Some time ago, I hang around a local library's book sale. I encountered a book: Engineering Drawing by French (French is the author, not language), 1960. This is the text book we used in our sophmore year. I don't know how many of you still remember the class by 凌霄. My memory is fading fast, so I think it is worthwhile to write something about him & his class. 凌霄 was unique because he always complained something in the class. For instance, 你看那些窗子, 都不是垂直的. 工程館是怎広盖出耒的? 一包水泥八包沙! Apparently, he was not a happy man at that time. I heard that he was running some kind of bufferfly business in southern Taiwan. Life must be tough at that time as a professor. I just hope those poor butterflies don't get perished or extinguished. I browsed this text book, it reminds me a lot of interesting stuff. After we finished the drawing assignment, we needed to have the drawing checked by him. Nine out of ten, we got problem and had to redraw. It was very frustrating and really a pain in the neck. I am not sure this class have anything to do with my future career. Anyway, the same holds true for 投影几何, 工程材料 & 三民主義, totally a waste of time. I did remember a person who did the best in 凌霄's class, 黃中平. Since I left NTU, I have never heard of him & the classlist has no information or data of him. Anybody knows where he is?Life can be boring sometime. We always remember something unusual & forget all the boring routine stuff. For instance, when it comes to 翁通楹, it is "Tighto Sido", 李举賢, it is "你這是 shami-isu", 白光弘, it is Reading the text book Antenna in the class. How about 楊進順, it is "楊都美". She reminds me of him instead of the other way around. I actually forgot the title of his class & I am not sure I learn anything from him. One thing I did remember what he said, "我一碰到 delta 和 epsilon 就頭痛". He probably hates calculus. Next, how about 馬雲龍? His 电机机械 is another pain in the neck, too many assignments. I remember we had to spend those precious weekend just toiling along with slide rule for his assignment. If we had electronic calculators, it might save us some time. But slide rule, it is killing. We all found out that we might as well wait a little while until Apo finished his work & shared some of his secret.
I am sure some of you have good memory & stories. Please blog & share them before we all forget those good old days.
2 comments:
I remember the cement/sand=1/8 well. He certainly wasn't a happy guy, yet wasn't afraid to say it either.
One of our teachers, don't remember which, said. "Here we have first rated students, second rated school, and third rated teachers." I think he was sincere and honest. But from where we were and what we had, we probably were in the best place there was.
How about the factory workshop. For a semester we were to chisel a piece of raw iron into 1 inch cube, using only chisel and hammer. The whole cirriculum was a joke.
I almost forgot the workshop in our good old days. Gradually I pieced some picture together & here is what I remember.
Before I set foot to the shop, I had no idea what it was. I kind of thought it had to be some machine tools that we had to master or used them skillfully. But what a bomber, it was an eye opener. There were just two guys man the shop & nowhere you could find a professor or teaching assistant there. Worse yet, this two guys spoke some kind of alien language that you can't comprehend. After the first session, I gave up communicating with them. Obviously, these two persons had no interest in you. All they care was to shut off the power & close the door when 5:00 pm reached, not even 1 minute extra. I think I am quite handy but this workshop was really a bad experience for me. I consider this is one of the worst gift a university can give to its students. Yes, to chisel a piece of raw iron into a cube is a joke. Whoever got this idea & created this shop had to be on drug. In later days of my career, I had a chance to work in a lab that equipped with lathe, drill press, band saw, table saw, mitre saw etc etc. These tools are much more valuable in building the instruments you need to do experiment that supports your dissertation.
Talk about the bad experience, there is another one. Remember the chemistry lab? We, as a group, purchased all bunch of bottles, tubes, beakers etc etc. We always locked them up in the drawer after the lab work. Alas, our last lab session, when we entered to retrieve our precious stuff, it was a shock. All of them were gone with broken locks. It was really an eye opener---Hello, welcome to the real world! I think it was highly possible those lab assistant rounded them up for the next year & resold to those students next year. Of course they pocketed the money. It was a serious robbery, we should have reported to the police or protested to the president 錢思亮. By the way, his name means 見錢眼開, another eye opener.
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