A friend of mine in IT does the interviewing of potential new-hires at his company. His biggest gripe is how the IT Grads know so little, although they boast to know so much.
In a parallel fashion, I was curious to know if this may also be a growing trend as noted by veteran blue collar workers where math skills are important to the specific trade or talent. Do machinists and people in other trades (plumbers, electricians, carpenters) have the same gripes about kids today entering these professions without understanding fractions and decimals, or even how to apply basic geometry or basic trig, for example?
In short, do veteran workers wish today’s kids had a better grip on basic math skills, and doesn’t the lack of this lead to mistakes which waste time and/or money budgeted for the job ? What’s the shop talk about this? Is it scary to think about what’s coming out of the schools today? And, how do the various trades and skilled professionals handle this problem? (Yes, of course, there are calculators, but if you don’t know how to set up a problem, you won’t know how to enter the numbers into the calculator to get the correct answer out! In short, you put garbage in, you get garbage out.) Just wondering how the skilled laborers deal with this (potential) decline in the incoming rookie co-workers…
I just wish these kids had a work ethic! I can teach what they need to know for our field.
You would be surprised how many teeners think they should be getting high pay when they can’t even cut sheetrock right. Or don’t know the diff between oil, latex, and laquer.
If a youngster wants to learn the ropes, I’ll put them where I can use them. That may mean cleaning up demo debris or power washing siding, or removing nails from old trim we will reuse. It all has to get done by someone, are they willing to do it?
Once a willingness to work is shown, then my partner and I have no problem teaching as we work.
Basic math and reading/writing skills are a prerequisite. Spelling isn’t so important, as long as the idea comes through clear.
No Drugs! I’m not speaking of moral objections. It’s just not safe. Period.
My financee is the head mechanic for the city here. He’d probably agree with NoClueBoy in regards to the work ethic. He’s been fortunate to dig up some good fellas but it’s quite a chore. Especially re: the pot smokers ~ they’re everywhere.
My daughter is 17, and working in a restaurant. Since she is a hard worker, she has gained the favor of management, and gets any hours she chooses. Most of the other kids working there don’t have her work hard ethic.
I’m a civil engineer. I’ve noticed that lots of young folks coming out of engineering school expect to rise quickly without paying their dues. I’ve seen several recently who started their own companies rather than work several years as a staff engineer before becoming a manager. They are not doing so well, either.
When I worked in a machine shop (late eighties), I was about the only one of the young fellows who knew any trig or had any solid background in technical drawing. All of the old hands knew how to use trig and they always whipped out their copy of Machinery’s Handbook to find formulas for this and that. Hence, I can simply offer a confirmation to your suspicion, but no answer as to how we are dealing with it.
Hijack:
I agree with your assessment of IT (my current area). It got so bad that one day I was giving a technical interview to a young woman who’s resume trumpeted her PhD, along with every conceivable computer language, skill, methodology and what have you. After a few basic questions it became clear that she knew absolutely nothing about the subjects written on her resume. I was stricken with a desire to lay into her with such vigor that she would leave the room with tears streaming down her face; however, I restrained myself. Why do folks like that think that they can start at a high-level position without paying their dues? It only takes a couple of questions to make a fool out of someone who is embellishing their resume.
I’m a bartender, and I’m constantly astonished by how few of my coworkers have any clue on how to figure percentages. This is what pays the bills! Fifteen percent of a tab should be old hat to any waiter/bartender worth his/her salt, but half the time they’ll come up and say, “I got tipped nine bucks on a sixty dollar tab. Is that good?”
They are required to tip out three percent of their sales (to the bartender and bussers) and even that gets difficult. A waiter who sold six hundred dollars should hand over eighteen dollars; it’s simple multiplication! And half the time they have to be told, because they can’t figure it out on their own.
I don’t get it. I was an English major in college; I never considered math to be my strong point, but obvious percentages, subtraction/multiplication etc… should be apparent to anyone who graduated highschool!
It isn’t. I’m 24, so I don’t know if it was any better “back in the day,” but it sure as hell isn’t up to par these days.
My math skills are nonexistant, and yet I sometimes am shocked that other people can’t do simple math (calculating change, etc.) “in their head”. My math skills suck, but they’re not that sucky. Same goes for vocabulary. What’s with that? My vocabulary is decidedly average, and yet I sometimes get people look at me as if I’m speaking Chinese or something. It’s just ENGLISH, folks. I want to tell them, “Look up the damned word if you don’t understand it! I have no intention of ‘dumbing down’ my already average vocabulary.”
A semi-related hijack regarding art, with my standard disclaimer: there are MANY absolutely awesome artists (young and old) out there today, and certainly the “traditional” art techniques are alive and well. But, my hunch is that there are less (percentage-wise) artists today than there used to be who possess the “basics” of art. (“Basics” meaning drawing [if they want to draw “realistic” images], design, color theory, etc. etc.)
For instance, my nephew is quite the computer whiz-kid and has had an interest in computer graphics (especially those nifty 3-D graphics apps). But after talking with him for a while I discovered that he did not know what a color wheel was. I mean, how can you be so keenly interested in computer art and NOT know the most basic of things—the freakin’ color wheel? And he’s not an isolated case. I encounter many of these types on arty message boards. Fortunately, I think a lot of them eventually realize that there’s more to it than learning the latest and greatest graphics software, but I do lament. And I feel that those of us who had the “traditional” education in art are damned lucky and shouldn’t take it for granted.
And as I have also lamented more than once, some artists seem to think that knowing how to draw (freehand drawing) is unecessary. But many employers will beg to differ—they want to hire artists who can sketch out an idea on the fly, and will assume that if an artist shows a portfolio with realistic drawings or paintings, that they were drawn freehand. (But in a lot of cases they weren’t—they were traced or drawn with a lot of “aids”.)
I don’t think there are as many artists nowadays who can sketch and draw well as there have been in the past. (There are still plenty who can draw well, just not as many as there used to be.) The reason I feel this way is that those of us who do know how to draw relatively well are sometimes treated like freakin’ geniuses, when in reality we’re only showing a drawing skill that probably would have been considered “average” 50 or so years ago. Just my personal impression.
We have the same problem in the professional world. Every MBA thinks they deserve to make $200k a year out of school and run a department of 50 people.
Also, I hate having to explain to people the basics of using Excel or MS Project over and over again.
I wouldn’t be too hard on him. As someone who dabbles with computer graphics software like Photoshop or 3DS Max, I’m definitely glad I learned to paint and draw when I was younger. It defitely helps to understand basic concepts of light and scene composition. But I also learned a lot of technical stuf about how light behaves in the real world (ie ambiant lighting, radiosity, etc) from using such programs.
Question: did yesterday’s veterns have the same gripes about yesterday’s kids? Is there really a downward trend, or is it that today’s veteran’s forget their own ignorance when they first entered the workforce? Is there a problem with schools “these days”, or is this older than that?
Well, I wasn’t “too hard on him” then, though I did try to draw a diagram of a color wheel for him right there.
The thing is, this kid wanted to improve his 3-D work, and made a few comments about how people had said he needed to improve in this area and that area. The problems sounded color-related so I asked him about color. He didn’t know anything about color, not even the color wheel. He looked at me like I was nuts when I brought it up. (As in, “Oh yeah, sure. Like I’m gonna learn that.”) When I tried to explain the concept his eyes glazed over and he kind of brushed me off.
Now, maybe he’s gone on to educate himself on the color wheel—he’s a good hard-working kid in many ways. But if indeed he never bestirred himself to learn the color wheel and still laments that he can’t get this thing or that thing right in his 3-D work, then, he deserves to have the problems he’s having. I mean, come on. We are talking about a freakin’ COLOR WHEEL here!
I also have an art tutorial site, and once in a blue moon I’ll get people writing me, telling me of the new “cheat” technique they’ve learned. My tutorial’s all about not “cheating” but learning the basics. But some people just don’t get it. They want the easiest way out possible.
Some wannabe artists complain about how “hard” it all is, and wonder how can they get out of learning all this tough icky stuff. There are many people who keenly want to learn the basics, so all is not lost; but there sure are plenty who will always try to find the easiest way out, and will complain bitterly when they are required to put in some extra effort. I guess this is true in any discipline.
In many respects, it IS a recent downward trend. The relatively recent introduction of calculators in math classes of lower and lower grades (esp. just to speed through the curriculum) has given the working world a sea of math illiterates. In some instances, I don’t know how they even know how to enter a problem into a calculator, if they can’t set it up correctly on paper. Like proportions, for example. If they can’t set up the proportion correctly, they will get the reciprocal of the correct answer. Maybe some realize this “by feel”, if they have a smattering of sense about numbers. (i.e.: Gee, I wasn’t expecting such a small/large answer.) Also, I’d lump percentages and ratios into this very same category.
Even worse, the schools are expecting the higher grades to have graphing calculators…as if the majority of the kids understand one iota of what the heck the graph is telling them! There’s no short-cut for a good education. You gotta walk before you can run!
Unfortunately, the schools cannot do it all by themselves. But, they can no longer hope for support from home as they once did. Many of today’s parents don’t even know it themselves, so there’s no one at home to help the kids! (And, I mean even something as basic as working with flashcards to help their kids memorize basic math tables!) It’s all swept under the rug as “that’s ok Johnny, I wasn’t very good in math myself”.
I admit, I am even guilty of this as a once young, naive, starry-eyed Mechanical Engineer romantic. However, blame the whole mess on the COLLEGES! The colleges demand unrealistic tuition costs making pie-in-the-sky promises to their unsuspecting prey about how much you’ll be making with our “holier then god” name on your resume. Why, our graduates start at $60,000 right out of school, don’t you know? And, that’s just in our College of Tiddly Winks.
There’s a sucker born every minute, and every college is being run by P.T. Barnum with a P.T. Barnum PR team behind it.
Even the two-year schools are guilty of this. And, if they didn’t make such wild promises, would we even bother to waste our time and money at their school? Yeah, my college’s great name opened doors alright…just so employers could hear the sound of these doors slamming in my face! - Jinx
:mad: as hell about the fleecing of America and the fallout therefrom. We need a lot more than just eternal vigilance, folks, if we’re going to preserve our quality of living in the USA.
This reminds me of something that happened to a friend of mine.
At age 40, after being quite a successful potter and getting in many gallery shows, being featured in ceramics publications, he decided he wanted to teach. So he went to a Big Name Los Angeles College (which will remain unnamed) to get this degree.
In his case, it didn’t matter one whit what kind of education he got at this college. He’d already paid his dues, he knew his stuff. However, the other students in the ceramics program were not so fortunate. Most of these students were getting their ceramics degree so they could get into teaching. However, the head of the ceramics dept. decided (for some obscure artsy-fartsy reason) that the students would not have access to potter’s wheels. You know, those things that people make pots on (as seen in “Ghost”). Not all potters use wheels, but many do. And no school is going to hire a ceramics teacher who doesn’t know how to use a potter’s wheel. It is a pretty mainstream piece of pottery equipment.
But it was worse than that. The ceramics dept. didn’t teach jack shit about so many areas of ceramics. All the basic things—like teaching the students to prepare their pottery so it doesn’t blow up in the kiln, and learning how to use glazes properly so they won’t chip, peel or curl off the pots. The students weren’t taught any of this by this Big Name L.A. college. They were on their own. When my friend (who knew the wheel and all about glazes and kilns) tried to show the students the potter’s wheel on the sly, he was glared at by the head of the Ceramics Dept. They definitely did not want the students to even know about the wheel. Another example: in one class when all the students’ work blew up in the kilns because they had no education about how to prevent that, the teacher just told them to “glue the pieces together”.
These other students got their degree in ceramics, but in no way would any school anywhere hire them to teach pottery. Would you want to have a ceramics teacher who could not teach the wheel, and whose pottery regularly exploded in the kiln? I mean, seriously!
My friend has done just fine since he’s gotten his degree—he already knew all he needed to knew before he went to get his degree. But he wonders what will happen with the other students who were there with him. They are obviously unemployable as teachers. But you know what? There’s a part of me that feels irritated and frustrated with these other students. I mean, how can you MAJOR in ceramics and be oblivious about the POTTER’S WHEEL?!?! I mean, how can you not know about these things? To invest all that money and time to get the degree, and yet to be so ignorant about the subject of your major? How can you think that you can be a ceramics teacher and not know how to work a potter’s wheel? How gullible are these people, anyway?
When I was in high school, I worked at the local movie theater for a summer. At the time, there were no cash registers at the theater - it was a small theater (2 screens), locally owned, and had been doing things the same way since my mother was a teenager. When people bought candy and popcorn, we added the prices in our heads, took money, and gave change all by doing the math in our heads. Things got busy at times; I remember having to work hard dishing up popcorns and cokes all while figuring out what the customer’s total was going to be in my head. This was in 1986.
Fast forward 15 years - the theater is remodelled & they have a cash register now. Still, though, they hire the local high school kids to work the popcorn counter. Every time I go in there I take one look at these kids and absolutely can’t see them trying to add things in their heads. Hell, most of them have trouble using the cash register!
Athena, you reminded me of my days at the register. We made change by counting backward into the customer’s palm.
When my daughter went to work at Sonic last summer I showed her how to count backwards to make change. The carhops carry a bank in their aprons, so it’s easier to make change at the car. You wouldn’t believe the other kids there who had to go back into the store and use the register to make change.
