Who Scores Higher In Math?
March 15, 2004 PM/Home
My Uncle Phil sent me a pretty funny email forwarded from a high school teacher. It contained the following two pictures with the caption: Is it any wonder that the Chinese score higher in math than the Americans?
Photo 1 = a university in China...
Photo 2 = a university in Colorado...
Photos posted without permission.
Absolutely reminds me of CU (I attended University of Colorado, the school "featured" in the second picture). That is, both pictures remind me of CU. On a warm spring day, me and my lab-mates would make a point of draggin' our computer chair flattened arses out to lunch. The point wasn't lunch, but to take in a little sun and to walk past Farrand field where the beauties were laying out sun bathing. That's about as close as I came to the second picture. Bummer.
If you took a graduation picture of my engineering class it would look a lot like the one from China. Only mix in Indian, Pakistani and then various other pacific-rim countries (Japan, Korea, Vietnam etc etc etc). Being in an advanced degree program in aerospace engineering is a very funny thing. Lets not beat around the bush, I was in there with a bunch of guys who were going to go back to their country of origin to work on weapons systems. We all studied together, but the US guys were in general headed for work at Lockheed-Martin or NASA and the Chinese for their state run weapons maker and so on. It was strange, but I was too young at the time to fully appreciate the irony of the whole situation. The dwarves from a dozen countries all struggling to master the art of forging objects of power while the hobbits and elves danced and fucked. Its hilarious really.
Now you've got me going, thinking back to those days. One of my graduate lab-mates was a Colonel in the Taiwanese air-force. At a party he threw for the lab when he got his PhD, that was the first time I ate chicken feet. And they thought all the gaijin wouldn't touch them them. Ha! Please!! That said, I tried real hard not to talk religious matters, and ultimately talk at all with a couple Saudi guys in my lab. Even then (1990) they more than raised an eyebrow. Perhaps it was the way they had decided Salmon Rushdie had to go (it was a big topic then). And given the opportunity, they'd do it themselves. That sort of shocked my young brain. I think of those two guys a lot these days.
Come to think of it, you don't need to flash pictures from China and the US. On any given university in the US itself, bumping into each other between classes is the exact same dichotomy. Only one set is, in general, headed for "Communications" class, or no class at all. And the other is headed for classes in electrical engineering. The two don't mix much. I guess its good that both get a chance to go to college. But I never got much of an idea what the other half was doing, other than spending an amazing amount of time dissecting the goings on from last night's parties and then positioning themselves for the next.
My favorite quote from the other half, overheard from some guys sitting in front of me at a movie on campus:
Where's the state of New England? I know the capitol is Foxboro, but I've always wondered where the state of New England is?
Ah, college. Gotta love it.
March 22, 2004 PM/Home
While adding in the links, I read the Farrand Field page, perhaps a bit to closely. CU offers cable TV in every dorm room? Please. Thankfully they didn't have that when I was there. I wonder if anyone's done a before and after grade analysis?