[Amps] Entry level license

[Jim Brown]

That is often the result of how the class is taught. This winter, I sat 
in as an observer accompanying my wife in a Technician study class. The 
instructor was a degreed EE and retired from work as a design engineer. 
I was quite disappointed to see that he taught only formulas, with no 
explanations of the concepts behind the formulas. My advice to him 
afterwards was to slow down his coverage of these very important 
fundamentals (Ohm's Law, Power, dB, frequency and wavelength, etc.), 
devoting twice as much time to them and "telling the story" of each 
concept.  After class and at home, I attempted to fill in the missing 
stuff, but she was so discouraged by his presentation that she abandoned 
her pursuit of the license.

To put this in perspective, she's a Ph.D in a biological field, and has 
no background in physics of any sort. The concepts were quite alien to 
her. And her only interest in the license was for emergency 
communications in our mountain community that has no cell service, not 
enough motivation to cause her to persevere.  :)

My background is a BSEE, 5 years teaching at DeVry in Chicago, and 40 
years in engineering, mostly as a systems engineer. I learned radio and 
electronics from the ARRL Handbook, .the Novice study guide, and the 
older hams in my hometown radio club.

73, Jim K9YC

On Wed,4/26/2017 2:09 PM, Chris Hays wrote:
> But it shows that people are just memorizing answers and not understanding
> much if anything.