3 ms·

If you're a good pedagogue, please help out. Teaching isn't easy, and the abundance of poor pedagogy is surely a big reason why so many people develop mathemat

• omginternets 11y ago
  >If you're a good pedagogue, please help out. I truly think I am, but I'm still struggling to learn Haskell... >the abundance of poor pedagogy is surely a big reason why so many people develop mathematical anxiety. I'm one of them, but 28 years later, I'm finally realizing that mathematics actually aren't that hard. >The programming world lately is inundated with tutorials that take their pedagogical style from the Teletubbies or at best Bob Ross. Maybe that is not a viable way of teaching Haskell. I think you hit the nail on the head, here, and I would like to hazard the following opinion: this is a deeply cultural problem in the United States, where we operate under the implicit belief that learning should be fun. I don't mean to suggest that learning isn't rewarding, deeply satisfying, and occasionally exhilarating, but beyond learning your ABCs, it's rarely fun in the traditional sense. The problem, as I see it, is that we're failing tell the truth: learning non-trivial things is tedious, grueling, difficult, and tooth-grindingly frustrating while still being one of the most worthwhile things in life. Instead, we try to teach difficult or non-obvious concepts with the pedagogical equivalent of coloring books. Stated differently, we simultaneously tell our youth that one has to "work hard" and "make sacrifices" for things like sports, while telling them that intellectual pursuits should be nothing less than blissfully entertaining. As a general rule, I avoid anything labeled as being "for beginners", unless it's from a foreign editor. I'm lucky to be a fluent speaker of French, and I've noticed that French textbooks systematically approach subject matters in a rigorous, Cartesian, matter-of-fact way ... and this from grade 1! You want to know how I finally grokked monads? I read this paper: http://repository.cmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2846&context=compsci http://repository.cmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2846&c... It sucked. I mean it was awful. I spent weeks pouring over this thing, fighting the kind of frustration I described above. And I got a D+ in undegraduate pre-calculus. I'm not a "math guy", but like everybody else, coloring books don't cut it after you start growing armpit hair. Big-boy concepts require big-boy methods.
  • mbrock 11y ago
    Agreed, and thanks, that looks like an interesting paper. In Gothenburg, Sweden, where I studied, Haskell is the first introductory language for students of CS and (I believe) CE. I know people who had barely even used a computer when they started there who are quite proficient with Haskell. A side benefit of that is that the dorks like me who had been coding Perl and C and whatever for years before were thrown back to "oh shit, I have to actually study" mode and thus equalized with the people who were starting from scratch. In terms of gender, when I started studying women were way less likely to have been coding since the age of 6. In the exam for a later course on Advanced Functional Programming that included monad transformers, functional embedded languages, the basics of dependently typed programming, and a semi-large Haskell programming project, I was happy to see a female classmate who hadn't programmed at all before university get the best score of anyone. But I digress... (Shoutout to Elin if you're reading!) I'm somewhat anxious that my way of talking about this stuff might make people think that Haskell is way more difficult to learn than other languages, which I don't think is the case. I think people probably forget how much trouble they had grokking concepts like "objects" and "superclasses" and "generators" and so on. Haskell might be difficult in some other ways. Maybe in some ways it forces you to really understand things more than other languages. But it's still very possible to learn to program in Haskell without being exceptionally good at math. Also, some of what people find tricky about Haskell is also present in other ML-style languages. I learned about O'Caml and some SML, and also Scheme, before I got into Haskell. So I knew about functional recursive styles of programming, and algebraic data types, and probably the biggest new things were lazy evaluation and the complete lack of side effects leading to the need for monadic sequencing. Those are not insurmountable. Edit: By the way, I also appreciate how Haskell is becoming a sort of grass roots study group for coders to learn more about math, algebra, category theory, and what have you. It is not at all constrained to the universities anymore. This article is at the top of HN right now! Interesting times.
    • jacquesm 11y ago
      I think you're on to something here. It may be that programming languages that require you to 'reboot' are better suited to people totally new to programming than to people that already know how to program using some other methodology. This is because compared to your old, well used and worn tools that new tool starts off as a set-back rather than an advantage and we more or less expect an instant productivity boost from new technology. That set-back then becomes a huge hurdle to overcome. The question a programmer faced with a problem to solve is always one of investment: should I invest my time and effort into this new technology that will make me x times more productive or simply a better programmer (or someone capable of tackling more complex problems) a year or more down the line, or should I break out my trusty tools and turn a buck today (or turn a buck for my employer). In most cases that equation works out in favor of the old tools so the energy required would need to be offset by concrete short term gains if a person is to switch from one tech to another. That lack of concrete short-term gains is the big stumbling block for old hands, and if you manage to hack that then I think a lot of these better technologies would find traction. People new to programming don't have that particular hang-up and I'd expect them to do much better with such new tool or different tools. (But they'd have the same problem if they needed to switch to other tools, it's just that in this particular instance they have a blank slate advantage, that evaporates the moment they become proficient in that technology.)
• jacquesm 11y ago
  The most dreaded words in math education: 'from which it is obvious that...'.
• marchdown 11y ago
  What are some examples of good pedagogy in programming? I would point to pretty much anything by Norvig, Knuth, Sedgewick, and maybe to Zed Shaw's agressive tutorials.