Strangely enough I got almost no mentoring, he was like, the stuff is all there if you want to use it, I got taken to the uni labs on weekends and the family went to the library once a week religiously.
He was both a lecturer of maths and computing, but also taught teachers how to teach. His attitude was that if you were really interested you needed to do it yourself and learn through successes and failures and build up all the concepts in your own mind - it was the concepts, not the facts that made all the difference going forwards.
Now this is so much more true than ever, because facts and calculations are available as a "service" effectively on the internet.
Abstracting the concepts and synthesizing new ones through extension, application of lightly related techniques/ materials/methods, cross pollination, etc in your mind is the truly irreplaceable skill that leads to disruption and innovation.
I did better with cars, for the simple reason that when I took them apart, I could see how everything worked. With electronics, you need an oscilloscope to see the magic. All I had was a VOM.
Ironically, there were lots of kids taking cars apart in high school, so I could help and get help. But in college, nobody, and I mean nobody, was interested in cars. It's still hard to find anyone who is, hardly anyone has a modified car. My (medium modified) dodge wouldn't merit a glance in my high school daze, but today people go ape when I drive by in it.
>With electronics, you need an oscilloscope to see the magic. All I had was a VOM.
The price of test equipment is one of the reasons I went into software despite having an EEng degree. Tinkering with a computer is way cheaper, and I sort of gravitated towards stuff that had software in it, then ended up realizing that I don't really care about electronics all that much. The degree served well for getting a job in writing firmware, I guess.
He was both a lecturer of maths and computing, but also taught teachers how to teach. His attitude was that if you were really interested you needed to do it yourself and learn through successes and failures and build up all the concepts in your own mind - it was the concepts, not the facts that made all the difference going forwards.
Now this is so much more true than ever, because facts and calculations are available as a "service" effectively on the internet.
Abstracting the concepts and synthesizing new ones through extension, application of lightly related techniques/ materials/methods, cross pollination, etc in your mind is the truly irreplaceable skill that leads to disruption and innovation.