Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.

Will Durant

I find it interesting that people will put more energy into questioning the reason for foundational learning then they put into immersing themselves in the lesson itself.  That lack of prioritizing energies lessen the odds that the knowledge will be there when needed later.  I myself am guilty of doing that and would like to share a few stories. These are of when I got to see the need for that knowledge very near to the time I got the actual lesson.

The first was years ago when I was taking an PC Hardware Electronics course.  One of the lessons involved building a 25 pin serial cable.  It took a good hour and a half for the lesson on what the cable was, how to solder, build and then test the cable.  I wasn’t too interested in the topic, and several students were noticeably vocal about how they felt like it was a waste of time.  After all, a null-modem cable could be had for $5 at the monthly computer shows.

A month later while working as a System Administrator I got to see firsthand just how useful that lesson was.  The firm I worked for had purchased another company for the intellectual property.  With that came a lot of telecom equipment.  But since the employees had all been let go they put passwords on and locked down the various systems.

One piece was a custom 2U system that had a type of serial port I’d never seen before.  My mentor knew that it was possible to access via that serial port.  This was long before Amazon, so he paid a quick trip to HSC (Halted Specialty Company) for a couple of connectors.  One was a standard db9 for the typical PC of the day.  For the other, he couldn’t find one that small.  Instead he purchased a male header that would normally go on a circuit board.  He then broke it at an angle with the right number of pins on it.

He then leveraged a magnifying glass and some gentle assembly work.  The cable worked on the first try, he reset the passwords and the expensive piece of equipment was put into use that afternoon.  It was interesting how a simple foundational piece of information made it possible to keep things moving.  Don’t discount the basics.  Education is like legos.  The more you know, the more blocks you have to build with!