101–110 of 195 posts
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Haha I'm on a train and autocorrect is a bit of a bitch :-p (That actually scares the crap out of me, missing something like that on something I give the students)
My wonderful English teacher gave extra credit on correcting her own worksheets.
In Japan, English is already mandatory, yet, English fluency sucks. Japan recognizes the problem, but doesn't know what to do about it. Basically, English education has yet to succeed. [1][2] This is the thing about Japan. They can make these moves that are incredibly progressive and ambitious -- visionary even, yet, they really have no idea how to go about doing it. As it stands, they don't have enough teachers that…
I don't know when you taught here, so hard to say but a couple of things have changed in the last 10 years or so. First, they have introduced a "foreign language" class for elementary school children. I know some people who have taught it and they have a lot of praise for the program. It focusses on simply interacting with foreigners and includes many different languages. Personally, I've noticed a big difference in…
Anyone have any thoughts as to why they would take the bottom up approach (ie, start with elementary and go up) rather than top down?
Elementary school students have much more flexible time, and university seems like it's a long way away. Taking a chance on computing in school won't seem nearly as scary to parents.
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>I guarantee you the smarter students will be correcting their teachers and making a mockery of them Like what happens already with exceptional students for any subject. The fact that a number of teachers are barely ahead of their own material is nothing particularly new.
Actually in Japan, I could easily see students being mocked for correcting the teacher. A little story from a Japanese friend who was fluent in English: He, of course, had to take elementary English in school. The teacher was teaching family members and asked "What do you call your grandfather's father?" He replied "I think it's great-grandfather" The teacher laughed at him, causing the whole class to laugh at him. "…
It actually came about as i was a bit nervous about teaching a subject i hadn't done in a long time, and didn't want to mess something up.
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I don't know when you taught here, so hard to say but a couple of things have changed in the last 10 years or so. First, they have introduced a "foreign language" class for elementary school children. I know some people who have taught it and they have a lot of praise for the program. It focusses on simply interacting with foreigners and includes many different languages. Personally, I've noticed a big difference in…
I'm going to look into this, thank you. I am always interested in learning better ways to teach the students :)
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I'm going to look into this, thank you. I am always interested in learning better ways to teach the students :)
I have some notes somewhere around here as I was half way through writing a text book before I went back into programming. Give me a shout at my username @ gmail.com.
In Japan, English is already mandatory, yet, English fluency sucks. Japan recognizes the problem, but doesn't know what to do about it. Basically, English education has yet to succeed. [1][2] This is the thing about Japan. They can make these moves that are incredibly progressive and ambitious -- visionary even, yet, they really have no idea how to go about doing it. As it stands, they don't have enough teachers that…
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I would put it on the same level as literacy and basic arithmetic. It exposes you to entirely know ways to solve problems, a basic understanding of computer science on a societal level would be amazing.
There's no way it is on the same level as literacy and basic arithmetic, at least not for decades if not longer. Literacy rates in the modern world are close to 100%, near the same can add and subtract. Programmatic thinking requires much more effort and skill, at least right now, and that's why we are getting hella paid. It's almost like saying accounting or medicine is the same level as literacy. Or on the low end…
That said, programmatic thinking itself is much simpler. Learning how to think algorithmically and think about things like recursion, iteration, functional abstraction, etc., are definitely things everyone can learn to do. And this sort of thinking is valuable in areas other than software engineering. The weakest thing you can claim is that knowing programming lets people write programs, which is somewhat popular hobby activity among people can do it regardless of their profession, and something that there's some value in given the success of IFTT, Tasker, and similar systems that either approach or are actually programming.
This may not be a good idea. Code is one of those things that by itself sucks until you have a reason or purpose to use it. I started learning coding around age ~9 in 1996 or so. But what got me hooked was websites, because I could use the code to build fan sites or accomplish real, purposeful tasks. I feel like just shoving code at kids isn't going to do much unless they are also incentivized to use it somehow.
You can apply this logic to almost all subjects in school aside from the very basic ones (math, reading/writing) and even then you can argue school need not be teaching at a high level. > I feel like just shoving code at kids isn't going to do much unless they are also incentivized to use it somehow. We shove kids into biology, chemistry, physics, literature, art, etc. The ones that like it will make it their career…
This may not be a good idea. Code is one of those things that by itself sucks until you have a reason or purpose to use it. I started learning coding around age ~9 in 1996 or so. But what got me hooked was websites, because I could use the code to build fan sites or accomplish real, purposeful tasks. I feel like just shoving code at kids isn't going to do much unless they are also incentivized to use it somehow.