Higher Education for Mentally Handicapped? 86
Anonymous Coward asks: "I am an autistic high-schooler, who is currently in special education. I am very bright, but I lack the ability to do even very basic math. I am interested in Technology and Computers very much, but after looking at the requirements for a computer science major, there is no way I can do all that. What options, other than college, are available for a good education?"
Re:Get a book. (Score:2, Interesting)
Oh, if you really like to do something. Of if you want to make a profession out of your hobby. Then don't. After 4 years of learning, most people end up either disliking or hating the thing they loved to do.
I know that story too well. I really loved comp sci. Even after just two years, I hate it. I'm leaving university after three years of undergrad. It's just not fun any more. I must find new challenges.
Good on you (Score:0, Interesting)
My advice: Consider software engineering instead of comp sci. They are different areas - compssci is a branch of math.
My final bit of advice is not to click this link [tubgirl.com].
I don't know what you are talking about. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Computers and Math (Score:3, Interesting)
As you said, programming is a state of mind type of exercise. My experience has been -- consistently, and backed up by classical training, that you do not start people on things like perl which is indescriable.
A simple structured language -- python is acceptable but i'd still suggest good old fasioned pascal. Granted it teaches out-of-style procedural kind of programming, but it enforces rigid structure, is fairly simple and strait foreward, and verbose. These are important things to do when training someone else, or yourself, to program.
You can always move to a language that gives you mor syntactic sugar or a greator depth of standard libraries later, but ultimately the language is restricted beneath all of that to the rigidity of the 1 and 0. Having that firmly in your mind regardless of the $_[~/[...]]/i] syntactical shortcutting and flexability your still operating within that structure.
As far as the neccisity of math -- this depends on the kind of programming your doing. Most jobs these days are business app style jobs. They don't require the kind of math sensitivity that ivory tower programming (Sorry -- I tend to ignore accademic computing), systems programming or game programming require.
Yes the sort question is still applicable, but you don't need be able to determine the O(n) of the algorithm -- you just have to understand what it means and apply it to your problem domain. It breaks down to what philosophy students call first order logic, and mathematicians call boolean logic.
I've been architect and lead technical programmer on a number of different contracts and within my job now -- and i'm degree less -- my credits add up to two minors: philosphy with a concentration in logic and history with a concentration in eastern european.
Perhaps there are many things that i do intuitively, I've not studied those aspects of my style very deeply. But i do know that the focus on math in computer education -- particularly for programmers -- is a bit overkill.
-T
Re:Troll. (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe i am a bastard,but, surely, no more than someone who is blind and wants to be a bus driver.
Or someone who is autistic and cant do even simple math and want to....
I hate to be an asshole, but... (Score:3, Interesting)
If math is your weakness, shouldn't you concentrate on it?
AFAIK, the therapy for dyslexia includes reading lessons. The therapy for severe autism includes dealing with other people.
Personally, I'm pretty shy in certain situations. So I force myself to go out and say hello to strangers on the sidewalk, bore checkout ladies with chitchat, etc. If I ignored my problem, it would get worse. Will I ever reach the level of social interaction the average person has? No. But am I getting better? Yes!
So why are you avoiding math if its your weakness?
Re:I don't know what you are talking about. (Score:3, Interesting)
In my experience the number of times someone uses the "learn how to think" argument is inversely proportional to the value of the material they are peddling. For example, at Ohio State, it's not uncommon for a Computer Science undergrad to take 30 credit hours worth of math in a 200 credit hour program.
After having worked for a few years as a developer, I can safely say that virtually all of the material in those math classes was of no direct utility in my occupation. I can't even remember the last time I took a derivative or integral of anything. However, I still hear people proclaiming that these courses are good because they help teach people how to think.
But, my college education seemed to have very little impact on my ability to think or my general thought processes in attacking a problem. In addition, the suggestion that the math classes I took were designed to teach me how to think seems almost laughable. Most of those math classes had between 50 and 100 students and met at most 3 times a week for less than an hour with any given teacher. Not all of the teachers were understandable (bad english). It was more about processing students through an academic machine than it was about teaching them to think. To contrast that, I had a few very influential teachers in high school that had a rather large impact on how I think.
Yet people will still say these anonymous math courses are valuable because they teach people how to think. Personally I think it must be a cognitive dissonance thing with an element of deferral to authority figures. Dr. Milgram says this course is valuable and he has a Phd therefore it must be valuable. I've never used an ounce of calculus since that final three years ago even though I spent $5,000 and 6 months of my life studying high level math. If I didn't invest all that energy into acquiring the content, it must have been for something else. Perhaps I was learning how to think? Yeah, that's the ticket.
OTOH (Score:3, Interesting)
Before that, even more so, because I worked in a geoprocessing program... that calculated loads in the electrical plant of a whole state (yeah, 12 million people). Global and local; dimensioning substations and trafos.
Re:Tech schools (Score:1, Interesting)
Anyway as a practicing CS I can tell you that I did not need one lick of math. You need the higher math to understand how to analyse algorithms and for advanced graphics optimizations. But 99% of the time you get your algorithms from a book! Even more to the point 99% of the time you don't even care about the algorithm, outside of some simple queues I have not coded up a B-Tree or quick sort in years. All the math you need for CS can be taken care of with a good engineering calculator, one that can handle 64 bit numbers and can be set into bin/hex/oct mode for fast conversions and manipulations. And most run of the mill programmers don't even know how to count in binary or hex so there...
If I were you I would go to a good community college and see if you like the hard stuff. Its cheep and the teachers are 100% better than at a university. If it apeals to you you can easily transfer to a university later. If not try a trade school or just jump out there and start developing web pages/etc. Altho having a teacher makes learning to program a lot easier! I tried to teach myself to code for 5 years, but after 1 semester at a community college I hade it down pat.