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To my daughter's high school programming teacher

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Re: To my daughter's high school programming teacher

#231

Post by grannyg00se »

Didn't everyone grow up facing some kind of regular harassment in high school? I expected things to take a serious turn for the worse in this story and it actually doesn't seem all that bad. A mother is upset that her daughter was slightly harassed. In one class. In her entire high school experience. Obviously it doesn't make it okay just because many people have faced worse, but dragging the teacher through the mud for it seems unreasonable.

" Sadly, you only get one chance to make a first impression, and you, sir, created a horrible one for girls in computer programming. "

No, he didn't. Not by any reasonable definition of "horrible". Nor is it his responsibility to create any particular impression for any particular race, gender, or religion. Your own pet issue is not his concern.

While on the topic of things horrible, that seven point list is horribly patronizing. Complete with little insulting gems like this: "Good grief, man — how were you even able to make programming boring?".

So glad I'm not a teacher. Must be excruciating at times dealing with the entitled, self obsessed parents, let alone the students.

Re: To my daughter's high school programming teacher

#232

Post by ktsmith »

kaitai wrote: post #144
bangbang wrote: post #9

I cringe reading this. Since when it is alright to tell teachers how to do their job in bullet pointed letters? * Be an adult and talk about any issues, complements or concerns during the class. * Talk with them in person or on the phone. * If you wish, post to your blog after the issues have been resolved. To put a global context on the situation should be supported with evidence as it pertains to life as a women in…

As a teacher, I know that it is the job of a teacher to do better. Allowing an environment that takes engaged, bright students and grinds them down is in fact a failure to do a teacher's job: classroom management is tied with content delivery in a high school teacher's job description. Yes, there are many bad teachers, but why do you excuse doing bad work, essentially arguing that wasting kids' time and potentially d…

Did the student tell the teacher? Did the parent tell the teacher? From the story I get the impression that no one actually brought this issue to the teachers attention. The only context we have is that the parent offered to talk to the teacher for the daugher. The daughter declined and just put up with it for the rest of the year and avoided her classmates.

Kids are really good at hiding what they're doing, especially in high school. It's easy enough to not get caught by a distracted teacher that has 20 or 30 other students to assist. If this was happening in the open and the teacher was aware of it then there's an issue, it's very possible that's not the case. Unfortunately I saw the behavior described in this article in a number of classes during my own time in high school and none of them were CS classes. There are people that will be cruel regardless of the context.

Re: To my daughter's high school programming teacher

#233

Post by contingencies »

Hey author or daughter, if you're reading this, try a hackerspace! Far more convivial environments for intelligent experimentation and learning than a classroom. Mother: Seriously? It was your fault to clinging to out of date notions of formalistic teaching.

Re: To my daughter's high school programming teacher

#234

Post by jholman »

philwelch wrote: post #221
jholman wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So much wrong with this comment. First of all, you need to go do some remedial math. The percentage of DWTS watchers who are women is no predictor of what women do. This fallacy is called confusion of the inverse , and it's a probabilistic variant of the better-known converse error . Second, even if 99% of women were to be DWTS fans, it has no bearing on anigbrowl's comment. The reason that "while your wife watches D…

First, Dancing with the Stars is one of the highest rated shows on TV; the fact that it has a 2/3 women audience indicates that very many women will make the time to watch it. Second, setting aside households with two TV's, only one spouse can enjoy passive entertainment at a time. Presumably while we watch football, women can do something fascinating and productive. Third, political correctness is a phenomenon of wh…

To the first, IF as you say it's 2/3 women, and IF as one short Google search suggested to me it has around 13M viewers, and IF we agree that those are all in the US and the US has around, what, 100M adult women?... then that's 8% of those adult women watching it. If those 13M include people outside the US, then it's lower than 8%. Apparently 92% of women do not watch DWTS.

In response to the second, I don't understand your point at all. Help me out here?

As to the third, I agree that there certainly exist some fools, most of them white and liberal (and maybe prigs?), who have a mental pattern wherein they make knee-jerk complaints about certain behaviour being offensive, without having a well-considered ethical system that justifies this complaint, instead using these complaints to signal their belonging to a certain social clique. If that's what you mean by political correctness, I agree that it exists, and is odious. Whether or not such fools object to your remarks should be entirely beneath you, however. So raising the potential political incorrectness of your remark appears, to me, to be saying "I'm going to use this straw-man argument to attack those who disagree with me". And this is why I brought up the fact that it's a lowbrow dismissal, and suggested that on those rare occasions when the label does fit, you can instead construct an independent explanation of what's wrong with the political correctness.

Re: To my daughter's high school programming teacher

#235

Post by akg_67 »

I am wondering why author is not offering to volunteer to teach or help the teacher recruit students and do other things she is recommending. I guess it is easier to criticize than do something to make a difference.

When I was in college and a class that I wanted to take kept getting cancelled due to low enrollment, I went out recruited students for the class.

Did daughter report the bullying? Did the author report the bullying? Teachers and school admins are not mind readers and not tagging along with all students all the time.

The whole article displays nothing but the arrogance and superior ego of the author. If you have a problem, get off your butt and do something instead of whining.

Re: To my daughter's high school programming teacher

#236

Post by chipotle_coyote »

jessedhillon wrote: post #86
bangbang wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kids say terrible things. This isn't the sign of a bad teacher or a worthy of a internet rant, it's an opportunity to prepare her kids (Not just the girls) for the real full-contact brutal reality known is the the real working world.

Oh. Just curious, where's the line on this? Like, what things is she allowed to attempt to draw public attention to, and what things should she just counsel her daughter to learn to live with, and accept as a part of life? How should a person know what sorts of circumstances belong on which side of that line? Are these written in a book somewhere that I missed?

I'm pretty sure the general consensus is that if you're female and you want to speak up about feeling belittled or harassed, the problem is in you, and we will gladly tell you that you need to stop bringing this subject up because we are so darn tired of hearing people like you try to bring us down.

If, however, you are male and you are feeling belittled or harassed, we're pretty interested in having a serious discussion about your experience. We may not agree with you and we may tell you that we don't think you should feel that way at all, but we won't tell you not to have the discussion.

If you're a woman, though? You're not allowed to have that discussion. Leave it to the menfolk.

Does that clear it up for you?

Re: To my daughter's high school programming teacher

#237

Post by etfb »

Pinatubo wrote: post #204
etfb wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a learning moment for you, Mr stefantalpalaru. What you've just said, although I know you meant it sanely and sensibly, has been interpreted as lacking in compassion. This is not your fault; what happened is you have made a comment from a position of unrecognised privilege. For your own good, and the good of any women you may have any kind of relationship with now and into the future, it would be a very good…

If your goal is to increase the acceptance of women in the tech community, this post is very counterproductive.

Not at all! My goal is to respond to someone who is unkind with something close to kindness. If he goes on the way he has been, he'll do himself as much damage as he does to the people around him. The reasonable response to that sort of privileged blindness is anger; I was aiming for something a little more compassionate.

You, however, don't get the same consideration, because I strongly suspect you're a pillock.

Re: To my daughter's high school programming teacher

#238

Post by derleth »

philwelch wrote: post #221
jholman wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So much wrong with this comment. First of all, you need to go do some remedial math. The percentage of DWTS watchers who are women is no predictor of what women do. This fallacy is called confusion of the inverse , and it's a probabilistic variant of the better-known converse error . Second, even if 99% of women were to be DWTS fans, it has no bearing on anigbrowl's comment. The reason that "while your wife watches D…

First, Dancing with the Stars is one of the highest rated shows on TV; the fact that it has a 2/3 women audience indicates that very many women will make the time to watch it. Second, setting aside households with two TV's, only one spouse can enjoy passive entertainment at a time. Presumably while we watch football, women can do something fascinating and productive. Third, political correctness is a phenomenon of wh…

> Third, political correctness is a phenomenon of white liberal prigs who go out of their way to take offense because they have nothing useful or productive to contribute to the public discourse.

If you've defined it that way, of course that'll be how you see it and nobody will shake your conviction. This makes conversations with you on the topic as dull as someone who doesn't grasp enough statistics to understand trivial errors, but so be it.

The rest of the world has a more nuanced take on it, which begins with the idea that being rude to people who lack relative power in a given situation is still morally wrong and tactically quite stupid.

Re: To my daughter's high school programming teacher

#239

Post by SwellJoe »

scotty79 wrote: post #225

You can't be different than other kids and visibly better than them without becoming a target of harassment. I've been better than other kids in anything computer, math, physics or chemistry related and I remember I had to tread very carefully even while I was helping them. Same way as when you give a good ideas to your boss, your concern should be not only about him accepting your idea but also about him not hating…

Victim-blaming. Just because abuse happens commonly, and has happened to all of us at one time or another (to varying degrees; and I was certainly on the receiving end of plenty of abuse and bullying, as a kid), does not make it OK.

So many responses here are of the form, "Toughen up! I did!" Would you not have rather had a safe, non-abusive, school experience? I certainly would have. Would you not rather girls (and boys) in school today have a better experience than you? I would.

There are techniques teachers can use to address these kinds of behavioral problems in their classrooms. And, there are ways for schools to help prevent them in the first place. Smaller class sizes consistently reduces behavioral problems and increases success among students, for instance. I don't think it's useful to merely blame the teacher...the system as a whole is culpable (and, society as a whole is culpable on some level, if our budgetary priorities place making war over education). But, the teacher could certainly be better educated in his job and more responsive to a child who is being singled out.

Re: To my daughter's high school programming teacher

#240

Post by derleth »

gemma wrote: post #60
cookiecaper wrote: post #15

So, was this article about the student's experience or the mother's? Because it reads like it's about the mother. The guys in class suggested that their peer go make a sandwich. That's the only accusation actually made against the class and the teacher. While I don't endorse such teasing, it's certainly in no way specific to computer programming, and it's not anything like the intensity one would expect when trolls f…

> Minority entities will be teased practically any time they exist, regardless of sector or age, and they need to be taught to handle it well. Yeah? So this high school programming class isn't so much a programming class as a crash course in coping mechanisms for gender-based harassment? Please. It's the educator's job to create a safe space for, you know, education--for every student in the class, not just the privi…

People can talk about how the real world is without endorsing it or thinking it should continue to be that way.

Do you understand the statement above? If not, I'll quit wasting my time.

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