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A School With No Teachers, Where Students Teach Themselves

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Re: A School With No Teachers, Where Students Teach Themselves

#21

Post by mekoka »

I see some comments already heavily criticizing this school. A few things to note before taking those comments at face value.

- This is the school's website http://www.42.fr. If you can't read in french, but want to know more, I'd suggest to use some translation tool, or lookup other articles that talk about it.

- I also encourage you to lookup who is behind the project http://www.42.fr/lequipe-et-les-moyens/

- The very first class will be in November 2013. So the program hasn't even started yet. I don't know how some people can foresee failure this early.

- on this page, http://www.42.fr/notre-pedagogie-programme/ there's a testimony (I think) by Bruno Lévêque that roughly translates to A "project based" methodology that favors realism, learning by creating real applications useful in everyday life. That answers the question will they be doing only programming exercises for 15h a day?

It is unfortunate that this website would only be in french. If there was an english translation, I sense that some people would be a bit less cavalier about spewing unsubstantiated information.

Re: A School With No Teachers, Where Students Teach Themselves

#22

Post by yodsanklai »

I'm very skeptical about this. The idea is that computer science isn't properly taught in French old fashioned universities and "grandes ecoles". As a result, some students fail while they would succeed with a more pragmatic, project-based education.

It sounds like a good idea. After all, we all know stories of bright people or great hackers that felt academic education wasn't for them and followed a different, successful path. And after all, Xavier Niel should know, being a such a successful entrepreneur.

Well, I think he's wrong for several reasons.

1 - even though he says otherwise, conventionally CS is already taught largely with programming projects.

2 - this field has became so complex that IMHO it's increasingly difficult to escape some theoretical knowledge. And actually, 42 curriculum has plenty of it. It's not clear how it's gonna be taught, and I can't see how a student that failed to learn let say Automata theory, linear algebra and Fourier transforms at university would succeed just because he's now supposed to learn by himself.

3 - I think teaching with projects still requires a lot of preparation and supervision from the teachers, and last time I checked, 42 didn't have that kind of resources. For instance, you can't just ask 800 students to write a shell (and learn UNIX and C in the process) by leaving them on their own for a month. Of course, some will do it, but most won't. I doubt they manage to find 800 john carmack.

Re: A School With No Teachers, Where Students Teach Themselves

#23

Post by alanctgardner2 »

nawitus wrote: post #20
juliendorra wrote: post #12

There is more to it than this idealistic view: 42 is very excluding for women, succeeding in bringing in les than 7% women. Less than a classic computer engineering school in France apparently. So much for inclusiveness. (They managed that by only showing bearded old men on their website, bringing a frat-house culture from their experience in older schools, with "fun" bonding games like taping a student to the trees,…

>42 is very excluding for women, succeeding in bringing in les than 7% women. Having a small percentage of women doesn't indicate that they're excluding women.

Not necessarily, but they do have less women than the average French school, and the OP gave a bunch of serious reasons why this might be the case. They could try to eliminate those policies, and see if it increases female enrollment.

Re: A School With No Teachers, Where Students Teach Themselves

#24

Post by platz »

zarify wrote: post #16
j2d3 wrote: post #5

This is probably bound to catch on fast in the us where teachers and their unions are thought (by an unnerving possible majority) to be one of the primary factors in our ongoing economic problems.

Except this isn't really 'school', it's more of a technical college. Students are going to learn a specific skill. (I could be getting confused by how you folks in the US still call what we call university 'school' in which case disregard my comment :/)

Agree, the scope here is extremely limited

Re: A School With No Teachers, Where Students Teach Themselves

#25

Post by HarryRotha »

craighooghiem wrote: post #11
yeukhon wrote: post #2

I like the idea, but I hope the article would address my question whether or not there are mentors available for office hours. You can certainly learn by trials and errors, but to be honest you'd learn a lot more if there are professionals to help you. Second issue is programming 15 hours a day seems a lot. I can't even stare at my screen for more than 7-8 hours a day. That's a lot of work... I do like the idea, and…

I feel like there are so many other places to find mentors now that it's not necessary to have them at the school itself. As for the second issue, I stare at a computer screen for at least 12 hours a day - you have to be careful about it (backlighting, fl.ux, etc) but it's possible to do and can result in some incredibly productive days. That said, 15 hours is a long time.

Used to do 15 hour days.. then cubital tunnel :( Now I'm trying to recover and limiting myself to 4hrs.

Re: A School With No Teachers, Where Students Teach Themselves

#26

Post by belorn »

juliendorra wrote: post #12

There is more to it than this idealistic view: 42 is very excluding for women, succeeding in bringing in les than 7% women. Less than a classic computer engineering school in France apparently. So much for inclusiveness. (They managed that by only showing bearded old men on their website, bringing a frat-house culture from their experience in older schools, with "fun" bonding games like taping a student to the trees,…

> They managed that by only showing bearded old men on their website

No. I will just say no on the implied statement that schools and companies must drag any women, black, Asian, Hispanic and Latino person they got to create political correct photos for their websites. No.

I approve when school/companies/conferences do sincere outreach because they want to engage a wider audience. That does not mean that they must do so, or for ever be branded as "excluding".

> with "fun" bonding games like taping a student to the trees.

The bonding games is serious, but a) sources? b) frat-house culture is a US concept, while first week hazing rituals in university has nothing to do with "houses" c) almost every university school in EU used to do it, and has resulted in it being commonly outlawed in recent 10 years. Not sure what French law says on the matter.

Re: A School With No Teachers, Where Students Teach Themselves

#27

Post by gbog »

alanctgardner2 wrote: post #23
nawitus wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>42 is very excluding for women, succeeding in bringing in les than 7% women. Having a small percentage of women doesn't indicate that they're excluding women.

Not necessarily, but they do have less women than the average French school, and the OP gave a bunch of serious reasons why this might be the case. They could try to eliminate those policies, and see if it increases female enrollment.

What serious reasons? Some pictures with beards? You're kidding. From the article and the kind of philosophy behind, it seems clear to me that they just do not distinguish people race, background, gender even. When putting pics on the site they don't think "oh let's get some women and some black people for the balance" because they forbid themselves to think in these terms. That's the founding of French laicity and equality and public education. I think it's still the right way to do it. That's why all the IT is sexist meme is so flawed.

Re: A School With No Teachers, Where Students Teach Themselves

#28

Post by gbog »

juliendorra wrote: post #12

There is more to it than this idealistic view: 42 is very excluding for women, succeeding in bringing in les than 7% women. Less than a classic computer engineering school in France apparently. So much for inclusiveness. (They managed that by only showing bearded old men on their website, bringing a frat-house culture from their experience in older schools, with "fun" bonding games like taping a student to the trees,…

Why so unfairly critical? The founder has been successful in breaking monopolies and empowering p people.

Requiring the same exercise order is the proper way to compare students.

Entrepreneurial skills is an option in real developers life, as it is in this school, and rightly so.

Re: A School With No Teachers, Where Students Teach Themselves

#29

Post by yeukhon »

craighooghiem wrote: post #11
yeukhon wrote: post #2

I like the idea, but I hope the article would address my question whether or not there are mentors available for office hours. You can certainly learn by trials and errors, but to be honest you'd learn a lot more if there are professionals to help you. Second issue is programming 15 hours a day seems a lot. I can't even stare at my screen for more than 7-8 hours a day. That's a lot of work... I do like the idea, and…

I feel like there are so many other places to find mentors now that it's not necessary to have them at the school itself. As for the second issue, I stare at a computer screen for at least 12 hours a day - you have to be careful about it (backlighting, fl.ux, etc) but it's possible to do and can result in some incredibly productive days. That said, 15 hours is a long time.

Maybe. For general programming questions like how to loop two things at the same time or combining two lists into a dict, yeah. For particular open source project if you are lucky yeah you can get help from IRC (or fall back down to reading source code). But infrastructure, scaling, security, these are very specialized areas. You can get a general idea from stackoverflow or security exchange but implementation wise SO is not a good place to find inspiration.

In the past when I had to deal with puppet/chef I constantly had problems that the mailing list just couldn't help and the only way I could get help was to bring someone in and had them debug in real time with me.

Re: A School With No Teachers, Where Students Teach Themselves

#30

Post by yeukhon »

alanctgardner2 wrote: post #23
nawitus wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>42 is very excluding for women, succeeding in bringing in les than 7% women. Having a small percentage of women doesn't indicate that they're excluding women.

Not necessarily, but they do have less women than the average French school, and the OP gave a bunch of serious reasons why this might be the case. They could try to eliminate those policies, and see if it increases female enrollment.

You have to count how many women applied and how many were rejected. A fair policy is to have a balance percentage. For this number of male applicants, there must be this number of woman accepted.
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