I like hard tests. I felt like I had no chance in passing the FS, and did. I don't give myself enough credit for being abke to problem solve, but then again we are usually our own worst and most painful critic.
and I suck at typing, more so on a little itsy bitsy phone..
Yes, but the technology eliminates items 1) and 2) from what's needed to solve Problem 7. An apprentice learns only how to use GPS to find a stake point, the rest of the understandng is lost.
If an apprentice knew how to solve Problem 7, how hard would it be to teach (mentor) him on using the GPS procedure? On the other hand, if he knew the GPS procedure, would there be any value in his knowing the concepts involved in the older method? How hard would the mentoring be? Personally, I would rather teach GPS to someone who understands Problem 7 than the other way around.
I first started teaching Geometry after the advent of standardized end of course testing. Shockingly, my experienced colleagues did not require proofs in their courses; proofs weren't required on the multiple choice exam.
But proofs are essential to understanding why the principles used in surveying and many, many other fields always work. Understanding proofs makes the exam easy.
The further we get from the fundamental relationships, the lower the level of understanding becomes.
Very true Math Teacher, GPS is the dummying down of surveying. The first day I got my RTK system it was so simple. Look I can do this, I can run line, slope stake, calculate areas, ect.
Nothing to any of it.
GPS is really an easy to use tool for surveying.
The surveyor needed to have much more skill and knowledge in the transit/tape fieldbook era.
Indeed. Surveyor education faces the same challenges in our rapidly expanding technological world as other fields. Consider, for example, the potential impact of ChatGPT on thesis writing.
We old guys in every field had to learn techniques that were very close to the fundamental principles underlying whatever problem we were trying to solve. NASA had rooms full of human calculators as did NGS. No need for them now, but somebody has to know the principles to write the software and to verify results.
Surveying education cannot possibly keep up with surveying technology. To me, that means that education should focus on basic principles and hiring entities should provide the procedures training. After all, everybody's procedures are d8ffernt. How in the world can educators teach them all?
Yes, it takes time and money to develop competent employees and yes, they will leave if there are better opportunities. The alternative, though, is continuing to put up with button pushers and the havoc they can wreak.
For us, it was a competition to see who could get the answer first and a check to make sure the first guy got it right...
It's been a long time!
Staking some of the large slope staking jobs like large railroad cuts we would use a brunton for slope chaining and we could slope reduce it. There is a chart on the back of the so we would do it in our heads, good times.
Today, people abhor the thought of doing iterations to find an answer. Why can't you get the absolute correct answer on the first calculation, they ask? The real world doesn't have absolutely correct answers on the first attempt. Refinements are necessary.
It's good to know how to slope stake with a rag tape and a level, just to be firm on the fundamentals and to be able to knock out the occasional quick need on a construction site without poking around on your electronics forever.
Did my share of slope staking early in my career, but never enough to approach anything like the speed and confidence of the old timers. From my 9th Edition of Wolf and Brinker's Elementary Surveying (p. 533): "An experienced surveyor employs only mental arithmetic, without scratch paper or hand calculator." Reading that as a young man, I could only shake my head. Worked with a few of those guys, but never reached that level myself. Few in the future ever will.
For small projects, those who think it's always faster to comp it up on the laptop or your field controller: It's only faster for you. Those who haven't worked in the field with the analog generation have a hard time imagining how fast those guys could move.
Frozen North, while it's true calculating slope stakes mentally was SOP, the complicated design often accomplished with CAD started to make it virtually impossible to do. Hwy slope stakes often are more of a story book anymore than the slope stakes I was used to doing. It became important to have templates that could be attached to the computer files the DC uses to get it done efficiently.
It's good to know how to slope stake with a rag tape and a level, just to be firm on the fundamentals and to be able to knock out the occasional quick need on a construction site without poking around on your electronics forever.
Did my share of slope staking early in my career, but never enough to approach anything like the speed and confidence of the old timers. From my 9th Edition of Wolf and Brinker's Elementary Surveying (p. 533): "An experienced surveyor employs only mental arithmetic, without scratch paper or hand calculator." Reading that as a young man, I could only shake my head. Worked with a few of those guys, but never reached that level myself. Few in the future ever will.
For small projects, those who think it's always faster to comp it up on the laptop or your field controller: It's only faster for you. Those who haven't worked in the field with the analog generation have a hard time imagining how fast those guys could move.
My Monroe calculating machine manuals will often say there is "no mental effort required" then proceed to describe a long complicated process. I guess for them "no mental effort" meant the absence of longhand calculations or using Log tables.
I wish i had a nickel for all the slopes stakes i had to set. So many little tricks to getting that catch point and making things move along quicker. We had a set of plans. With profiles and such. Sit down and compute grades at cl then use the different cross sections to get out to the toe or top of slope are and have that grade/elevation know your slope 3:1 or 4:1 etc. compute rod readings then simply subtract and x the required slope move in or out until you catch. Geezers i hope i didn’t miss anything. It has beea long time. But clapping 90’s right angle prisms pulling two chord distances whatever it took to get the job done. Now points points points. Heard a surveyor complaining the other day. He said with robots we have no mentoring in the field anymore. I have crew chiefs that cannot compute anything and can’t find one to hire that can. I said are you the LS. He said yes. I said well isn’t your job to mentor. He said its a crew chiefs job. I said i had good crew chiefs coming up but the LS was the main mentor and the main one testing me to see where i lacked. The crew chief most definitely helped. But when i look back and see the owner the main manager all Pls as the main teacher and mentor its not the robot or rtk fault. Now i try and set my chiefs down every chance i get and teach what little i know. Somehow we have to get that done in this profession or the profession will wither on the vine.
Very good discussion above of button-pushing vs. having a clear mental picture of what's going on.
Slope staking was one of the first things I had to learn when I started work on the County survey crew in northern Minnesota in 1963. There was no training as such, and asking questions was not encouraged. I had to listen to the experienced guys, watch what they did, and figure it out.
I would stand at the road centerline, holding the rag tape at a distance given to me by Stan, the head chainman, who was on the rod. Stan was astonishingly quick at mental math. Ed, on the Dumpy level, would call out the cut or fill. Before Ed's mouth was fully closed, Stan would have computed the new offset from centerline and called it out to me.
Cut sections of the road always included a ditch. The ditch usually was of a fixed depth, say 2 feet below the road shoulder. With a 3:1 slope from the shoulder to the ditch centerline, the ditch centerline would be offset 6 feet from the shoulder.
But in some cases there would be a "special ditch," on a flatter or steeper profile than the road, to match up with a cross culvert or something of that sort. That ditch centerline would not be parallel, and this affected the slope staking. In those cases Ed would compute the ditch centerline offset at each station and call it out to Stan, along with the cut.
After several days of doing this, I was discussing slope staking with Pat, the other new guy, who didn't know any more about it than I did (his job was to carry a bundle of lath and follow Stan around). Suddenly I got a mental picture in 3D of the cut or fill slope as a plane, slicing through the ground surface at an angle. After that it all made sense.
All these points were staked with 4-ft. lath, leaned away from the road centerline at a 45-degree angle. That made it easy for the dozer operator to tell they were slope stakes.
We generally staked 2:1 cut slopes and 3:1 fill slopes. Most of the soil in northern Minnesota is clay, and those worked all right. Softer soils would of course have required flatter slopes.
Slope staking still has its place even now that machine control is common. Every once in a while I set slope stakes before construction so the engineers can visualize the impact of their design on sited before any dirt is moved. On some railroad jobs we will stake out the catch line based on the conceptual plan to make sure we have the correct coverage for the engineers. I'm not saying I use a level, but the technique is the same with a robot or GTK.
I tell people every time I'm walking around to certify the subex that they don't need me. The only need a grade rod and a tape measure. If we didn't have insurance they'd be doing it everyday. Sad but true. It does take a few people that know what they're doing and care to do it right, but post COVID I'm always surprised and even shocked at some of the things I see And get asked about when I'm on a site.
