the Windows user group?

I left school at 16 and went straight to college to do a BTEC course in Computer Studies, and got top marks in both years. I then went to university and made a pigs ear of things which meant that I left early without a degree (although in the end I wound up with a diploma in HE). It hasn't stopped me from getting good jobs as a system administrator in and around Norwich and London and I've done lots of stuff for other companies in my spare time which has earned me a bit of extra dosh.

I did much the same thing except I am doing an apprentiship at BT. I am self taught for most things, except I managed to get and advanced C course, Other than that its books all th way.

I continue my "education" by reading books, mucking about with my server, mucking about with work stuff and learning things. I've begun to learn Perl properly since I took this job with Internet Assist and I'm enjoying it. I'll be moving on to PHP and SQL stuff good and proper next, and all the while I'm earning money.

PHP, uck. Perl, Uck. SQL, get SQL in a nutshell from O'reilly.

I have loads of books and web pages from which i learn most things, and mailing lists for the rest. As for college, well When you give the lectures its not a good sign.

An education is important - whether you're educated by the state, your parents or learning during employment. However, as for spelling and grammatical errors - I'm pretty bad, I think. I have trouble going back and reading what I've written to correct it's syntax or spelling mistakes.

<aol> me too</aol>

In informal email and web pages, strict use of the English language isn't so important. However, professional employers in the vast majority of the various industries DO expect their employees to have good grasp of English. It would reflect very badly on their company if a letter was sent to their clients with bad spelling and grammatical mistakes. Heck, I've received those kinds of letters and wonders who employed them.

Again, I agree.

But I do agree that English language and literature in UK education needs a big boost to get it back on track. I can never really remember covering the syntatical layout of the language in any great detail whilst I was at primary or secondary school. They made us read books more than anything, and write essays which even having made mistakes, they were not always clearly pointed out by the teachers.

You hit the nail on the head with the reading. I never read books unless I had too as a child, I hated it as the books we had to read were boring, I mean really crap fashionable Teenage type books about kids and what they get upto etc... I don't like that. As you can tell from the list I read alot now, and I really like SF and techy fiction. I also like factual stuff and intellectual masturbation.

That's my two pence for this morning. I've got the lovely tasks of moving sites across from one server to another - dead boring. :|

/me deposits another 2p putting the balence in double figures.

Thanks

D

----- Original Message ----- From: "David Freeman" david_freeman@rocketmail.com Sent: Tuesday, July 17, 2001 10:24 AM

...

OK so I'm not going to troll or flame, but I'm sure somepeople

will.

...

But we need a topic to start discussion on.

I would like to suggest Education, in particular, how crap it is.

Discuss

===== -------------------- "We all know Linux is great... it does infinite loops in 5 seconds." Linus Torvalds

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