CCNA class

The final class of CCNA prep is done today.  I've got to take the final, and then the formalized class is over.   It has been kicking me up one side of the street and down the other.

It's not that material is hard.  It's just that there's a lot of material covered in an incredibly short time period.  What is normally a 16 week class has been reduced to 8.  And that's pretty crazy.  That's nothing for many classes.  But a bunch just turns college into some horrendous grind.

I guess colleges needed to find a new way to make money.  And grinding students through faster always seems like a good idea.   How much do I want to bet they are charging the same amount for the 8 week class as they were the 16 week class?  Nothing.

Anyways.   Once the class is finished, I need to start studying to take the CCNA.  I'm aiming for about one month out for that.  My goal is to have it done before July 1st.  Maybe June 12th, as the place I take the test schedules on Thursdays.

Seems like that is the next thing I need to do.  Schedule the CCNA, so I have a definite date in which I'm going to take the thing.  Definiteness adds a sense of urgency.  

Why I homeschool

Something I've been thinking about lately.  One of the local schools here said they were going to have to release teachers after the senior year because they didn't have enough students.

Good.

I feel sorry for the individuals.  But for the school?  I'm happy.  Why should the populace accept such failure as we get at public education?  There needs to be a culling.  For people who's only answer is "spend more" it's time they learned to deal with the inadequacies of their methods.

For some reason, whenever I think of this I imagine either a teacher meeting with a dozen teachers lined up like the inquisition.  That occasionally vacillates towards a giant room full of people.

So, let's talk about the socialization program in school.  Let's discuss ages, curriculum, and time spent.  Well, there's speech class.  So socialization is taught in school at the very end to people who by and large are now phoning their effort in?   Great teaching job.  So if school isn't teaching proper social behavior, who is?  That would be the other students.  So you send your kids to school to learn how to socialize.  They are then taught by people who are also learning how to socialize.  And the teachers are doing what?

Guess no one ever thought of teaching power distance at an early age?   Yet that's more of a defining characteristic for success than intelligence.  Malcolm Gladwell spends an entire chapter on it in Outliers.  That is one of the greater definers of a person's ability to succeed in life.

I know a person who was trying to get into college.  Power distance defeated him until I gave him a pep talk.  The college kept telling him he couldn't go, but he didn't understand why.  I got him to ask until he know the answer and could explain it.  After all that fight, turns out his FAFSA was turned in late so he couldn't get federal aid.  If he couldn't get federal aid, he couldn't afford college (at least in his eyes).  Now there is an answer.  All it took was a little persistence and understanding of power distance.

And why is someone having to learn how to deal with people of greater authority at 20 as opposed to 5?  Why all the deferral?  Couldn't this have been easily taught in kindergarten?

It could have been taught.  But that's not the purpose of school.

So we've beaten up on the first idea of public school.  What about the rest of it?

What about those schools who profess their "quality of teaching"?  

And I ask: in comparison to what?  The children and adults of today have to compete on a global scale for many things.  Being the only shoemaker in town doesn't benefit you anymore.  Anyone can go on the web and order any individual item they want.  Unless your profession is in the trades, you need the ability to compete globally.  Even the trades aren't a good example.

Let me illustrate.  Company A has a preferred electrician.  The electrician does good work, and always fills the order as requested.  Unless that electrician stops performing, Company A will continue to hire that electrician anywhere that electrician is licensed.  150 miles away?  Pay the trip charge.  300 miles away?  Pay the trip charge.  Why?  Because you know the quality of work you are going to get out of that electrician.  And quality work is worth the extra expense.  So hometown electrician isn't competing on those big jobs with Company A because Company A is going to hire the same person over and over again.  Until that subcontractor pisses off Company A.  And the subcontractor knows it.  So that person makes Company A happy.

Once again, in comparison to what?  To the local schools?  According to Pearson, the United States is 14th overall, 11th in Cognitive Skills, and 20th in Educational Attainment.  So "best of the best" in America is still pretty pathetic in comparison to South Korea.  Or Japan. Or Singapore.

Unless you are being compared to the best, you are not the best.  The cream of the crap is still crap.

How do you solve that problem?  Pretty simple.  Eliminate stuff in the daily class load, and spend more time in teaching each skill.  Math goes from 45 minutes a day to 2 hours a day.  When was the last time a student was at the board solving a problem in American public school?   Once a week?  Once a month?  With homeschooling, that child is answering questions and getting direct solutions to problems every single class period.

What happens if one student falls behind in public school?   Nothing.  What about a lack of understanding?  Also nothing.

Until the student fails school and can't move on because they didn't understand material that built on other material.

In home schooling, the class never has to go on until the student understands.  Period.


There's probably more.  I'm sure there is.  But I'm done with the hippy failure mindset of the US.  Go out.  Be more than a conquer.

Opportunity abounds everywhere, yet many can't get beyond minimum wage.  What has the education system taught those people?  Why are they failing?

cisco 4 class

Back to class for Cisco 4, and I wonder where the passion is.  There are a lot of people in the class spouting the typical stuff.  Worried about how much homework they have and how to get out of it.  A lot of spurious griping and complaining from people.

I wonder why they are there.  What's the purpose of giving up your Thursday night for a class you don't care about?

I guess it's part of the degree plan.  But where's the drive to be the best?  Where's the drive to do something great in the world?  To make a name for yourself in your position?

It doesn't exist in the classroom I'm in.

I guess they haven't learned yet.

You do not rise to the occasion.  You fall to the level of your training.

And if your training sucks, so will your response in stress.

The Not So Monday Post

I know it says the "not so Monday post", even though it is still technically Monday while I'm writing this.  Monday evening to be exact.  Which is a bit different than Monday morning, though not by much.  I didn't watch the Super Bowl, so anything I say can't be blamed on the greatness (or failure) of something I am completely unaware of.  Strangely enough, I didn't even know who was playing until some point in to the game.  My wife was Facebooking ,while I was doing something else.

I couldn't really tell you what I was doing at the specific time of the game, seeing as how I didn't watch the game.  What I can tell you is that I got back to teaching my kids math and reading.  I know I've been spending a lot of time thinking about how best to teach children.  I also know I've been thinking about how best to automate a good deal of the process.

The problem is I need to start teaching now.  My kids aren't learning what they need to learn while I try to figure out the entire equation before I begin.  That would be great if I could.  But it doesn't look like its going happen for the first two kids.  I've got two more years before my youngest starts school.  Hopefully, I'll have it figured out by then.  If not, then I think I'll still be okay.  At the very least, I'll have started and produced something.

I'm currently using Saxon Math for home school.  The scripting seems to work for me, as I'm not terribly sure what I should be teaching.  I guess I don't realize how much I know without any sort of background of when I started knowing it.  Sure I can read a calendar.  And a map.  And I can navigate using a compass.  Do I remember when I learned those things?  I can't narrow down the basics of compass navigation, but I can remember when I learned the final refinement.  I know it because it was relatively recently.  Reading a calendar?  That has to have been 30 years ago.

My current reading book is also script based, though my kids have gone decently off script.  It's Teach your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons.  I'm currently on lesson 45, and my kids can site read most of the material.  So no need to completely follow the script.

I think the bigger part of all this discussion is that in the beginning, you must start somewhere.  Start with scripts, start with anything.  Just start.

And get some Thrive so you can make it through that teaching session after 12 hours of work.

Last Projects for Cisco 3

So I just finished my last two packet tracers for my Cisco 3 class.  Presented, for all your wonderful glory, is a picture of my EIGRP capstone project.  

Which I have to admit is about as complicated as some things I've designed for work, and are actually in operation.  The fun thing about this one is I ended up setting up DHCP on every single one of those networks in there, so the end user connections are all DHCP assigned.  The EIGRP portion wasn't that difficult.  Mostly, it was just labor. 

The interesting thing was in creating the ISP connection.  Really, it's just a router with an assigned public IP.  From there, I added a default route back towards the network I designed.  It might have been more interesting to design the thing as a multiaccess network, but who cares.  The system wanted a multiple location EIGRP network.  So I used serial connections.  And funny thing is, I've never had to set up a serial connection in real life.  All Ethernet based.  One was PPPOE, and that was a bit annoying to set up.  

So now, all I have to do is study for the final and start working on the next book.  In the process of taking over four stores.  Isn't work fun?