ISP customer assignments

Tue Oct 13 12:05:37 UTC 2009

While I may agree that teaching classful routing is stupid, the
addressing part lets people start getting the concept of binary.  While
I'd love to think that people coming out of the school system have a
grasp of simple mathematical skills, more and more I'm finding that's
not the case.    I wouldn't spend a LOT of time with it, and I certainly
wouldn't LEAVE at classful addressing, but it's a foundational step.

Why is the presumption faulty?  If you did calculus, more power to you. 
However, you still needed a foundation before a pseudo-random collection
of letters and numbers together would make any sense. ;)

I learned long ago that not everyone can learn in the same fashion that
I do.  So there's a path to everything with foundations.  Some people
have a hard time subnetting IPv4 on varying boundaries.  More people
have a hard time subnetting IPv6 on varying boundaries.   While I don't
have a problem with either I have to find ways to "fix" those that do
while teaching.  And typically it's missing foundation skills.

But anyway, I don't think that's the important part!  My point was more
about not assuming that just because someone is teaching that they don't
have a realistic set of experiences to go with it as the poster from
APNIC pointed out.

Just my two cents,

Scott

Joe Abley wrote:
>
> On 2009-10-13, at 07:39, Scott Morris wrote:
>
>> No idea, I haven't looked at that stuff in a while.   But I would assume
>> so, as it's easier to build a foundation than jumping straight to
>> something difficult?
>
> I've found RIP to be a reasonable way to teach the concept of a
> routing protocol, since the protocol is very simple and you can always
> close with "don't ever use this".
>
> But teaching classful routing and addressing is just moronic. It's a
> foundation that nothing is built on any more, and makes no sense to
> teach outside of a history class.
>
>> Or did you learn calculus in grade school?  Just askin'   ;)
>
> Yes, since you asked, but your presumption is faulty.
>
>
> Joe
>
>