Downtime.
The Rice network is down again tonight (a planned outage to replace the ancient power supplies in the data center, in anticipation of some Very Big Iron they’re getting next month), so I can’t do my homework. Yay! Update: See below.
I’ll take this opportunity, though, to express a thought I had about college courses.
There are three ways a student emerges from a course with true mastery of the material:
- Gifted student. The material comes easily, naturally, instinctively to the student; with a moderate amount of work the student outstrips the lecture, tosses off the homeworks, etc.
- Brute force. The material doesn’t come naturally to the student, but she works every example problem she can find, goes to office hours, attends study sessions, makes study sheets, and passes the exam. [This is probably the most common case.]
- Gifted teacher. This is perhaps the rarest, and the best case; gifted students and the hard workers will always do OK, but only the gifted teacher can make the material come alive for everyone else.
The gifted teachers are the ones you talk about years later; they’re the ones who turn average students into gifted ones.
Update 9/17:
The Mudd power outage is lasting a little longer than we had hoped. Most of the power has been restored to the computer room at this point (1:50pm) but at least one PDU still has not been finished. We are in the process of bringing up the services we can on the power we have. We hope to have all services up and running at full power by 5:00pm. [#]