More important than your questions is the fact that this instructor is
depriving you of the education you are paying for. It sounds like he knows
little and just wants to make it easy on the students so he doesn't have to do
any work or show competency. Rather than looking up specs for hard drives
(yeah, that'll get ya a good job), have you considered going to the Headmaster
or Dean of Students and complaining? I'd demand a refund and a review of this
instructor.
I'd definitely report the above mentioned instructor to the school and
to whatever agencies credential the instructors and school programs.
Its good to require the students to do the work, but he sounds like he
isn't teaching them how to use resources in order to do the work and
find the facts.
An old friend just stopped by this afternoon. He's a "trained"
computer tech with CompTIA A+ and Network+ credentials, but I'm
always answering questions for him. While he was here, I had to
*show* him how to turn off the HTML in Hotmail (despite my trying to
walk him through it in email several times). Now his correspondents
that use email readers don't have to send his mail to a web browser to
read, or worse, just toss his mail, unread. And ya'know... Its a
pity. He uses Hotmail because he is too intimidated by tecnology to
use his native email account.
My friend was professionally trained at great expense by the state,
and went through an "intensive, fast-paced... comprehensive" program
consisting of rote instruction with additional labs. Despite all the
training, he is only a small cut above the most basic user. He's no
dummy. Just the instructors went too fast and skipped over a lot of
stuff needed to make the mental connections required in real-world
situations. The students came out with only sketchy knowledge of how
things work, even though they could recite IRQ and DMA addresses like
the old "arithmetic times tables" we did back in primary school. <g>
He was taught to memorize and regurgitate answers, not to analyse
problems and think things through step-by-step from source to end.
Like the stereotyped help-desk flunkey, as long as it's in his book of
cheat sheets, he can "solve" the problem, but he can't go further. A
pity.
I've got compTIA and MS alphabet soup credentials out the yin-yang,
but *no* traditional training - I learned it all on my own out of my
own perverse curiousity.
Too bad we can't teach students to be curious. That would solve half
the problem. And yes, there are some great instructors that can
*inspire* their students, but they are few and far between. :-(
