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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

#371

Post by eddieroger »

hga wrote: post #96
yeukhon wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does he get through the course certification? Shouldn't he has to demonstrate he has the qualification to teach CS class? Is this a high school from a small town? I'd imagine in NYC this could mean firing the school's principal if New York Daily finds out.

My high school programming course, in 1977---IBM 1130 FORTRAN 'IV'---was taught by a coach . Who, without referring to notes, nor was it in the book, one day taught us 2s compliment representation on the blackboard (and boy was it useful to get a peek under the hood!). I suspect, like in the real world, programming ability still sometimes counts more than credentials. Pity that unlike my teacher he wasn't so good at…

My high school CS class was taught by the softball coach (who also taught AP Calc), so yeah, credentials aren't everything, even though he probably had them. The only gripe I had was that spring semester suffered since his passion was definitely softball, and not so much the math or programming. Somewhere deep in the back of my head are the remnants of C++ thanks to him.

Re: To my daughter's high school programming teacher

#372

Post by acjohnson55 »

brokenparser wrote: post #276
LnxPrgr3 wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 par…

Every time someone drops the "generational breakdown of ethics" idea, I can't help but think that we really can't have fallen that much ethically when we used to have legal slavery, legal disenfranchisment of the poor, and so forth. On the other hand, in a lot of ways we have found more subtle and palatable ways for groups to seek power over others.

In the end, I just think that over time, the "goodness" of human ethics has been more or less stationary. We've got wants and needs. We've got empathy. We've got conscious minds that seek rationalizable patterns of behavior that satisfy both of these things, but the end result isn't really a consistent normative ethical scheme. Even the most religious people (obviously) find ways to bend the spirit of the ethical schemes to their own benefit.

Re: To my daughter's high school programming teacher

#373

Post by sologoub »

CatMtKing wrote: post #249
sologoub wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the path to mediocrity and failure...

Yup. The world is full of mediocrity and failure, though :(.

Exactly, that's why personal decisions and attitudes matter. It's a lot easier to not do the right thing if no one expects you to.

Re: To my daughter's high school programming teacher

#374

Post by xauronx »

irahul wrote: post #337
Tloewald wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that if I were going to teach programming to high school kids I'd show them the console in Chrome / Safari, because it's something they all have easy access to (I assume we're talking about a first world country, right). VB seems to me to be a poor choice because it doesn't intersect with the kids' lives. They likely won't go home and build VB apps (on their Macs...) The console is like lifting the curtain an…

To each his own. I find web development(dynamic or just html/css) doesn't have the instant gratification something like VB has(it doesn't have to be VB). The main purpose of teaching programming to high-schoolers is to con them into learning it themselves. VB, despite its warts, was one of the most popular programming languages of its time. Excel and VB owe its popularity to the simple fact that they aren't hostile(o…

As someone who learned programming in VB, I agree with you. As a junior high kid I was able to make things from business calculators to arcade style games. Was my code great? NO. Was it hip and trendy? Back then... maybe, but no. Am I now a successful programmer "who knows better" with a degree/full time job/start up? Yes.

I'm not sure VB was a "make or break" factor in my education, but it certainly didn't help. Also, I'm trying to teach my girlfriend development and web development, it turns out, IS NOT a good place to start.

Re: To my daughter's high school programming teacher

#375

Post by kaitai »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #223
kaitai wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>is just funny Why is it that people misreading comments to call them out almost always come off as bigger asses than the people they're replying to?

The post I was responding to did refer to the sandwich comment as a "joke" and jokes are generally defined to be "funny." I would not consider the sandwich comment a joke, myself, since it doesn't fulfill the criteria I have for a joke, but apparently the poster I was responding to does consider it a joke (even if not one he likes, per se). Thus to the poster it does fulfill the criteria for a joke, whether good or not, and thus it is not inaccurate to rephrase those criteria, including funniness.

Re: To my daughter's high school programming teacher

#376

Post by kbart »

Common, seriously? Blaming teacher (and even tell him how he should do HIS work) just because other kid said something to your daughter? That's just hilarious and wrong in so many ways.. Kids are rude and cruel - always have been and will be - it has nothing to do with programming or teachers or schools. If you really want to make a difference, go to that school and teach them yourself (if you are such a talent, I'm sure school board will gladly accept). Then you can even choose the programming language to teach!

P.S. Haven't read such bullshit for a long time..

Re: To my daughter's high school programming teacher

#377

Post by X4 »

That's absolutely, absolutely, absolutely true!!!

When I was in the first semester I knew that we had lots of women in there 20 in 200. What I also knew was that some damn idiots, (who I'd punch up, if I knew) would cause them to quit. Honestly just 6-8 girls stayed, the other girls left CompSci to study something "better". Those who stayed stopped having contact with anyone in class. They told me that the people are weird, which is mostly true, but they also got treated badly and excluded from anything which would help to make them look stupid.

A year later or so, I wanted to redo a course from the first semester that I didn't pass back then. To my surprise there were even more girls and admittedly hotter ones, like a gf that I knew from before univerity and some of her gf's. However I tell you, all of them, with only a few exceptions left CompSci after the first semester again!

I still have a good relationship with them, but it annoys me that some idiots managed to make almost all girls leave this time. They had so much potential. If you ask me, that's nothing else, but pure mobbing. Hey don't think that only the students were at fault!! The Profs made such ugly and shocking jokes about women (and gays), that I wondered if they ever had sex with a women in their life...

Things like: If the last man on earth would be gay, it would still be better than a women, but also not be a (hu)man. (Only a handful people boo'ed, that's courage huh?)

Re: To my daughter's high school programming teacher

#378

Post by jayrox »

The start of this article started off very similar to my experiences with programming class, we also used vb6. Going into the course I already had several years of programming various languages including vb6 so I wasn't really learning anything new.

Just like her, I only took the class to make my parents happy and maybe, just maybe get something out of it. I didn't.

Just like her, when I finished my assignments I would go around and help struggling kids with their stuff. I wouldn't ever do their work for them, more like guide them into the right direction, helping them figure it out on their own but with a little nudge from me.

Just like her I was bullied, except I wasn't bullied by other students. I was bullied by our teacher, a female.

The teacher was the only female in our class. I would venture to say she was pretty intelligent. I mean she could write the day's lesson on the board in backwards cursive.

I nearly failed the class because she insisted I was cheating. There was no way I could know what I knew at that age. I had to prove to the principal that I wasn't cheating in order to get an entire semester of zero's reversed.

I'm pretty sure that was about the time I went from wanting to be a professional programmer when I grew up to never taking a paying programming job. Here I am, 30 years old, doing IT support instead of what I really enjoyed doing.

Re: To my daughter's high school programming teacher

#379

Post by kaitai »

serf wrote: post #167
kaitai wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

that's the most PC thing I've seen all week. and I mean that in the worst possible way.

It's just an easy algorithm for detecting trite arguments! Makes some of these discussion more amusing for those of us who get to hear 'em a lot, and Lord knows we need some amusement.

Re: To my daughter's high school programming teacher

#380

Post by derleth »

javert wrote: post #250
derleth wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, and that is not going to change unless we privatize education. Because poor people don't really need to learn how to read! Yeah, go back to the glory days of the Forties. The Eighteen-Forties.

Poor people not learning to read does not follow from having privatized education. If in 100 years the government provided clothing, and I advocated privatizing clothing, you'd say, "Becuase poor people don't need to wear clothes!" Where I'm from (in the US), many poor people _don't_ achieve a basically acceptable level of education, because the public schools don't ultimately serve them well for various reasons, and…

> Poor people not learning to read does not follow from having privatized education.

It has in the past. Which is my point.

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