Teaching how to code is broken

> As a high school CS teacher, I've seen how boys can be towards girls interested in coding.

I'm surprised. I was expecting the opposite (boys wanting more girls in the classroom!).

> All of this swings both ways, of course, and men are deterred from positions like elementary school teacher, nursing, and secretary roles.

It's interesting that there's an acknowledgement that we need more male nurses (from healthcare professionals) and male elementary school teachers (from experts in the field) and yet there are zero initiatives to do so.

By that I mean money being spent toward that goal. The same way there's a will to have more "diversity" in medicine... mainly so that people of color can go serve "their people" in underserved areas (read: not very attractive or lucrative).

But in computing we’re spending a fortune and investing time to essentially… commoditize ourselves.

> Who believes the former person “would not be able to answer questions about [the subject]”?

All the people who believe that "teaching the test" is not real knowledge.

For example, would you hire a lawyer who flunked the bar? How about consult a physician who couldn't pass his medical boards? How about get on an airplane with a pilot who flunked flight school, but "really knows how to fly"?

And yes, there are bad tests. But there are also good tests, and they work. Personally, I've never encountered a person who mastered a topic but couldn't get a good grade in it.

There are people working on this rigorously, try going through Prof Krishnamurthi's papers: https://cs.brown.edu/~sk/ he teaches higher-order functions because they've found it helps students understand how an API works, he designed his own learning language from scratch (Pyret) and I went through much of his older CS19 Brown course here: https://learnaifromscratch.github.io/software.html because the course uses a web browser IDE, they were able to take stats of all students to see when they started to write code VS when they wrote examples and tests. The tests he teaches are property-based not typical cs101 style tests just plugging in edge cases and hoping for the best. His goal is to turn the teaching of programming from absolute guesswork and wishful thinking into something proven to work which is admirable, most CS professors that I had just taught whatever they felt was best for them when they first learned, not what is provably best for everyone in a large class.

Of course the answer to everything is 'just be motivated and dig deep into X then you will learn as you go' like building a program from scratch, or how some mathematician's learned by being fascinated with various topics and purely researching them on their own for hours on end. For some people this will work others will just give up when it gets too difficult, I find it's something you can do after 1/2 of a course, you have just enough education to be able to read the documentation and now you can actually teach yourself whereas before that just attempting cryptic docs about types and objects good luck.

Then of course there is getting paid to program, which requires specific skills you would never get doing ad-hoc hacking around for fun. You actually have to go on Kattis or Leetcode and bang out countless tiny algorithms where each one you have to defend your architect choices with analysis of it's complexity to a room of professionals with vastly more experience than you, and this is of course what most people want when they tell you 'teach me how to code' it's really 'teach me to make money from my laptop like you do'.

It's not about teaching people literally how to code. It's about teaching people how to learn how to code.

For example, if you're trying to teach someone Javascript with "this is a variable, this is a function, this is an event listener" they're going to get no where. It should be "how to change the color of a button when I click on it."

Then you guide the person to creating a good Google search query. And I think it's totally acceptable for beginners (and experienced programmers) to just copy and paste at the beginning, slowly figuring out how it all works as they try to get an idea working.

What’s interesting to me is that I’m tue internet you’ve got loads of students and loads of more experienced medium people meeting on stackoverflow and forums and right there where there is individual connection and back and forth, the experts keep trying to silence it because they want only expert discussions about advanced topics.

Like the companies that will help you leave as a customer because at least you leave with a good feeling and might come back, versus the companies which make it hard so you hate them forever. Experts go round Internet forums with a “fuck off lazy noob” attitude then wonder why the forum is in decline and empty with only noobs traffic, and then blame it on the noobs, because they are overrunning the site and that must be driving the “good people” out.

Mentoring and individual communication happens all over, but it looks like “doing their homework for them” which is verboten.

If they don’t learn from your answers, you might, other readers might.

The fix for “eternal September” is not “duplicate question” it’s that the older questions and answers need to be deleted, forgotten. The important bit is the development of ideas in the questioner and answerer, not the production of paperwork.

I suspect there is room for a huge forum/site based around these ideas that would combine collaborative editing, live examples, questions, and push new people not on “how to ask a good question” but “how to engage in a back and forth discussion” in some way.

This has been a disjointed blog post in a comment.