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To my daughter's high school programming teacher

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271–280 of 596 posts

Re: To my daughter's high school programming teacher

#271

Parts of this article I can relate to. When I was growing up I had a mother that was constantly involved in what I was supposed to be taught at school: What are they teaching you? Why are they behind? Why are you behind? Why is the teacher so incompetent? This led to me changing schools quite often and each time that happened I lost friends. It didn't matter that the classes were beginning easy for the sake of revisi…

I agree with what you wrote. This person is so wrong to write that letter and this type of "nannying" will ensure the child grows up to be the same. So unfortunate.

Re: To my daughter's high school programming teacher

#272
post #242

I see a lot of posts here simply making excuses for the teacher, proclaiming why it wasn't really his fault or responsibility. So what? The situation presented is unacceptable, and we're kidding ourselves if we think that whether the details of this particular instance are sufficiently condemning or not makes a difference as to the fact this this kind of thing goes on all the time in our high schools. It's not okay.…

When it comes down to it, I have to agree with you. I think dealing with situations like this is part of growing up, and while I disagree with a lot of the points of this blog post, the main issue, harassment (of any kind) should not be tolerated anywhere (including and especially schools).

On that same note, I think OP would be hard pressed to find an industry that isn't like this, if not towards women, towards some "different" group of people, possibly even men or Anglo Saxons. One of the things I have the hardest times with is when people say a specific form of harassment isn't tolerable (can't segregate based on color, can't discriminate against race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, etc.), but don't get at the root issue, singling out anyone for being different. It doesn't matter that she was a girl or that the comment was sexist, what matters is someone was singled out for the sole purpose to make them feel bad and shameful for who they are.

Re: To my daughter's high school programming teacher

#273

Parts of this article I can relate to. When I was growing up I had a mother that was constantly involved in what I was supposed to be taught at school: What are they teaching you? Why are they behind? Why are you behind? Why is the teacher so incompetent? This led to me changing schools quite often and each time that happened I lost friends. It didn't matter that the classes were beginning easy for the sake of revisi…

Yes, life is hard for girls and women and everyone else too with adversity.... but, I think some of the point of the article was that the teacher could have taught the boys something about how to treat girls and women. Set the tone right for them before they continue to engage in this behavior throughout college and adulthood so we can break this sexist cycle which is not present in many other technical fields.

Re: To my daughter's high school programming teacher

#274
post #74
post #34

My favorite comment...a tad subtle: > During the first semester of my daughter's junior/senior year, she took her first programming class. She knew I'd be thrilled, but she did it anyway . Edit: before anyone harangues me, I don't mean to take away from the shitty circumstances surrounding the core message in the post, just got a chuckle out of the subtle dad/daughter humor inserted.

> dad/daughter humor inserted. Not to be a dick, but you may be guilty of a little benign sexism yourself there... the author is a woman.

She first mentions such halfway through the article, and her writing style is masculine. Even I guessed (not assumed) male until that point.

Re: To my daughter's high school programming teacher

#275
post #199

I feel for the daughter who (like many women before her) had a crappy experience in the male-dominated programming world. I feel for the parent who sees her daughter possibly reject a very fulfilling career path after a bad initial experience, when the future could be so much better. But as a former high school teacher, I also feel for the teacher. Giving them some benefit of the doubt, I just want to point out a cou…

I totally agree with your comment, one thing though > a crappy experience in the male-dominated programming world. It's a bit far fetched to call a high school level programing introduction class audience the "programming world". Given the amount of people that, even in totally CS oriented engineering school, give up, or aim at a management career after they discover what CS really is, I'm confident to guess that no…

The bullying took a sexist form. I don't care why, no female should ever be told they need to go to the kitchen and make sandwiches for the guys in a programming class.

That's behavior that should be stopped, or preferably never happen. The expectation should have been set that it will not happen, that the cool programmers don't discriminate and are respectful of each other as individuals.

Re: To my daughter's high school programming teacher

#276

I feel for the daughter who (like many women before her) had a crappy experience in the male-dominated programming world. I feel for the parent who sees her daughter possibly reject a very fulfilling career path after a bad initial experience, when the future could be so much better. But as a former high school teacher, I also feel for the teacher. Giving them some benefit of the doubt, I just want to point out a cou…

I had people saying absolutely awful things to me in the middle of class, well within earshot of an authority figure who couldn't be arsed to do anything about it. Funny enough, by far the worst class I took was a networking class. I thought I'd be surrounded by smart people. Turns out, I was only surrounded by assholes, with a teacher willing to let anything and everything slide. The best class? Geometry. The teache…

> it's something anyone who has the potential to influence others' lives should be working on

Especially parents. Ethics should be passed on from generation to generation, religious or not. Somewhere in the past century, the art appears to have been lost. Or it may dilute with each generation, as can be observed in children raised by their grandparents when compared to children of the same age raised by their own parents.

Re: To my daughter's high school programming teacher

#277
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…

One time in college, I went to a busy ice cream restaurant with some friends of mine (Fenton's in Emeryville). After entering, we saw there was just one single open table, so we went and put our jackets down on it and then got into line. After getting our ice cream we went back to the table only to find our jackets gone and some fat people sitting there, eating ice cream with their fat kids. When I asked where our ja…

It's amusing to me that you find this extremely insignificant story worthy of mention on HN in a thread where it's not even tangentially relevant.

P. S. He was right. No way that shit counts.

Re: To my daughter's high school programming teacher

#279
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A school with "no violence or rape" wouldn't be just nothing wrong, it would be extraordinary. Even elite schools in developed and rich countries are filled with bullying: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/28/swedish-school-... Maybe you really ought to think about which school you went into in which neighborhood, which social clique you were a part of and if you still think no bullying happened, maybe it's t…

I went to an all girls school, and while I'm sure there was bullying, there was definitely no violence or rape.

I feel like I should come to the defense of mixed-gender schools here a bit, even though I realize your comment doesn't necessarily advocate gender isolation (but it does sort of imply the benefits of it).

I went to a mixed-sex high school, albeit you might choose to take this anecdote with a grain of salt since that was 20 years ago in Germany. There was certainly some bullying, although not on the scale I discovered much later in life was common elsewhere. There was almost no intra-school violence. I feel pretty confident in saying this because these things were taken very seriously by both staff and students alike, and the few cases where there had been confrontations between students quickly became very public and a matter of much water cooler talk afterwards. I can also say with about the same level of confidence as you that there was no rape, or other forms of gender-based violence. And coming back to the article's subject, CS class was mandatory for everyone at first - and even though in later years the course became one of those that could be voluntarily dropped, the gender balance stayed the same after that.

That said, school wasn't ideal for me as I was in it. CS class wasn't exactly great, mostly due to utter disinterest by 90% of the students who took it. At the time I had the feeling the school was a bad choice for individualists like me, though in hindsight I would revise that conclusion a bit (as a humanist-themed middle/high school it was actually much better than any other school I could have gone to).

I think it's important to bring young people up together and not artificially separate them into two groups. Of the many social problems present in my time studying there, gender issues were not one of them. There was no us-versus-them mentality, and informal social groups were almost always mixed. I can't help but wonder if that sort of normalcy is something single-gender schools actively campaign against.

Re: To my daughter's high school programming teacher

#280
Only girls have a bad time at schools. For boys it is just fun and games all the time. They also never target jokes at each other. Imagine if there hadn't been a girl in that class. Who would those boys have directed jokes at? It would have been a very dreary affair.

Can you imagine a boy losing interest in a subject because school is so awful? I can't.

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