Tonight was my last class for DCOM 101 – Introduction to Data Communications. It was a fast, yet intense course since I took it for eight hours a week (two evening classes, 6 – 9:55 PM, Tuesdays and Thursdays) for five weeks.
We were lucky to have an awesome teacher. I think that if someone else was teaching it to me, I probably would not have understood most of it, let alone gotten an A in the course (Actually, I got better than a 100 because of the extra credit I did). He jokingly picked on me tonight because the first day he walked in the room, I raised my hand to ask a question and I interrupted myself. I said something like “Do we have to…. wait am I the only girl in this class? Oh wait, I see one other female. Hi!”…take the quiz online?” He’s like “Get used to it if you’re staying in this field”. (I am more than used to it. I’m a rock musician). So tonight, he was like “I’m going to miss you guys so much. You are such a good class. I’m gonna be sad. Are you guys sad? Everyone, ask Teresa for some tissues. You know she has some”. Hahaha. I’m going to have him again for at least one other course I take. So I told him to be careful what he wished for when he said he hoped to see some of us again.
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Computer networking involves a lot of math. Subnetting involves binary and applying that knowledge. Sure, in the real world you can just use a subnet calculator and a binary calculator to figure it out. But we had to show all the work to show we actually knew how to do it ourselves. At first when we were creating subnet masks, host IDs, ranges, and broadcast addresses, I was like !)(*@#$(*&@(%. But now I can do it without thinking much. =) Well, Class C addresses.
Moral of the above paragraph is that there are careers besides accounting that will require math. The math I used to apply to my programming course last semester and my networking class this semester wasn’t that difficult for me. I don’t think it was very advanced or anything. But there were a lot of students who could not move forward in the courses sucessfully because they did not understand the basic math that they were supposed to learn in high school, so they couldn’t apply that knowledge. I remember in high school, during various math classes, students would say “When will I ever need this crap? What job will require this?” And the teachers’ responses would be “You won’t actually use it but you are at least expanding your mind and the skills you use to memorize these problems will help you memorize things later in life”. This is all true, but to most teenagers they just think “Laaaame”. Teachers could actually answer it with this: “Like computers? Want to work in programming or networking? Well, you’re going to need it there”. |
I am tempted to take a class during Summer Session II but I need to just take at least a little bit of time off, even if it’s not much. But I kind of feel like I’m in the zone and on a roll, so maybe I should keep it going and I will thank myself in five weeks. But in the end, I am saying Nay to that because I know that I have lots of other things I need to catch up on right now like working on some music, cleaning up the house, etc. And if I don’t take time off, it’s going to suck in the Fall when I go back.