The Null Professor (2014)

Somewhat later in the post, the word can even be clicked upon. I honestly hoped that the link would explain the specifics in teaching methodology, but it was simply a link to the Wikipedia page about the term.

Good teachers use pedagogy. Bad teachers, which are 'Null Professors', don't use pedagogy. Simple. The author herself once didn't use pedagogy. Now she does. She understands now.

The article then turns to a question: "Why student's don't get it". This also is easily answered: educators should use "problem-driven and hands-on [methods] rather than abstraction-driven".

He said that no matter how good we will be, in CS half of our (high school) students will not learn much, if anything.

I was (and still am) absolutely shocked about this statement.

He claimed that this was a unique property of CS. If such a thing would happen in any other subject the teacher would be a total failure. But it would happen to him in CS, every college and every teacher in education he was ever responsible for.

This person is responsible for the education of teachers, engaged, probably very well thought and I have every reason to believe him to be a very good teacher. I'm don't know what I should think about this.

But The link at the end is really not helpful.

>At Harvey Mudd we’ve focused on changing four things about learning CS: make it fun, make it relevant, make it not scary and make it clear that lots of kinds of people have careers involving CS. We changed the context of the intro course to “creative problem-solving in science and engineering using computational approaches with Python” instead of “learn to program in Java” and made sure that the homework assignments were a lot of fun. We did not reduce the level of rigor or challenge, and we increased the amount of programming.

So, you made CS less like math. That good for some. But you completely ignore that math education does not suffer these problems. Why not making making it more like math? Well, in the end AFAIK neither works. At least for worse half of high school students.

I've taught both programming and guitar over the years, and in the end, those that endure the frustrations and loneliness of learning, because of whatever-inner-drive, have become successful, although it would seem that in this context, the word "successful" is perhaps fairly arbitrary, which also may be at issue here.

It really isn't much more complicated then that.

I just cannot see any shortcut in learning to play guitar besides actually playing an hour a day, with very sore fingertips and sounding like crap, for months, although, of course, my encouragement and beginner-level instruction in how to play "Seven Nation Army" and "Brain Stew" is, at some level, probably sort of helpful.

Same with learning Python/C/JS/etc.

I have always loved the term grok as a wonderful descriptor of gaining these type of skills and knowledge, as it captures the essence of the idea almost perfectly.

[edits]

A language is like an instrument, once you know one, learning the next will be much easier, because you already know about rhythm and harmonics. Each new instrument, even a new guitar, is a ear opener, as it forces one to play different, to learn fresh.

Same with programming languages. Learning a new language becomes trivial after the first dozen. But each new one widens the way one see code.