Oldest Grandchild Graduates from High School

Do it without a second thought. The first couple of classes will be a real bitchkitty; you will spend five hours preparing for every hour in the classroom. The next time it will be three hours. Then an hour. Then ten minutes to print out the class notes with the current year's heading on the paper.

The first time one of your kids comes in beaming to show you his or her first pay stub with a dollar figure more than you are making teaching, all of a sudden it becomes worthwhile.

On the other hand, you will go through the first day of class normal routine of asking, "why are you taking this class" and some kid will answer, "because my dad took it when he was young and said that he liked the class." I never in my life felt so old. If I stay at it another ten years, I'm sure somebody will mention their grandfather.

Teach the theory, of course, but candycoat it, at least in the basic classes. It's fine to do a little bit of "primary cells" and "silicon nitride" for a few minutes, but building an LED flashlight from coin cells and a white LED that hangs on their keychain is what they will remember.

Jim

I have no idea what airstrip you are referring to. If you are talking about Grass Valley Intentional Airpatch (KGOO) then

The Loma Rica horse training ring borders the airport to the north and west, not the south and east.

Jim

That's a survey course. I'd like to teach a serious electronics course that covers a small number of concepts and uses just a few components, so the students learn to feel the way the parts work and can do the basic math to back it up. All those subjects can't be approached in any depth in years, much less a semister.

John

I guess I fail to see the usefulness of such a course as you describe. You said that you wanted to teach a freshman class some basic concepts, or at least that's what you said when we started this thread. Now you say you want to teach a limited component class in some depth. You can't, as you noted, have it both ways and certainly not in a semester.

THe same website; the 10 class teaches passive components and some limited semiconductors. THe 20 class does a fair job on opamps and digital devices through LSI. We don't teach at the university level. Indeed that is not our charter. Could we? Sure. But what's the point? The kids that are going to go on to EE will get that depth and the kids that are going to fix slot machines at the Indian casinos have just enough knowledge to do their job properly.

Jim

What I think they ought to know is circuit concepts: voltage, current, resonance, exponentials, feedback, transistor action, and basic opamp functions... amplification, integration, gbw limits, things like that. A week of "signals and systems" would be great too.

These are bright kids starting on a 5-year university degree but will spend the first three years on sciences and then take 2 years of engineering. The math is second nature to them, but they will absorb both a lot better if they have some good instincts installed from day one. I learned a lot more than other, smarter classmates because I'd been an electronics hobbyist as a kid. When a professor drew a diagram or an equation on the board, it clicked for me: so *that's* why that works! My classmates kept their heads down and took notes about equations, not realizing the gems they were missing.

I am talking about a different scenario here.

John

Same here. My years haunting my father's TV repair shop are every bit as important as everything I learned at MIT.

Electronics is second nature to me now... but it's a pox... take a look at a client's circuit and spout "crap" without thinking ;-)

...Jim Thompson

I did the same thing. I was a ham in high school, and was designing TTL based CPU's on my own... all the while wishing I could afford the parts to actually build one (early 1970s)... So by the time I got to college, I was quite well versed in electronics... though not so well versed in theory.

One of the most jarring memories of my early EE courses was before class one day in the first or second circuits course; there was a fairly complicated circuit diagram on the blackboard, left over from some other more advanced course, and one of my fellow students, on seeing it, piped up, "I sure hope we don't have to do anything like that!"

And thoroughly flabbergasted by the remark, I said, "I sure hope we do!" ... which got a kind of negative reaction from many of my other classmates. To which I replied, "What did you think we would be doing as EE's?"

It really does help to have a firm grounding in electronics before you start an EE program... But, more important, I think is a insatiable interest in electronics. It truly baffled me to see the number of students that were enrolled in the EE program who didn't like electronics. To them it was just training for a high paying career.

-Chuck

A pox learned very quickly in academia. One does not tell the professor that (s)he put the diode in backwards or after becoming a junior professor to openly comment that the class project design is a pile of doggiepoo without first finding out which senior faculty member designed it.

{;-)

Jim

What you describe is what we call CIE-20 and it is taught in the second semester of the freshman year.

Signals and systems is what the campus ham radio club is for.

Jim

It was my uncle's TV repair shop where I learned about electronics. I learned how to solder when I was three.

Where are the good EEs going to come from, now that most of the TV repair shops are gone?

Yeah, you've got to be diplomatic and leave them some shread of self-respect. Or they'll bad-mouth you to the bosses after you're gone.

John

"Jim Thompson" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

You guys (you and John) expect a short course to replace the years you spent as a hobbyiest picking up stuff?

The years of gradually picking up the stuff (instead of the speed that happens in a course) plus the motivation you already had aren't going to be instilled by such a course.

Of course a class like that would really help the kids that have already picked up a bunch on their own.

Robert

...and I teach it half out of Win's book and half out of my lecture notes...

Jim

I walk around in my sox a lot.

Ties are for weddings, funerals, and *very* good French restaurants.

None of my customers wear ties, so why should I? When I visit a major aerospace customer, I try to remember to wear a shirt that has buttons.

John

No, but a really good kick-start should be possible, at least for the guys (it usually is guys) who have the instincts to be a good EE.

I know some dynamite circuit designers who started in college, with no previous experience. I just think that, in a situation like Tulane is planning, they ought to get some basic electronics asap.

John

But the Tulane program will have the kids doing sciences for the first three years. I just think they should learn some basic electronics up-front.

Do they cover stuff like mixing, correlation, convolution, filtering, impulse response, FIR filters?

And does your "club" statement imply that the official courses *don't* cover these issues?

John

How to "kick start" students is something I desperately searched for when I taught Electronics for two years. And it certainly seemed many (not all) of my colleagues did as well. But mostly I was riding that curve Chuck mentioned, 5 hours prep (mostly wasted) the night before for a 1 hour lecture, then 3, then...

Besides the "fad of the moment" in Teaching I didn't see a lot I could use to do the kick starting you're talking about. What I could do was be a resource to the ones who were kick starting themselves. I pointed quite a few towards resources like Win's Book. Some of them were even grateful.

Robert

If the second semester of the freshman year isn't up-front, what is it?

Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Propagation, antennas, six hundred mile an hour tape, fixing it with bubble gum and baling wire. Mixers if somebody decides to homebrew one.

That is correct. I've got the kids majoring in electronics for four classes. Basic chassis and pcb fabrication (tinbending and pcb etching), passive circuits, opamps & SSI-MSI-LSI digital, advanced analog project fabrication. After me they split into either microprocessor work or mechatronic (hydraulics, pneumatics, numerical control) work. I'm the only analog cat that they see.

Jim

NEETS is all you need.

Have you even looked at the NEETS course?

It goes from basic electronics through some pretty advanced materials, and it is segmented perfectly.