To my daughter's high school programming teacher

A couple of takeaways:

1. The fact that the OP's daughter signed up for programming class because she wanted to impress her parent is truly a parenting win. Not just for programming, but anything, at that age.

2. I consider myself pretty open minded about gender diversity...but as I was reading the OP's post, I completely assumed it was written by a programmer-father, until I got to the part where the OP describes being harassed. Still, the mental stereotype was so strong that when writing this comment, I kept having to not refer to the OP as the father of the daughter. The trolling that the OP describes is troubling. But it's easy to be angry at the trolling, and raise awareness about it. Unfortunately, I think women in tech still have the much more difficult task of fighting pervasive, subconscious stereotyping and assumptions in the industry.

edit: 3. The OP treats the use of Visual Basic as an ancillary problem...and it is, compared to what her daughter had to put up. But yeah, VB, seriously? I respect people who do VB -- and do it well, because they have to maintain legacy software at a big company...but if you're a programming teacher, you should have a passion to make your subject as relevant to your students and their contemporary lives when possible...nevermind that using VB, in this day and age, has some considerable barriers to just "dive into" compared to, say, Javascript. It'd be like a physics teacher who didn't make a single reference to CERN, Elon Musk, or physics as it applies to modern athletic competitions.

There is simply no curriculum, there are no standards and no requirements, and if we are honest, the level of computing in most schools and even businesses are a very far cry from the high-tech filter bubble we surround ourselves in.

The worst thing about harassment culture (even when it's largely good-natured) is that it creates and reinforces a power dynamic and subtle "law of the jungle" status hierarchy where the most inappropriate, brazen harasser becomes the dominant figure.

In my opinion, this is particularly dangerous in the way that it obstructs critical thought and group problem solving. Not necessarily relevant to high school but highly important if a team of coworkers evolve toward such a culture.

And they removed AP Computer Science that same year, when I was about to take it, that's why I had to settle with the class that taught VB. The state of HS education in this country makes me sad.

Seems like people generally are agreeing with my interpretation. I am rewriting my comment.

First, it seems to me that she simply told her daughters what she could do. When her daughter said no the mother just left it to her daughter to deal with. After the semester is over, she's publicly denouncing the teacher.

So this is a little bit wrong because she could correct the issue by letting the teacher know the problem when it first occurred.

Let's not really speculating whether the teacher is old, simply doesn't care, sexist or what not. The daughter still got A. According to the mother, she assumed this was due to her daughter's long-term involvement with technology. I am sure she is a bright girl too. '

So can we just say there are two possibilities:

(1) the girl had hidden her sad face when she was in her classroom and since she did her homework and continued to excel on her quizzes and exams, the teacher didn't notice much

(2) the girl did show her sad face but the teacher failed to acknowledge that sign

If #1 were to be true, then we should say the mother has a bigger responsibility here than the teacher. First of all, she did not take action. Kids are weak but they wanted to play strong so they often hide their true feelings. I think any parent should step up to help solving bully issue right away. Not in a public way to name a few kids, but work with the teacher in a very constructive way (such as bringing in more women to talk about tech industry. That's better than bringing a man in.... if you want to show women can do the job too).

We don't know much about how the kid actually behaved in the classroom so we really shouldn't blame the teacher too much at the moment. What we need to realize is poor communication among the kid, the mother and the teacher. It's tough because half of the parents don't use email or they don't have time to talk to the kids or speak with the teacher reguarly. PTA is usually dead with a couple parents from time to time.

So the mother should learn her mistake, help reconstruct her daughter's confident and stop making her rants public now. It's not helping. It is sort of one-side if I had to be really harsh (you can downvote me if you want), but that's how I feel as I read through the post again and again.

Also, please, please, be careful when your daughter adds people she is still not very familiar with to her FB.