ht_th

I just moved to Kampen, so if you can get a Zwolle thing going, I'm game

I'd not worry too much about picking a major yet. Or rather, students typically need a couple of years in undergrad to figure out what exactly it is that they want, what motivates them, where their interests lie, etc.

I've seen top-students who got fed up with the field, or with academics in general, and moved into industry after a bachelors. I've also seen average performing students discovering a love for research and going that route successfully. And anything in between.

Heck, even discovering that a field isn't for you and switching majors or dropping out for a bit is fine.

So, I recommend going someplace/some major you feel at home and then try as many different courses and activities until you discover what drives you. Then decide where to go next from there.

Why not compliment them with a job well done? Add some details in your compliment that shows you've read their proposal.

Is it? It'll take a while for fertilizer and sun placement to take visually effect, and there's risk that short term effects aren't indicative of long term effects.

How can you verify the recommendations are sound, valid, safe, complete, etc., without trying them out? And trying out unsound, invalid, unsafe, incomplete, etc., recommendations might result in dead plants in a couple of weeks.

I am not so sure. I've ran 98 on bad hardware, and it crashed regularly. So much so, that I installed linux on it already in 1998, and that was much more stable. It only crashed now and then. No doubt in both cases the poor hardware was the cause of it.

Anyway, two years later I got a brand-new laptop with good hardware that was running 98se. As far as I remember, it didn't crash during normal usage. By then I was studying computer science, and would sometimes write or run programs that would make it crash, but that was on me. I did dual boot in Linux, and that didn't have any problems on that machine either.

Fun fact, I still have that laptop, it's over 25 years old now, but it still works and runs Windows 98se!

Of course, hackernews or the font it uses (?), doesn't seem to support the bold and italics Unicode symbols. Although it does seem to support the supperscript ones.

The odd thing is, you can do quite some bold/italics/superscript in Unicode nowadays. Because, at least from the ASCII letter range, they have been used in symbolic ways in Mathematics, etc., and have been added to Unicode as symbols rather than bold variants of letters. For example:

, !

, !

ᴴᵉˡˡᵒ, ᵂᵒʳˡᵈ!

So, there's almost no bold/italic punctuation. And non-ASCII Unicode letters aren't "supported" this way either. But you can get quite far with "formatted" ASCII letters in Unicode, if you're so inclined.

In my experience, once teachers retire or move on, or a course gets mothballed, it's only a matter of time for course websites disappear or become non-functional.

If the course website was even on the open web to begin with. If they're in some university content management system (CMS), chances are that access is limited to students and teachers of that university and the CMS gets "cleaned" regularly by removing old and "unused" content. Let alone what will happen when the CMS is replaced by another after a couple of years.

I did follow a curriculum set by Dijkstra's students. In the first trimester, we learned to program in Pascal, so we knew what programming was. The next two programming courses, in the second and fourth trimester, "programming" meant proving programs correct. Using pen and paper. Often in one-on-one sessions with our teachers where we'd to demonstrate our proofs. Or the teacher would state a problem and then continue to derive a correct progam by construction, writing slowly on the blackboard. These programming courses were supplemented with logic, discrete mathematics, and other formal methods. And we had continuous mathematics courses as well, practical labs, electronics, databases, and whatever you'd expect in a computer science and engineering curriculum.

For most students this wasn't easy, particularly compared to the way most of them were comfortable programming on their own by trial-and-error hacking away at a problem. Proving programs correct by construction takes a different skill. At the same time, it wasn't particularly hard either once you got going.

I don't think this way of teaching and learning programming was very useful or practical. With Dijkstra's students leaving the university, or otherwise losing primacy at the computer science faculty, Dijsktra's ideas faded away from the curriculum. Since then—I returned twenty years later to teach at this university—, the curriculum is very like any other computer science / engineering curriculum. And students seemed to have as much trouble with it as before.

What I missed about the curriculum when it was gone, was the consistency it brought into the curriculum. The curriculum felt as one continuous track to some clear idea of what it meant to be a programmer in Dijkstra's style. If you liked that idea, the curriculum was a great guide. If you didn't, it felt as a waste of time.

Besides, who knows how long theonion.com will stay up. Or keeps giving access to all old articles?

After all, they've just been bought. Usually this results in changes, despite new owner's loud promises that nothing will change.

These aren't excuses, but observations.

I've taught in classes of 12 and of 32, the differences in students' behavior, and in reaction my own was huge.

Similarly, I've taught classes where students just came back from an hour of PA and classes that were the second class of the day. The former group of students had always trouble concentrating and focusing, whereas the other group would sometimes have trouble getting up to steam in many activities.

Similarly, I've taught classes that were obligatory for students and classes that were electives. Again, the differences in students' behavior was quite pronounced.

Given constraints and practicalities of our educational system, it is difficult to offer each student the best courses, activities, support, etc. they each individually need. Instead, you often end up compromising. Which isn't great. Particularly for students performing above or below average compared to their peers.

Anyway, just a frustrated ex-teacher here. Thanks for listening.

It starts with the name "human resources". All HR departments I worked with treated employees as resources rather than humans. Bureaucracy all the way, with a thin veneer of human connection that'd be gone the time you walked out of HR's offices.