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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

#341

Post by cnlwsu »

pc86 wrote: post #339

> I'm no teacher, so forgive me if you think I'm out of place when it comes to telling you how to do your job. And yet, here we are. > But I am a mother, and I've spent years encouraging girls and women in IT, so perhaps my perspective will help you. Being a parent does not qualify you to discuss anything other than being a parent. It's no different than saying "As a mother, I feel that we need to bomb Syria." It's j…

Isnt this kinda ad hominem? in fact the first 3 paragraphs explain she has more expertise in the topic than most. She more then has a right to an opinion and her points make sense it was not "dont foster an environment that belittled and harassed my daughter because I am her mother" even though that alone is perfectly reasonable.

Re: To my daughter's high school programming teacher

#342

Post by invalidOrTaken »

kaitai wrote: post #135
cookiecaper wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Which real world are you advocating this high school programming class introduce to a 16-year-old girl? The real world where HR thought police aren't sitting in every room of every company. The real world where even HR people try to "make jokes" and be funny. The real world where HR people generally judge the severity of a harassment complaint by favoritism, which reality a blunt HR person (not employed at my curren…

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why 16-year-old girls leave programming. Remember, guys ganging up on you and telling them to make them a sandwich is just funny! You're so thin-skinned, ladies! thought police! http://hoydenabouttown.com/20110218.9512/sexist-joke-bingo/ ...almost got bingo... good work, cookiecaper.

Fine members of the audience, I give you the Myers Shuffle.

http://squid314.livejournal.com/329561.html

Will you take the free space kaltai, or can we stop trying to use rhetorical tricks like talking dismissively about(rather than to) and trying to out-meta the other?

Re: To my daughter's high school programming teacher

#343

Post by lotsofcows »

madaxe wrote: post #309
lotsofcows wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

... hello wilful misinterpreter? You don't fix a gas leak by buying a new sofa. I'm just saying that the thing being posed as an issue isn't the actual issue.

Your comment boils down to, "It was this way for me. Life's tough. Suck it up."

How can a situation where a child enters a classroom full of enthusiasm and leaves a year (term?) later depressed not be an "actual issue"?

Re: To my daughter's high school programming teacher

#344

Post by optymizer »

I went to school in a third-world country. We had girls in our CS classes - because CS was mandatory in high school. No one made fun of the girls. Most girls weren't interested in CS, but the few that were, kicked so much butt at coding, no one would dare make fun of them.

Re: To my daughter's high school programming teacher

#345

Post by VLM »

Nate75Sanders wrote: post #174
dandrews wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heh, Louden's book? Still got it here somewhere. For an hour of nostalgic fun and an excuse to burn a Bass Ale while your wife watches DWTS, take a look at the 1130 emulator at http://ibm1130.org/sim

Wow, you really managed to do that in a thread pertaining to sexism in tech.

I thought the most hilarious thing about the HN comments was the 100% sexism oriented response WRT general HN culture, and nothing about hetronormativity or whatever its called, I currently work with a great tech, who happens to be female, and she also happens to have a wife, and I've worked with other women with the same family life as that in the past, so I was LOL the whole way about the HN "belief system" that apparently in 1950's HN world, only men can have wives.

Another epic HN failure was confusing an obviously single word substitution issue like using the word wife instead of spouse as if it changes anything in the discussion other than the political correctness level, with actual intentional hate speech. You have to prioritize your problems and this is like "cut yourself shaving and also have a broken leg" one should be prioritized above the other.

Something never discussed about sexism in tech, at least on HN, is its an almost purely coastie "brogrammer" phenomena. I am not part of the apparently locally dominant dirtbag coastie culture, so I literally do not understand how it perpetuates itself. To explain myself, locally, behavior that is rewarded tends to be repeated and behavior that is punished tends to be suppressed, and simultaneously a highly effective way for a guy to make sure all females will never be in contact with any of his precious bodily fluids is to go all "make me a sandwich" on any other female. Even a false accusation is fairly effective at enforcing celibacy. So I'm fairly mystified why this problem perpetuates. Like are all men on the coasts 40 year old virgins or gay, so they don't care about lack of "fun time" with women, or perhaps the women on the coasts refuse to stand up for each other and this is the inevitable result, or maybe secretly most women really love that kind of treatment and its only a small vocal minority who complain (although I find this last theory unlikely)

The only real problem seems to be the lack of tech jobs in the midwest. Tech women, if you want to be treated with respect as human beings by professional gentlemen, move to where the gentlemen are if you want things to change. I'm off the market, but speaking for the local single gentlemen, I'm sure they'd greatly enjoy your presence here, unless you really secretly like how the brogrammers are treating you...

Re: To my daughter's high school programming teacher

#346

Post by hga »

nl wrote: post #215
dandrews wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heh, Louden's book? Still got it here somewhere. For an hour of nostalgic fun and an excuse to burn a Bass Ale while your wife watches DWTS, take a look at the 1130 emulator at http://ibm1130.org/sim

hga is female. (Actually I don't know hga's gender, but wow - I have never seen an example of gender stereotyping as explicit as that on HN, and in a discussion about sexism in programming too. I'm really hoping your comment was supposed to be ironic)

Harold Gerard Ancell is very much male, thank you.

I can't remember if there were any women in that high school class, but there were in the summer programs I took after it, and as far as I can remember they didn't get treated any differently than the men. Of course, back then, computers, especially serious ones, were scarce and getting lots of time on them wasn't trivial. I also wasn't the sort of person who would put up with harassment or bullying in my presence, nor were the instructors, but as I recall it was never a problem (all the local stuff was in the cultural South...).

Long before the zero-tolerance bullshit, so my entirely serious threats of disproportionate including sometimes lethal force were taken as "don't do that crazy thing" vs. I was the problem for objecting. E.g. after the incident that went the furthest, to my drawing live steel in college, a counselor did pull me aside to make sure I wasn't the type to do that except when needed to prevent a felony. I gather a very different time, no cell phones and therefore no helicopter parenting, unsupervised play outdoors with a very few rules, the high school rifle teams used .22LR firearms instead of air guns, etc. etc. etc.

This was all new, neat stuff and perhaps we were having too much fun exploring and learning it, and helping each other (I did a lot of the latter, including joining the college computer "club" for which that was our mission). There was no doubt serious self-selection, including it being long before to the "do this for lots of money" concept and the pathologies that brings. And it sure sounds like my college bound peers and I were a lot more polite that the sort of things I'm hearing from more recently (I don't think "make me a sandwich" was even in the lexicon, one source I just found dates it from nearly two decades later). It was certainly a while before serious pushback to feminism inevitably developed in the communities I was in, the ethos was "women are good", not yet "and men are bad".

Re: To my daughter's high school programming teacher

#347

Post by VLM »

jacalata wrote: post #160
bragh wrote: 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.

Whenever the topic of K12 .edu comes up, two loud and inherently conflicting arguments always percolate to the top:

1) Either we need to make school even less like the real world, by separating the sexes as per the above suggestion, or turning the school into the chronological opposite of a work release prison,

or

2) We need to make school more like the real world by banning unnatural things like homeschooling, because obviously no human beings work are home or own their own businesses and self direct themselves. Or no human beings carry a tiny swiss army knife on their keychain, so we need to ban that too, etc etc.

Re: To my daughter's high school programming teacher

#348

Post by madaxe »

lotsofcows wrote: post #343
madaxe wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... hello wilful misinterpreter? You don't fix a gas leak by buying a new sofa. I'm just saying that the thing being posed as an issue isn't the actual issue.

Your comment boils down to, "It was this way for me. Life's tough. Suck it up." How can a situation where a child enters a classroom full of enthusiasm and leaves a year (term?) later depressed not be an "actual issue"?

Either you have serious reading comprehension issues, or you make a habit of deliberately misconstruing others statements - or you're a troll, and I'm stupidly feeding you.

I am saying that it IS an issue, but that the issue is not one of gender discrimination, just one of kids, and humans, being dicks - and you can't combat it purely on gender lines as all you're doing is treating a symptom rather than the disease.

Re: To my daughter's high school programming teacher

#349

Post by jheriko »

this is depressing ... but i can't help but wonder if this analysis isn't sexist itself.

if the sexes were reversed i think it would be a case of saying "well son, women are just like that - you'll have to learn to live with it" and be on your way.

is that sexist?

i'm pretty sure there are natural and cultural tendendcies for men and women to behave certain ways. the behaviour described is not unique to programming, when there is one girl in a group or even school... its just people.

Re: To my daughter's high school programming teacher

#350

Post by hdctambien »

briandear wrote: post #287
sliverstorm wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's that, or nothing? It's not like high schools are rolling in money. Even if they could afford to hire an extra teacher just to teach programming, what programmer would want to teach for $20k when he can make (at least according to HN) $120k in the industry?

$20k? There is no full-time public school teacher making that. In Jersey City, teachers averaged in 2012 $67,412 with a contractually-limited 183 work days per year, that includes inservice/training days and excludes up to 8 personal days and additional sick days; with each day lasting a maximum of about 7 hours, including about a 40 minute lunch period. If a programmer gets 3 paid weeks of vacation per year, they wo…

My starting pay as a high school teacher was $30k. I lived in a one room apartment, didn't have cable, had a cheap used car and a $30 a month "dumb" cell phone. I didn't go to the bars or buy new fancy gadgets. And I still had 6 months before I had to start repaying my student loan.

Including grading papers and planning lessons I was putting in 10 hours a day.

Add I had a second job at the mall movie theater to make up the difference between by income and my bills, so I worked 8+ hours on Saturday and Sunday as well.

You know what I did on my school vacations and personal days? I worked extra hours at the movie theater (the extra money almost always went to fixing my broken used car)

I make more money now than I would have made teaching with 20 years experience and a PhD (which I would have had to pay for myself) and my job now is far less difficult that the easiest day of teaching. And I can pay my bills without working on the weekends.

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