What's really sad: most of the comments here either say “Teachers don't need to be good, that's OK, we should never change it or complain about it or even worry about it” or “We need more vivid descriptions of bullying until we can agree there's some problem”.
To my daughter's high school programming teacher
291–300 of 596 posts
Re: To my daughter's high school programming teacher
#292Ugh...I saw the title and had positive expectations because usually, it seems, letters to high school teachers are positive, as in: "My teenage child was depressed but your class made her love school again, etc. etc." 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 t…
Javascript has HUGE barriers compared to Visual Basic. Picture who you're teaching. These aren't generally kids who know anything about programming. They're kids who have never seen anything even similar to programming before. In fact, the vast majority of them probably don't even want to be there.
So you teach Visual Basic, because it has less "gotchas" than Javascript, it reads more like english, it has less intimidating symbols, it can be made to be strongly typed so that they'll receive feedback at compile time, it comes with a powerful WYSIWYG tool built into the IDE, and it has a vast, VAST suit of powerful first and third party libraries that can make the kids feel like they're performing magic.
Visual Basic gets shit on a lot by people, and perhaps justifiably in the business world - but in the teaching world (especially when you're teaching people who are ignorant of and generally apathetic to the subject matter), there are few languages that compare to it favorably.
Re: To my daughter's high school programming teacher
#293So, 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…
Child gets bullied (shock horror), mother assumes it's sexism (it ain't, it's bullying. I'm a dude. Got bullied at high school. Does that make my tormentors homosexual autosexists?), rants.
I'm so bored of this sort of thing. Yes, there are man-children who post stupid and hurtful crap on the internet. Yes, there are cretins who make dick jokes on stage at conferences. There are also women who are complete and utter asses to all men because "all men are rapists", which IMHO is a far more misandric view than the kind of offhanded misogyny of "sudo make me a sandwich" shit nerd guys come up with.
People are dicks. People do stupid crap. People hurt each other.
People who use gender as an emblem and weapon are also dicks, because they create a line of demarcation and balkanisation where there IS NONE. We are PEOPLE. Not "Men" and "Women" who are some kind of antagonistic polar-opposite species.
Edit: Rape jokes. Interesting one that. I recall being 12, on a school bus on a trip to some camp in Michigan (am mostly schooled in the UK, spent a year in 7th grade in the US, loathed it), and being astounded at the fact that the gaggle of girls sat behind me were all cracking rape jokes. I actually couldn't parse at first what they were talking about "rip? ripe? rope?", until I clocked the macabre subject of their humour.
It took the (male) bus driver to ask them to all kindly shut the fuck up.
Re: To my daughter's high school programming teacher
#294I also had a teacher in HS that taught Visual Basic in a computer programming class. Not VB.Net, but VB6, and this was 4 years ago. 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.
I went to high school from 2001 to 2005, and there wasn't any programming course. This was in the small-town US. Any form of VB is still computer programming, and would have been a big step up. > The state of HS education in this country makes me sad. Yes, and that is not going to change unless we privatize education.
> Yes, and that is not going to change unless we privatize education.
Or start paying higher taxes so that public education is given the funding they need to implement these programs.
Re: To my daughter's high school programming teacher
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 discovere…
I also went to school outside America, ten years ago. I don't have a decided opinion on mixed schools either way - there are definitely benefits to single sex education, but they need to be weighed against the artificiality of the environment, as you say. Its worth noting that many of the straight up academic benefits of gender separation appear to be stronger for girls - higher participation in STEM subjects, more participation in class, better performance in general - but there is some evidence that boys perform better academically with girls in the class. (this might be a little out of date, I am less interested in the theory of school since I left it myself). I got the impression that the idea was basically to reduce social distraction during school: one could always hang out with the opposite sex after school (and most people did).
Re: To my daughter's high school programming teacher
#296I 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…
Two things: 1. The OP did reach out to the teacher: > I suggested that she talk to you. I offered to talk to you. I offered to come talk to the class. I offered to send one of my male friends, perhaps a well-known local programmer, to go talk to the class. Finally, my daughter decided to plow through, finish the class, and avoid all her classmates. I hate to think what less-confident girls would have done in the same…
The first point is actually ambiguous. I think she made the 'offer' to her daughter, who insisted that her mother should actually not interfere.
Re: To my daughter's high school programming teacher
#297Earlier 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…
> 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.
I happen to enjoy watching the same shows and movies my wife watches on TV, and I somehow assumed it was true of the majority of couples.
Re: To my daughter's high school programming teacher
#298Do any men have any experience in classes where they were the only man amongst many women?
Re: To my daughter's high school programming teacher
#299So, 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…
Child gets bullied (shock horror), mother assumes it's sexism (it ain't, it's bullying. I'm a dude. Got bullied at high school. Does that make my tormentors homosexual autosexists?), rants. I'm so bored of this sort of thing. Yes, there are man-children who post stupid and hurtful crap on the internet. Yes, there are cretins who make dick jokes on stage at conferences. There are also women who are complete and utter…
I sorry you had a bad school experience and absolutely agree with your point that things shouldn't improve and we should do nothing to help.
Re: To my daughter's high school programming teacher
#300Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't disagree with you, strictly speaking, but I do understand how VB might not be the best way to get people interested in programming. While JavaScript is, in my very humble opinion, a rather poor "first language", I understand why so many people seem to want to use it as such, because it is easy to get "neat" results. When I was a youngster, I thought the copy of VB 5 my dad got me was the coolest thing ever, b…
Not only is it easier to get neat results in JS but it has a very low barrier to entry. Everyone uses the internet and is just a shortcut away from executing javascript code in console of their favorite browser on a live page. That and the language itself is very "loose" when it comes to rules and strictness. It just gets the work done. Nothing like cpp for example. Now it can be both good thing because the results a…
I'm a IT/Computing teacher in the UK. We've only just started to teach Computer Science recently and although I was a developer before retraining as a teacher I chose Visual Basic.
Why? Well, we don't have to pay to install it, our technicians are happy to install it, the GUI design stuff is easy for students to use, I think it is easy to learn quickly and most importantly it allows our students to get high marks easily. Also I'm the only person in my school who can program - others will have to pick it up as the number of classes increases - again VB is easy for a novice to learn.
The exam board dictates what programing assessment is to be done and the amount of time it is to be done in. As much as I'd be happy to teach another language VB is the best fit in this case.