Education

At age 8 I got a copy of the Amateur Radio Relay League Handbook. I studied it every day. Ohm’s Law. Kirchhoff’s Laws. Resistance. Impedance. And when I began to learn Resonance, my 8 year old brain hit a speed bump. Series resonance. Parallel resonance. Q factor. My brain sucked it in until it got to be over my head. But I learned.

When I was about 9 or 10, I was building electronic projects on a board. When I said board, I mean literally a piece of wood. I mounted Fahnestock clips on standoffs so I could change the circuitry as fast as I could build it.

When I was about 10 or 11, my grandmother’s sister (my great aunt) gave me an old Philco cathedral radio. It could tune AM and short-wave. It didn’t work. I fixed it. 

When I was 13, I attended electronics night school with my dad. I was too young to enroll but the teacher allowed me to audit the class. I did the homework and took the exams. Made good grades, too, but it was all unofficial. I took the class but according to official documents, I didn’t take the class. That’s ok. I learned.

I got my first real job at 13, so I earned money to afford an amateur radio station. When I was 14, I built my ham station. (The word “ham” is short for “ham-fisted,” a derogatory term for some early radio operators that lacked some of the skills they needed.) I had a rig (transmitter) I had built, a receiver, a quarter-wave vertical dipole antenna in the back yard, with copper wire ground plane. The antenna was connected to my rig by RG-8U coax, almost half an inch in diameter. It went through a T/R (Transmit/Receive) switch so that the transmitter would not blow out the front end of the receiver. The T/R switch would only connect one at a time to the antenna. The T/R switch didn’t work. I took it apart and made an adjustment and presto! It worked.

When I graduated high school my intent was go to Virginia Tech (VT) and become an electrical engineer. But I couldn’t afford to do that. Back then the tuition was a fraction of what it is today, but still way too much for me. So my first year I attended a local community college called Richard Bland College. It was a two year school. My first-year math class was Integral Calculus. I thought I would fail because I didn’t “get it.” It seemed to be over my head. But I stuck to it and I discovered it was hard because my professor was a poor teacher. I passed.

Now here is something important: Richard Bland used the semester system. I took four hours of Calculus a week for two semesters. Virginia Tech used the quarter system, and they taught the same course for 3 hours a week for 3 quarters. This meant that I earned 8 credit hours in Calculus (4 hours multiplied by 2 semesters) whereas the students taking Calculus at VT earned 9 credit hours (3 hours multiplied by 3 quarters.) This completely ignores the the fact that a semester (half of nine moths) is 1.5 times as long as a quarter (3 months). I was robbed!

I could not convince VT that 4 hours per week for 9 months is longer than 3 hours per week for 9 months, so I had to repeat part of my Calculus course.

The next year I went to another college called Richmond Professional Institute (RPI). It’s not called that any longer. There was a well-known medical college in Richmond called Medical College of Virginia (MCV). RPI and MCV merged to create a new university called Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU). The former MCV is called VCU Health Systems. But RPI is where I re-studied the last quarter of Integral Calculus. It threw me one quarter behind all the way through college because of a thing called “Prerequisites.” You have to complete and pass certain courses before you can move on to other courses. So after repeating the third quarter of Integral Calculus, I was allowed to proceed to my next math class, which was Differential Calculus.

At this point, as I became familiar with Differential Calculus, I had a realization. The two courses were being taught in the wrong order. I should have taken Differential Calculus first, and then Integral Calculus. By switching the order of how the courses were taught, it was like teaching someone how to build a helicopter and after that, only then do you tell them what a helicopter does.

So I went to Virginia Tech as a junior, still one quarter behind my classmates. I had good professors and a few that I considered not-so-good. When my graduation was approaching, I asked my course adviser what courses I should take to graduate in December (summer vacation plus I was still a quarter behind.) He advised me what to take and I got on with my education, expecting to graduate in December. Then I got hit by another stumbling block.

My course adviser told me I couldn’t graduate because I didn’t take Freshman Algebra. And that was true, I had skipped algebra and had taken two years of Calculus, a much more difficult subject. If you don’t know algebra, you’re not going to pass Calculus.

So the conversation went more or less like this:

Me: So I have to come back for another three months just to take Freshman Algebra?

VT: I’m afraid it’s not that simple. The University no longer teaches Freshman Algebra.

Me: Why not?

VT: We decided it was unnecessary.

Me: Wait. I can’t graduate because I didn’t take a course that the faculty has decided is unnecessary?

VT: Yes. But it was necessary at the date you enrolled. So you’re still required to take it. You can return for another quarter and take another course.

Me: I have to pay tuition, and buy a meal ticket, and pay for laundry service, just to take this unnecessary course?

VT: Yes.

Me: So what course should I take?

VT: We don’t care. Just pick something with the same number of credit hours as Freshman Algebra.

And so it was. I call it bureaucracy run amok. A more cynical person might say the University was gouging me for more money just because they could.