To my daughter's high school programming teacher

1) I feel like attacking the teacher is unfair. There is a much more significant root cause that should be addressed, and the teacher's inability to detect her bullying is merely a symptom of that root cause.

Bullying is terrible - I experienced that myself for alternative reasons in Middle/High School - and indeed, inexcusable. Little kids can be assholes, and I do hope that teachers get better at recognizing when kids are getting picked on... but it's a lot to ask when they're strained with multiple classrooms of students that they have to teach. With classroom sizes getting larger, it becomes a laughable proposal to tell them to "pay attention" or "check in" with individual students. These teachers are dealing with potentially hundreds of students every day.

If you want to attack the real problem, attack the fact that teaching is considered and compensated as a "second class career," and thus causes the best and brightest to avoid it. Attack the low pay that teachers receive, the low respect in their community, and in particular the low budgets for public schools brought about by the continual demand for lower taxes. If schools got the budgets to hire good teachers and (most importantly) give them significantly smaller classroom sizes, they could do the kind of one-on-one mentoring proposed: and that would diminish the core problem significantly.

Let's kill the root of the problem rather than blaming the already stressed out teacher at the tail end of said problem. This is a problem we can FIX as a society, if we can recognize that it's worth putting money into our community to solve the problem. This is a solvable problem, made difficult only by the fact that we refuse to give public school systems the funding that they need to sufficiently address it.

2) Far less important in the grand scheme of things, but I feel like people (including this author) belittle Visual Basic unfairly.

It's a great teaching language, and the simplicity of its syntax is helpful for situations like high school where the majority of students don't even want to be there, much less programming. The author's daughter is enthusiastic, and that's great - I'd be willing to bet that the vast majority of that class had absolutely no interest in being there. It's unfortunate, but true - and teaching a straightforward language can at least make the barrier to entry and the remote chance of getting through to some of these students just a bit less remote.

Yeah, it's not going to be something that she'll likely run into in the real world - well, maybe, depending on the industry - but teaching programming in high school is about attempting to break through the oversized wall that is general student apathy. You want to teach an apathetic kid Objective-C so that they can make iPhone apps? Nope. You need something simple - something that will hopefully be simple enough that they won't feel like they're struggling against it. Is it sad that kids are so apathetic? Sure, but wishing they weren't isn't going to make it better. So you give them a softball intro, and hope they feel empowered enough with it to start actually caring about it. Or for that matter, about something, anything.

This teacher also may have been teaching it because it's all they know. High Schools seldom (ever in the public system in America?) have the budget to hire a Computer Science teacher. This person was probably recruited as the only teacher in a related department who happened to know some kind of programming offhand.

Lastly in the defense of Visual Basic, it provides a vast wealth of easy-to-use, easy-to-install, well-documented libraries that perform what (to lay people) seem to be magic. Not only is it easy to learn, but these libraries can be leveraged to very quickly make programs that feel like they're doing something interesting with minimal resistance or struggling against the tools. Learning how to struggle against tools without giving up IS an important skill - but when you're just trying to start by teaching kids to care AT ALL, it's more important that they feel like they're winning. They can learn how to properly struggle once they've learned that it's worth the effort. When they can throw the use of some advanced libraries together and come up with something fun in a single classroom session, they're more likely to also view programming as fun - and thus hopefully just a LITTLE more likely to actually care about it.

In short, Visual Basic is a gateway drug - and a pretty effective one at that.

Anyways, that's my two cents.

As it is, in a world of 30-40 (and climbing) students per classroom and 5+ classes a day, a teacher who tried to one-on-one mentor every student they came across would be fired. They wouldn't have the time to actually teach the curriculum of the class, and would quickly find themselves out of a job.

Let's not blame and shame this teacher - that's the equivalent of blaming a brick that falls off the roof of a shoddily-constructed building for killing a bystander. Instead of blaming the contractors who built the roof, let's put the brick on trial.

I'm all for gender equality in IT and the like, but again, high school. Put a girl in a classroom full of hormone-ridden teenage boys that probably don't see much of that kind very often, see what happens.