I have the utmost respect for you as your discipline takes years of mastery and you rarely get the credit you deserve. However, for people who continually pine over the best way to support a table, or optimize power flow through a circuit, you are pretty blind if you can't see the thing that needs the most improvement...Your ability to actually educate people about your discipline.
I challenge you to find a resources (online, offline, textbook, etc.) that actually goes over the mechanics of calculating the magnitude of a transfer function for a linear system in order to make a Bode plot that doesn't take a single shortcut. I'm willing to bet that little fact is glossed over as every resource I've checked just has it magically appear. 20 Google pages and 3 textbooks which are consider the best do not explain this fact.
Perhaps you would make more progress with gaining respect for your discipline if you didn't make it so obtuse in the learning process. Actually ask people who are struggling to give you feedback instead of asking the good students and the people who are prodigies because guess what? THEY DON'T NEED THE HELP! If you're an Engineering professor, please ask yourself why you know something and ask your students if they know that something. I'm pretty confident that the vast will go, "Of course not! It was never explained to us clearly! We just memorized it for the exam since we never have enough time!"
Finally, if you want to put your desire to improve the world to use, why not use the IEEE and other engineering associations to pool together resources to make the best possible textbooks you can. Most of your textbooks are complete garbage (and the ones that aren't are usually written by mathematics people) so that might be a problem when students are trying to learn.
Here are the resources I've used
Modern Control Systems (12th Edition)
ISBN-13: 978-0136024583
Signals and Systems (2nd Edition)
Alan V. Oppenheim
(Author),
Alan S. Willsky
(Author), with S. Hamid (Author)
ISBN-13: 978-0138147570
Websites:
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=6&ved=0CFYQFjAF&url=http%3A%2F%2Fciteseerx.ist.psu.edu%2Fviewdoc%2Fdownload%3Fdoi%3D10.1.1.112.2812%26rep%3Drep1%26type%3Dpdf&ei=E4yFUdjDKa3G4AOo9YDYBg&usg=AFQjCNE2PeIVqUrO-PTlW3ySF-YMuzLN7g&sig2=ri-DGbHi5YL0bBsgv5U2GA&bvm=bv.45960087,d.dmg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bode_plot
http://users.ece.gatech.edu/mleach/ece3040/notes/bode.pdf
When I worked in finance, there were things you learned just being in the business but you could always find them from first principles and were usually explained in the textbooks. Engineering doesn't seem to have this and this is why I say that if you want people to become engineers, maybe you should put more effort into figuring out how to educate more engineers. After all, it's kind of pathetic that the some of the brightest minds out there can't figure out how to educate people who are desperate to learn it.
Sincerely,
An Engineering Student
