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The Missing Computer Skills of High School Students

163 points by OberstKrueger 8y ago

esaym 8y ago
Why computer skills? What about math skills? English skills? Social skills? These have been taught for centuries, yet as of now I feel these three basic skills get less and less every year... With today's hyper parenting meme tainting everything, .... <insert something profound and intellectual here>
- roymurdock 8y ago
  check out the job market and how much entry-level grads who are good with computers can make: https://www.levels.fyi/SE/Google/Facebook/Microsoft/ https://www.levels.fyi/SE/Google/Facebook/Microsoft/
  - thrmsforbfast 8y ago
    Being "good with computers" does not fetch $200k. Knowing the difference between "file" and "directory" and being able to touch type won't get you a $200K engineering position at Google... Furthermore, if the goal is to generate as many $200K-comp-caliber engineers as possible, parent's point is the right one. A kid who shows up at college with the ability to write well and a bit of mathematical maturity has a much brighter future than a kid who is "good with computers" but struggles with basic math.
    - roymurdock 8y ago
      computer literacy is the first step down the rabbit hole of compsci, and as we offload more and more of our cognitive, memory, and computing load onto computers, i would argue it will only become more important than knowing your sohcatoa and how to take derivatives. it will come to replace some fundamental skills that kids are forced to learn today (and most never end up using) whereas almost everyone uses a computer today but very few know how a transistor works, how a website is served, what x86/Arm is, etc. learning the concept of variables, and learning basic language syntax is still obviously very important, but learning basic computer skills is a prerequisite for becoming interested in computers, the internet, and how digital technology works in the first place that can lead to the development of skills to land one of these jobs. focusing on math, maybe will get you there, focusing on english/history definitely will not, unless you go to an ivy league and transition into "data science". it's just the reality of the job market
      - empthought 8y ago
        “How” to take derivatives is not the education that people need. Why to take derivatives is much more important.
        thaumasiotes 8y ago
        There's a good market in how to take integrals. Taking derivatives is easy.
  - sdinsn 8y ago
    You can't get a job for being "good with computers" unless it's an IT support job. Software development is much, much more.
yardie 8y ago
I can agree with almost everything the OP states except the dig at tablets. My first PC in university didn’t use local storage. So I get cloud computing. At the end of the day it’s all just NFS storage and chrooted apps. You don’t need a PC or laptop for that.
Mistri 8y ago
I'm a senior in high school and some of this is relevant to me. I'm a self-taught programmer since the beginning of high-school (although I was pretty bad at the time, and still am), but after just a few weeks of playing around with arbitrary code, I was able to pick up the filesystem pretty easily. I took AP Computer Science last year and the basics of the filesystem were briefly taught in class, however not very in-depth and most of my classmates still don't understand it to this day. As for typing, I'm a touch typer and have been since around 5th grade. When we started using computers at school (a new phenomenon, I know) everyone had to be able to type fast. In first grade we also had to learn how to type in the "computer lab" and for homework on our home computers, which I'm very grateful for now. I can type at around ~119 WPM now.
- yardie 8y ago
  119WPM is really impressive. I'm in the low 80s on my best days now. I partly blame intellisense as typing and tabbing through the object or function you need was too compelling. In fact I just remembered a comment a graybeard made to me a long time ago. The kids were all on visual studio, using intellisense. My response was it was faster having the computer clean up the code rather than us trying to remember all the calls in all the objects in all the libraries.
- bvy 8y ago
  I think in spite of those computer classes in elementary school, 119 is still on the higher end. You'd still have a lot of kids typing sub 40-50.
  - Mistri 8y ago
    Yeah, definitely! Some of my friends are definitely on the slower side for typing.
- flogic 8y ago
  Touch typing is one of those things it's easy to underestimate the importance of. I've been using computers heavily since the late 80's. But, I've only learned to touch type in the past couple of years. I'm going to be kicking myself over that for years to come. Programming isn't particularly better with touch typing. However, it's done wonders for my ability to communicate with others. It's really a must have skill.
jcfrei 8y ago
Files, directories and paths are such a fundamental concept, yet I am surprised how few computer users are actually familiar with them. To me it seems that most computer classes at the high school level can be divided in two groups: One which is basically a class for typists, where you learn how to type fast and how to edit documents. And then another one which directly (and often exclusively) teaches coding. However what's often missing is a class which teaches basic computing concepts. Files and directories are just some of them. The basic von Neumann architecture (a CPU changing ram), what a program is, how the internet protocol and the domain name system work, different parts of a URL, how a frame buffer determines what is shown on the screen, how colors are encoded with RGB values, etc. These are all very interesting concepts that could be taught at the high school level. There's a lot to be learned even without going into the technical details and I am confident that these students would then find (desktop) computers much more accessible. Smartphones and their touch interfaces have been a runaway success and I think this is in part because most people never got comfortable with traditional desktop computers (and their GUIs) due to decades of misguided computer classes.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- munk-a 8y ago
  But files, directories and paths are just abstractions we use for convenience. There is no mechanical reasons computers should have a single inheritance structure for locating files except familiarity and files being what files are now isn't a necessity either, zip files have a whole collection of files inside of them. I think as time goes by we'll see which of the concepts of computing we grew up with end up being core to the usage of a computer and I'd be especially excited if we went in the direction of relational linkage of assets the computer has access to.
  - DC-3 8y ago
    > But files, directories and paths are just abstractions we use for convenience Abstractions common to literally every home computer operating system from the last several decades.
thrower123 8y ago
I don't think this was any different ten or fifteen years ago when I was in high school. We even had actual keyboarding classes and Mavis Beacon and everything, and I wasn't able to consistently touch type until about a year and a half into my first job as a software engineer. This was coincidentally about when I started using IBM-layout mechanical keyboards almost exclusively; I'm still regularly thrown for a loop when I switch to keyboards with other layouts, so I probably am still not actually touch typing properly, I just have built up enough muscle memory that I get by on the particular hardware I spend 8-12 hours a day hammering. As far as pathing goes, and specifically the use of the particular convention we have around . and .. meaning present directory and parent directory, I'm not sure I was even exposed to that until I took a C/Unix programming course in college and had to get used to navigating a Linux file system in a terminal. The first computer I ever had started out with some type of Curses-style DOS shell that abstracted most of the nitty gritty details, and from there went to Windows 95->98->XP->Vista->7. As a regular PC user on Windows, you don't deal with the command prompt, you deal with the file explorer and the save/open file dialogs. When I started programming in high school, it was QBasic, then VB6, then basic C++ with Visual C++ 6 and Bloodshed, then Java working out of an IDE (JCreator or Netbeans?), and again, pathing was not particularly emphasized. Building out student-level projects, I think I just dumped whatever files I needed in the cwd, or in paths under that tree, or popped open file picker GUIs. You really have to live and breathe this stuff day in and day out for a while to internalize it, and I wouldn't say I was really comfortable until maybe a year or so into being a "professional" programmer.
- matt_j 8y ago
  I finished high school in the late 90s and we learned to touch type on mechanical typewriters for 2 years. I'm not the fastest typist in the world, but it sure is a skill I've put to use every day of my life. Programming is a little different from typing prose, and intellisense helps if you're using an IDE that supports it, but even then, a few characters > tab > a few more characters > tab, it really helps to be able to hit those keys without looking. If there was one skill I wish I'd learned as a young 'un it's how to use a proper text editor. I was 32 before I used Vim for the first time. I'm getting better at it, slowly, but I wish I'd been exposed when I was younger to give that skill a good decade of exercise.
Aelius 8y ago
I am wary of making predictive generalizations, but I have been thinking about the effect of "just works" computers for roughly ten years. The robotics program in my highschool folded after I left, in part because no one was left who could write the programming. Watching my nephew grow up on iPads and iPhones: I learned how to use computers by breaking them, and then fixing them. iOS doesn't let you screw it up, and there are too many addicting games to suck up all his time anyway. I'm considering teaching him some things now and giving him a cheap laptop or rPi, but I doubt he'd choose to use that over the silly endless games on iOS, or the bottomless pit that is YouTube.
- dmoy 8y ago
  You can make the same argument about basically any technology that has gotten more reliable, cheaper, easier, etc over the years. Cars is a big one. Going back farther, textiles. We don't spend a staggeringly large percentage of our time making and/or repairing our own clothes anymore. For the most part, clothes "just works", and the average person doesn't have to worry about it.
  - peter_l_downs 8y ago
    Taking cars and textiles as an example, though, is pretty disheartening if you would like to see a future with a lot of computer programmers in it. Although taking the cynical view, as a young-ish programmer today it probably points to a world where your skills only get much more valuable over time, as there will be less competition from a younger cohort in the future...
  - Green_man 8y ago
    I'm not sure thats a perfect analogy. in both those cases, the big change has often been machine aided manufacturing (especially with textiles), combined with lots of engineering/materials science. engineering and materials science has definitely aided the speed and effectiveness of computer hardware design as well (and anecdotally, people seem to be buying phones and laptops less often, they last longer), but that isn't true of software- we need (or the market demands) more software engineers than ever, afaik. and, as far as i am aware, we are still a ways out from machine aided software design.
scotty79 8y ago
I code for more than two decades and I never learned to touch type. I tried for a bit but it didn't stick. I can't type in complete darkness but if I can see with the corner of my eye where the keyboard is I'm just hitting the keys. Touch typing for coding felt awkward because there's a lot of special symbols that are kind of hard and unintuitive to make if you try to touch same keys all the time. Also I wiggle in my chair quite a bit and believe it's essential for healthy sitting. I feel like touch typing could interfere with my wiggling. My style of typing is yet another factor why I get infuriated when I sit in front of a Macbook. For some reason Mac keyboard is about 3/4 of the key to the side of where I expect it to be (and literally every other keyboard is exactly where I expect).
- RandomTisk 8y ago
  I learned the symbols last, simply started adding a couple to every password and after a year or so, viola.
- solveit 8y ago
  Yeah, not too surprising given that typing speed is never the limiting factor for any programmer.
- _Donny 8y ago
  I am somewhat surprised how important fast typing seems to be for computer users, mainly developers. It is never the typing that is my personal bottleneck. As a developer, I spend perhaps 99% of my time thinking of the problem, before actually writing the best and most concise solution. When writing reports or other academic papers, I first construct the sentences before writing them slowly while reading out loud. I guess this is personal preference, but I think it is worth the time to type slowly, instead of letting the fingers do the thinking.
  - ryl00 8y ago
    I'm not surprised, given the power of the CLI and the composibility of tools like grep, awk, sed, find, etc. IDEs are great, but sometimes what you need to do just isn't already defined in a GUI checkbox or menu item...
skywhopper 8y ago
I'm not surprised at all about the pathing things. I doubt there's any cohort in the last forty years who commonly had knowledge of "." and "..", though. But the typing thing is disturbing to me. There's lots of hand-wringing over whether or not to make students learn cursive, but my daughter was expected to write timed essays on computers (in tiny web textareas, even!) without ever being given even basic typing instruction. She's a junior in high school now, but never once in all her years of being in classrooms with computers, doing computer labs, doing online standardized tests, and being required to submit papers in electronic format, has there been any opportunity, much less a requirement, to learn to type. Somehow, miraculously, she's a prolific writer (of fan fiction, original fiction, and humor articles for her school newspaper--along with multiple completions of NaNoWriMo, which she's gearing up for again this year), but she still types half by sight and almost all with her first two or three fingers. I realize this can work fine, but nothing helped my own computer usage more than being forced to muddle through a typing class in high school. I'm agog we don't invest in such a basic skill in our schools.
- rjbwork 8y ago
  He was specifically talking about kids interested in computers. I had knowledge of this things with my first IBM clone as a small child, maybe 3-5 years old. I knew how to insert my game discs, navigate between directories, list the contents, and execute commands I found there. It's not complicated if you use it for a while, but kids these days just aren't exposed much to real computers.
  - sevensor 8y ago
    It's not complicated if, like you and me, you have to learn it as a child if you want to get your games to start. Many a career in technology was launched by CONFIG.SYS.
- WoodenChair 8y ago
  It's strange to single out macOS when the vast majority of these issues (as stated in the original article) stem from users not using traditional personal computers at all anymore as primary computing devices (i.e. growing up on Android/iOS).
Axsuul 8y ago
The keyboard on mobile devices has the same layout as the computer's so shouldn't that translate somewhat to touch typing? At least they should have an advantage over those who never grew up with technology. High school students still talk to their friends via iMessage or Facebook Messenger so they have plenty of exposure to this interface.
- celeritascelery 8y ago
  But that is all thumb typing. Which is a very different notion then full hand typing.
  - mastazi 8y ago
    In addition, on mobile you have on-screen keyboards, so you can never practice touch-typing (which entails being able to type without looking at the keyboard).
    - u801e 8y ago
      Years ago, I purchased a HP touchpad which has an on screen keyboard (big enough to use the traditional home key hand position). I'm a proficient touch typist, but I was never able to successfully touch type on it. Tactile feedback is a must and isn't something that you can get with touch interfaces.
      - mastazi 8y ago
        Yes you are right, my definition of "touch typing" was incomplete because it didn't mention the tactile element. There have been some prototypes where the screen has a surface that can produce "bumps" in response to electrical impulse, which could lead to having on-screen keyboards with some sort of tactile feel[1], however this is not available on the consumer market just yet. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JelhR2iPuw0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JelhR2iPuw0
  - miccah 8y ago
    Very different indeed! I recently switched my phone's keyboard to Dvorak to learn the layout. Interestingly, my thumb typing speed has increased with no effect on my touch typing (using QWERTY). It's as if touch typing and thumb typing use different parts of the brain.
variable11 8y ago
Driving is a skill soon to be obsolete apart from specialists, yet schools and state governments go to extraordinary lengths to churn out millions of teenage drivers every year.
ux-app 8y ago
I'm a high school IT teacher, and can definitely relate to the lack of knowledge of the file system. It's particularly bad with students using a mac. We're now seeing a 50/50 split between win/mac and it seems that most kids are getting macs because that's the current fashion, but they really struggle with basic file ops. About 90% (no exaggeration) of mac students simply never discover the little down arrow that expands the file save dialog. This leads to students simply hitting save and having all their files dumped on the desktop. Then they minimize their app and move the recently saved file into another folder (usually also on desktop). Of course, in the case of a save as, this leads to a 'file deleted' message when they return to their program. Thus was a particular issue when I was teaching web dev and using vscode. I try to teach file management in context where it makes sense. Web dev is a good topic to focus on it. Creating a folder to hold a site, sub folders for css,js,imgs and then relative file paths in html and css. These concepts are a first for many middle schoolers. On the other hand kids are great at using virtual desktops on mac, whereas only maybe 2% of win users have discovered/use virtual desktops.
- YawningAngel 8y ago
  To be fair to them, the finder interface for files is absolutely fscking mad and lead to me using a terminal for all file management for more than a year because it was completely opaque to me how to get access to the "real" filesystem.
  - vkou 8y ago
    As primarily a Windows user, who grew up with an orthodox file manager[1], I am not a fan of either Finder, or Windows Explorer. Still using FAR in 2018 does tend to make me one of the odder ducks in a room. I very much prefer it to the *nix terminal. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far_Manager https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far_Manager
    - diablerouge 8y ago
      Note that Linux often has GNU Midnight Commander, a clone of Norton Commander (Far is also a clone of NC.) So, whenever you're in Linux and wishing you had Far, check out MC!
snazz 8y ago
> In the future, kids will be less and less exposed to keyboards, and productive computing in general. I'll go out on a limb here and say that this isn't a new thing at all. It's just that, in the past, fewer students had access to computers, and those who did generally understood them better. Now, it's not that the average high school student doesn't have access, but that the vast majority don't have any interest in how the machine works. It's the same percentage of the total who are interested and good at computing but it's just that a much lower percentage of the computer users are good computer users, in my experience. High school "computer science" classes in my area seem to teach "you always need to type public static void main(String[] args) for your program to work", as opposed to teaching students what that means. As with in the past, the students who are really good at computing do most of their learning outside of school.
- nextos 8y ago
  I think it's more of a neomania problem. New and shiny equals better. Now "IT" is thought to be good, and lecture rooms are getting "digitalized". Where digitalization means something horrible, using tablets and slides (which will encourage shallow thinking and distraction). That's at least the trend now in some elite schools I attended more than a decade ago. In contrast, when I went to a (pretty forward thinking) kindergarden in the late 80s, we were taught Logo. During early elementary school I vividly remember how recursion blew our minds. From any possible point of view, the same school had a much more avant-garde education 25 years ago. Now try to convince policy makers. Same applies to CS schools. I was lucky enough to be taught Prolog, Smalltalk and ML during freshman year. We emphasized concepts over technologies. Now it's the other way round.
- city41 8y ago
  > "you always need to type public static void main(String[] args) for your program to work", as opposed to teaching students what that means. I've always wondered how practical it is to truly teach that though. Programming is incredibly abstract, and the less abstract you make it the harder it is to learn. I feel like making that leap from "just write this to get it to work" and understanding what's really happening will always take individual initiative.
sfRattan 8y ago
I have a distinct memory of 8th grade typing class: once a week over the whole fall semester we practiced typing on these awful AlphaSmart devices. Made almost no progress in our words-per-minute. Then, over Christmas break, we all started using AIM to message each other. Spring semester began and our teacher was flummoxed... We had all jumped up by 20-30 words per minute from where we had been on the first day back in class.
- fma 8y ago
  Back in the 90's I had a computer...a 386. It had Windows 3.1 but still I used a lot of DOS. I also played BBS games where there's multiplayer chat...so I typed pretty fast. I was fastest type in the class in middle school, even better than the teacher in our computer class. A year or two later, everyone gets computers, AOL...AIM....and the classroom is now clickity clack, full of fast typers.
- maxaht 8y ago
  I had a similar experience as well- I attribute most (if not all) of my typing ability to an unhealthy Runescape habit in my younger years.
  - ebullientocelot 8y ago
    Typing "333333 to buy a R2H!" repeatedly led to my initial discovery of copy/paste in my younger days. +1 for nostalgic smiles.
    - Cthulhu_ 8y ago
      A friend of mine used a macro tool to automate things like mining, another thing you don't really learn in school.
- bcaa7f3a8bbc 8y ago
  Completely agree. Touch-typing in standard finger position is ABSOLUTELY NOT REQUIRED to be a successful computer technician unless you are doing office document processing. As long as you can type in a reasonable speed so it doesn't become a significant bottleneck of your human-machine interface, it is okay. It's good to have this skill to become a more efficient computer operator, but it is optional in many cases. I can type at 50 WPM minimum by just pecking two fingers on the keyboard, and even faster when I use more fingers. I barely need to look down at the keyboard, I only do it to readjust my hand position, but most of the time, I can do this by using the text I just mistyped on the screen as my negative feedback. Many people I know who are not touch-typers, have also naturally acquired a similar "just works" way of typing - you don't need to actually study it, if you use computers day-by-day, you have probably obtained it. In the same way, when the cool kids in the 2000s were using SMS to text all the days, they learned to type at an unbelievable speed on the 3x3 numpad phone keyboard. On the other hand, if one is struggling to type words and commands on the keyboard to operate the commandline, it doesn't mean one is merely an inefficient typer, but often indicates a larger problem: A LACK OF GENERAL EXPERIENCE ON USING COMPUTERS, and this is the real problem, as general-purpose computers are becoming less and less common and many people of the young generation do not share your experience, which was how the older generation learned to type.
Adaptive 8y ago
I work at a girls middle school and taught a class called "technology literacy" last year to 6th graders. I covered what I felt were basics: * Basic communications tools (email) * Word processing/Spreadsheets/Presentation software via g suite * Basic command line usage including bash basics, paths, file creation and edition, sshing * Basic HTML and "how the internet works" (also with CLI editing of html files in user directories) * touch typing (typingclub.com) These girls as seventh graders are coding in Python and nailing it.
- Adaptive 8y ago
  I should also mention that their "downtime" activity was CLI text adventures. I recommend using these to teach basic "verb object" CLI usage.
  - stevenjohns 8y ago
    If you'd be willing to publish it, the study guide/course outline/lesson plans for this would be really interesting -- especially as its getting results.
  - poormansevo 8y ago
    This sounds impressive. I too would be interested in seeing the teaching materials you are using for your curriculum. As a father of two girls, aged two and five, I enjoy reading about girls getting exposed early to programming. I plan to start introducing my oldest soon once she progresses her reading skills more.
- pnloyd 8y ago
  Pretty impressive, don't know if I'd consider ssh a basic computer skills though.. the rest seems rather practical.
  - Waterluvian 8y ago
    I think if ssh is really just "time with a command line" then it's a super valuable exercise. You can remember none of it and still go away with the lesson that the CSI looking thing really ain't that complicated.
walrus01 8y ago
The increasing use of walled garden things like iOS which abstract the file system away from the end user, making it impossible to know what the system's actual directory structure looks like, certainly doesn't help. "where is your data?" "uhhh, it's in the app, or in the cloud" "yes, but specifically where?" "i dunno" The comment here nails it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18350671 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18350671 Children and teenagers these days spend a lot of time using passive media consumption devices. An iPad is great if you're watching youtube or netflix passively, not so great at all if you want to create your own content, edit it, manipulate it, back it up, transfer it places, etc. Touchscreen devices and phones are great for browsing web pages. It's a media portal with a walled garden app store, not a real computer, though its hardware may be capable of more than its operating system allows it to do. This comment could easily devolve into a "get off my lawn" rant, but I seriously believe that people who learned how to use x86 type computers from a command line first are much more capable of understanding what's going on underneath a GUI. If you spent time mucking about with config.sys and autoexec.bat settings in MS-DOS 3.3 and 5.0, a long time before you saw a Windows GUI, you could immediately grok what was going on when you did install Windows. I am not a big fan of Arch Linux, but in the modern era there's a lot of value to getting people to learn what is going on when they do a brand new Arch install on an empty disk. What's happening with fdisk, partitioning, formatting, grub2/bootloader, etc. And why it's happening. If you don't want to go that far in an educational environment, start people from a debian stretch barebones install with CLI only + sshd.
- ryandrake 8y ago
  > "where is your data?" > "uhhh, it's in the app, or in the cloud" > "yes, but specifically where?" > "i dunno" We can keep going: “It’s in /home/walrus01/docs” “But specifically where? What physical drive?” “It’s on /dev/sda2” “What cylinder/track/sector?” At some point it stops mattering practically. The abstractions presented to users today are often such that it doesn’t matter if the user knows what path something is stored in.
  - brokenmachine 8y ago
    It will matter when that data goes missing or the abstraction stops working for whatever reason. From what I've seen, people who don't understand or aren't interested to learn about computers will only learn precisely one method to achieve exactly what they are trying to do. Not knowing how it works is a very fragile way of doing things and could fall over at any minute, and that's bound to be the worst possible minute, and in the worst possible way.
Sophistifunk 8y ago
Unpopular opinion: Relative paths (paths in general, really) are a terrible thing, and it's excellent that people are able to get by without that knowledge.
- zaphar 8y ago
  I don't think we'll ever get away from hierarchies as a useful organizational strategy as a species. Paths are a useful way to encode those hierarchies. They are concise and easy to read. Most of the replacements for paths try to pretend that there is no hierarchy or force people to not use a hierarchy. Personally I find the hierarchy to be a very useful tool and paths on a file system to be a useful way of representing them.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    There is always a hierarchy. Trying to pretend there isn't one is just stupid, because hierarchy as a concept is as fundamental to how our minds work as it could be. If a platform tries to hide the natural hierarchy, users will still build their own out of clues given by the UI, and the result can be unnecessarily confusing.
    - dragonwriter 8y ago
      > hierarchy as a concept is as fundamental to how our minds work as it could be. Whether it's fundamental or a product of socialization, ISTR there is a substantial empirical difference to the degree to which heirarchy is used to model the world between men and women, so if that is true at all it may be true only for certain values of “our”.
      - TeMPOraL 8y ago
        Hierarchy is created when you start considering whether or not a thing is a part of some other thing. Sexual reproduction forms trees. Causality forms trees along time axis. I think the concept it's pretty fundamental, even if some specific connotations are learned through socialization.
deleted 8y ago
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catchmeifyoucan 8y ago
Agreed. New schools give ipads to students in lieu of laptops. I think typing is very important, and schools should continue teaching typing as a skill.
paavoova 8y ago
Fundamentally, abstraction fosters illiteracy. You have an entire generation or two of people who grew or are growing up solely on touch devices, and many of these devices expose no native filesystem (e.g. iOS) to its users. And as the article says, these devices are used largely for consumption (media, social extensions), all by design. You now have to go out of your way to learn even the basic, trivial fundamentals, but kids handed a smartphone at age 9 may very well have no desire to do so. Of course, and to use an analogy, not everyone has the time or motivation nor even reason to become an auto mechanic. But something like transportation has always been a means to an end. The difference with consumer technology now is that nearly everyone fancies themselves a "tech" enthusiast in one form or another thanks to proximity and thus familiarity. But at the same time, many (perhaps most) remain underexposed to the very technology they use as a lifeline. There's a pervasive "just works" mentality that has influenced everything, partially spearheaded by tech companies like Apple circa Steve Jobs. This wouldn't be so bad, if it weren't for people spending so many hours of their own spare time using technology, but simultaneously learning nothing. The equivalent time spend in a traditional computing environment would teach the fundamentals whether one is interested or not, simply through exposure. But there's little such exposure in modern personal computing.
thewizardofaus 8y ago
Really interesting that touch typing is a skill lacking! Maybe it was growing up on age of empires that improved my typing. At age 8 I typed 32wpm At age 12 I typed 120wpm Typing speed never really improved beyond that, occasionally hit bursts of 140+wpm but eh. Regular qwerty non mechanical keyboard.
- moduspol 8y ago
  > Maybe it was growing up on age of empires that improved my typing. I'm definitely the fastest in the office at typing PEPPERONI PIZZA dozens of times in a row.
andrewclunn 8y ago
So less time on touch devices or with a mouse. More time navigating and typing using a keyboard.
justifier 8y ago
i advocate for computer education being complementarily folded into the current math curriculum i have interest in changing the math curriculum as well, but for people who like the current math curriculum I think there are enormous benefits of teaching computer skills.. science.. through implementation
jtnews 8y ago
"Instead it’s rote learning some particular IDE without real understanding." The reason for this is that very few of the people doing the teaching of computing concepts in high school understand themselves and all they can do is follow the script in the textbook. Teaching degrees focus more on the concept of teaching than the content of teaching. I have first hand seen teachers with years of experience "teaching Word" get lost and come to a full stop the second something doesn't line up exactly with the book. Using a computer does not translate into understanding a computer. I know very intelligent teachers, some with advanced degrees (Master's and Doctorate's), that have trouble navigating to a website that doesn't start with www and are unable to distinguish between a url and an email address. All of the letters and symbols (real strange ones like :, /, ., or @) might as well be part of a magical incantation that teleports words, pictures, and videos to their screens.
vezycash 8y ago
Not understanding paths isn't alarming they just haven't had a need for it yet. Teach em how to copy, delete, move, rename stuff via CMD and they'll get it fast! Make them use cmd exclusively for playing music, opening games, deleting stuff... And the concept of Path, directory and files will simply click. Besides they'll have something cool to show off to their friends If I only use explorer, I don't need to know . and .. However, if I do lots of file operations via CMD, then I'll get tired of using cd\ all the time when I only want to go up one level.
_ph_ 8y ago
Touch typing is one of the most underappreciated skills for tech workers. Few of my colleagues are true touch typists. So yes, you can survive without touch typing. But it is one of those skills, where a few weeks up to months of thorough practise early one give you a life-long benefit, as you save valuable work time and screen attention with every single word you type. As a touch typist you can not only type faster, but also can concentrate more on what you are typing as your attention never leaves the screen and the typing itself doesn't require any concious typing effort any more.
hrshlb 8y ago
typing.com is a great place to learn touch typing. I reached ~35wpm in less than 3 weeks.
codemusings 8y ago
I think what's worth noting is that users in general are less and less exposed to the concept of files and directories. Let's face it. The computer most students use are their smartphones. Everything is sandboxed. You never ever select a file path. It's more about context than location.
systematical 8y ago
Are you telling me kids don't click around the C drive anymore and all those "weird" folders in Windows just to see whats there? That's probably one of the first things I did when I got a computer (Windows 95), including deleting random files just to see what happened.
- 0x445442 8y ago
  I think it has a lot to do with how phone and tablet OS's (iOS and Android) deliberately try to hide the notion of paths or even files for that matter.
  - trey-jones 8y ago
    Windows has been doing the same since Windows 7 with the "Libraries" concept (Documents, Pictures, etc. instead of paths). Never liked it. Where's my stuff?!
    - 0x445442 8y ago
      Exactly, when I plug my phone into the computer I want it to show up as another drive so I can just drag my mp3s over to the music directory. It's sort of works that way with Android but the directory where your music lives on your phone is buried deep. It's one of the reasons I still use a Blackberry :)
- Jackim 8y ago
  Kids barely use computers these days. Schools buy tablets (iPads/Android) and Chromebooks. Neither encourage computer literacy. At home they have phones and iPads for the most part.
  - systematical 8y ago
    You're right, hadn't thought of it that way. Never thought I'd be the old guy who prefers a "big clunky" laptop.
- MarcScott 8y ago
MayeulC 8y ago
This is true in my experience. Even a (materials science) PhD student I'm working with told me he is so "bad with computers" that when someone asked him to open a specific directory, he answered "what is a directory?". I can only imagine it being much worse for the general population, and this makes me wish I could teach in high schools, even if just a bit. Unfortunately, part-time teachers, or teachers that just come for the odd conference/course on a specific topic seem to mostly be a uni thing, at least where I live. I was just thinking about this the other day: kids should probably get more exposure to cryptography, maybe even before high school, for the following reasons: - kids love secret messages - crypto math is quite basic algebra - even without the maths, asymmetric crypto and hashes are quite easy to grasp - maybe it will allow them to better understand security as adults I would love to see a future where public/private keys can be used as a general authentication mean, without it needing to be too dumbed down, as we can expect people to know the basics. It would also likely lower phishing issues. I agree that schools are to blame here, even when they try to broaden the scope of their teachings. But I would give teachers some slack, as they were likely not prepared at all on some topics. So, maybe the solution here is indeed to ask parents to come and teach students some bits of their speciality? It could be done in multiple domains, and I feel like this would be a lot better for kids to be able to relate and project the content their are taught onto a person's job.
- gibsons77 8y ago
  These guys are working on a solution to general authentication for the web https://universallogin.io/ https://universallogin.io/
- MarcScott 8y ago
  > and this makes me wish I could teach in high schools, even if just a bit Reach out to a local school and set up a https://www.codeclub.org.uk/ https://www.codeclub.org.uk/
- Balgair 8y ago
  > I was just thinking about this the other day: kids should probably get more exposure to cryptography, maybe even before high school > So, maybe the solution here is indeed to ask parents to come and teach students some bits of their speciality? My SO taught HS Math for 2 years in the US. One in a VERY low income school, one in a 100% college acceptance rate school. Via what we talked about over dinners at night, I learned that what kids need is food and guardians that aren't abusive/neglectful. Honestly, ~30% of her students, from either school, would not eat at all over the weekend. No, not that they would eat Cheetos or drink Coke. They plain-jane went hungry. Long weekends were not a source of excitement for them. Their folks either didn't have the money or just didn't care. The 100% college acceptance rate school fed the kids breakfast and lunch each day, for free. That was likely the largest single contributor to the success of the school (unproven, granted). So, if you are US based and want to help out with these issues, PLEASE DO! A lot of kids really do need very simple things like food or pencils. It's amazing how smart kids are if you just give them a sandwich and a pen to work with. They just amaze you. Boys and Girls clubs are a great starting place: https://www.bgca.org/ https://www.bgca.org/ Google your local after school organizations and volunteer Become engaged in your school boards and PTA. They need guidance and citizen participation.
jccalhoun 8y ago
I teach college and the problem is much more fundamental than that. Certainly I have tech literate students but I can't tell you how often I see students struggle to just log onto their email when they try to pull up a class presentation. The old cliche is searching for google is not only alive and well but now it is search for google, go to google, then search for youtube, then search for the video you want to show. Even when they actually have the url for a video, in the last several years since I have started paying attention I don't think I have ever seen a student use the "paste and go" option in the right click menu. They ALWAY paste it in then hit enter. Paste and go is right under paste! When I post a link to a survey or something I want them to go to I have stopped just copying and pasting the url. I now have to paste it in and make sure to delete http://www http://www because nearly all of them will type it in and a large percentage will do it wrong. showing them ctrl+f to find something on a page blows their mind. I have started teaching some sections of public speaking online and I was driven crazy by the complete tech illiteracy of some of the "digital natives." (pro tip: emailing and saying "it doesn't work" is not useful.) I try to keep the xkcd comic about being excited when I get to show someone something new but it is hard.
- brokenmachine 8y ago
  > Even when they actually have the url for a video, in the last several years since I have started paying attention I don't think I have ever seen a student use the "paste and go" option in the right click menu. They ALWAY paste it in then hit enter. Paste and go is right under paste! I usually go Ctrl-L to focus the location bar, then Ctrl-V to paste, then enter. Is there a keyboard shortcut for "Paste and go?" I agree - I'm not sure these "digital natives" are all they're cracked up to be. Of course there are exceptions.
maceurt 8y ago
The touch typing part is not true, at least from my experience. Almost every kid I know in my school can type at least 30wpm touch typing. In fact, we had 2 required typing classes in middle school that both were a semester long. This is not even a rich private school thing either this is a public high school that is composed of mostly kids from lower income families.
trey-jones 8y ago
I mostly speak from my own experience growing up (90s). Briefly, this was Apple II in middle school learning BASIC for 6 weeks, Windows 95 in High School, XP in college (Liberal Arts). I didn't start writing code until I was about 25, and was 28 when I started in tech. I can understand that it's possible kids don't know about paths, since most modern operating systems abstract this from the users, but I wonder if it has as much or more to do with never having been exposed to Linux. That was certainly my situation. One of the first pieces of advice I read when I started teaching myself to write code was "So you want to be a hacker? Ditch Windows and use Linux full time." I realize there are lots of good Windows programmers out there - not trying to bash anyone - but for the programmer on a budget I think this is the correct path. I will also admit that I haven't used a Linux GUI in many years and I suspect that one could get by without understanding paths using a recent version of Ubuntu. One of the reasons I suspect this is that I have had my parents using Ubuntu since 2011 or so. Nevertheless, many basic linux concepts were foreign to me when I started using it. Ever since, I've definitely thought Linux computers in schools rather than Windows would be a good idea. Linux computers without a GUI at all might be even better (at least for teaching computer classes), but I guess you might have difficulty holding their attention.
- bischofs 8y ago
  I would have been so much better off in my CS degree if I would have walked into computer lab in high school and there was just a terminal with a blinking cursor. It took me far too long to clear all the nonsense and finally get to that stage where I felt close to the operating system
vinceguidry 8y ago
His main complaint seems to be that he couldn't teach kids how to interact with a file system. I don't think the concept of a file system is an easy one to grasp. And it's not something we should be expecting schools to teach. I once had the privilege of doing the converse, teaching an 80 year old woman the same concepts. I had exactly the same problems he described. These things are not simple nor intuitive, nor are they really needed for basic usage of a computer. I taught them to her because that was what my formative years using computers was like, and because that is how you understand what's going on under the hood. But I had to quickly roll back my ambitions to non-CLI interfaces because she just didn't have the same kind of time I had when I was 13 to just spend hours and hours figuring it all out. It's not necessary to learn how to touch type, and it's not necessary to learn the file system concepts used by the userland. You can do amazing work with a computer without that knowledge. Pedagogy doesn't just involve knowing how to teach, but also in knowing what needs to be taught. You don't need to dive into the intimate details of radiocarbon dating to get kids excited about dinosaurs.
japhyr 8y ago
> I lay most of the blame on the schools. I'm a high school teacher, and I've been in this world for a long time. I'm surprised no one has mentioned the issue of pay yet. The median pay for teachers in the US is around $50k. Starting salaries are under $40k. Max pay is around $70-$90k, but it takes 10-15 years to get there, and in many states the max pay isn't this high. If you're a good high school CS teacher, you can basically walk out the door and get a job that will double your salary. How many of you have been in a field where your pay absolutely does not depend on the quality of your work? I am leaving the classroom after this year, to focus more on technical work. It feels entirely different to be heading into work where the better my performance is, the more I'll get paid. I've been teaching for 24 years, so I'm not leaving just for pay reasons. But I don't think we can look at solutions to better HS CS education without addressing the issue of teacher pay. If I were graduating college today with the skills I had 20 years ago, I'm not sure I'd go into the classroom.
- rhexs 8y ago
  Do a majority of public high school teachers still enjoy pensions, three month breaks a year, and legendary job security, or is that going away as well?
  - japhyr 8y ago
    - Pensions are going away as states find they're unsustainable. My state (Alaska) has moved into a defined-contribution model, which I believe is like most jobs that offer any retirement benefits. - Yes, 2-3 month breaks are pretty sweet. - "Legendary job security." I believe this is going away. I have tenure, and my district still offers it. That's a good thing, I believe, because it allows good teachers to stand up for good educational practices. I am definitely able to support students and new teachers better because I am not in fear of losing my job. I know some states have moved away from tenure; I'm not sure how many. Are these enough to keep good CS teachers in education? I don't think so. If you're a good software developer, I believe you can manage a career where you take some time between jobs. You can build toward a much earlier retirement than you can as a teacher. You can live a wealthier lifestyle along the way. Neither career is a rosy field of happiness. But my point is that if you're a good high school CS teacher, you can probably find a much more appealing work situation outside of education. If we want good CS teachers available for high school students, we should probably look at this pretty carefully.
bitwize 8y ago
As it turns out, understanding hierarchical directories is really, really hard for most people, which is why iOS eschews them entirely, at least as far as the UI is concerned. According to Jaron Lanier, the concept of a "file" is an accidental one in the history of computing, not an essential one. If we want computing to truly be available to the masses, maybe it's time we leave things like files and folders behind, and not allow the dead weight of the past to hold us back now.
epberry 8y ago
File systems suck anyway. They’re useful for programmers and software but pretty awful for people organizing data. My exclusive approach for finding things these days is Spotlight on Mac or google drive search. Drive search is so good that it’s not even necessary to name documents correctly or put the right content in them. Sometimes it seems like the search is context aware and you can type ideas into the search bar and get a list of documents that might be relevant to them. I think of my document memory more as a hashmap than a tree and typing in part of the file and going straight to it is extremely satisfying.

163 points by OberstKrueger 8y ago

Why computer skills? What about math skills? English skills? Social skills? These have been taught for centuries, yet as of now I feel these three basic skills get less and less every year... With today's hyper parenting meme tainting everything, .... <insert something profound and intellectual here>

roymurdock 8y ago
check out the job market and how much entry-level grads who are good with computers can make: https://www.levels.fyi/SE/Google/Facebook/Microsoft/ https://www.levels.fyi/SE/Google/Facebook/Microsoft/
- thrmsforbfast 8y ago
  Being "good with computers" does not fetch $200k. Knowing the difference between "file" and "directory" and being able to touch type won't get you a $200K engineering position at Google... Furthermore, if the goal is to generate as many $200K-comp-caliber engineers as possible, parent's point is the right one. A kid who shows up at college with the ability to write well and a bit of mathematical maturity has a much brighter future than a kid who is "good with computers" but struggles with basic math.
  - roymurdock 8y ago
    computer literacy is the first step down the rabbit hole of compsci, and as we offload more and more of our cognitive, memory, and computing load onto computers, i would argue it will only become more important than knowing your sohcatoa and how to take derivatives. it will come to replace some fundamental skills that kids are forced to learn today (and most never end up using) whereas almost everyone uses a computer today but very few know how a transistor works, how a website is served, what x86/Arm is, etc. learning the concept of variables, and learning basic language syntax is still obviously very important, but learning basic computer skills is a prerequisite for becoming interested in computers, the internet, and how digital technology works in the first place that can lead to the development of skills to land one of these jobs. focusing on math, maybe will get you there, focusing on english/history definitely will not, unless you go to an ivy league and transition into "data science". it's just the reality of the job market
    - empthought 8y ago
      “How” to take derivatives is not the education that people need. Why to take derivatives is much more important.
      - thaumasiotes 8y ago
        There's a good market in how to take integrals. Taking derivatives is easy.
- sdinsn 8y ago
  You can't get a job for being "good with computers" unless it's an IT support job. Software development is much, much more.

yardie 8y ago

I can agree with almost everything the OP states except the dig at tablets. My first PC in university didn’t use local storage. So I get cloud computing. At the end of the day it’s all just NFS storage and chrooted apps. You don’t need a PC or laptop for that.

Mistri 8y ago

I'm a senior in high school and some of this is relevant to me. I'm a self-taught programmer since the beginning of high-school (although I was pretty bad at the time, and still am), but after just a few weeks of playing around with arbitrary code, I was able to pick up the filesystem pretty easily. I took AP Computer Science last year and the basics of the filesystem were briefly taught in class, however not very in-depth and most of my classmates still don't understand it to this day. As for typing, I'm a touch typer and have been since around 5th grade. When we started using computers at school (a new phenomenon, I know) everyone had to be able to type fast. In first grade we also had to learn how to type in the "computer lab" and for homework on our home computers, which I'm very grateful for now. I can type at around ~119 WPM now.

yardie 8y ago
119WPM is really impressive. I'm in the low 80s on my best days now. I partly blame intellisense as typing and tabbing through the object or function you need was too compelling. In fact I just remembered a comment a graybeard made to me a long time ago. The kids were all on visual studio, using intellisense. My response was it was faster having the computer clean up the code rather than us trying to remember all the calls in all the objects in all the libraries.
bvy 8y ago
I think in spite of those computer classes in elementary school, 119 is still on the higher end. You'd still have a lot of kids typing sub 40-50.
- Mistri 8y ago
  Yeah, definitely! Some of my friends are definitely on the slower side for typing.
flogic 8y ago
Touch typing is one of those things it's easy to underestimate the importance of. I've been using computers heavily since the late 80's. But, I've only learned to touch type in the past couple of years. I'm going to be kicking myself over that for years to come. Programming isn't particularly better with touch typing. However, it's done wonders for my ability to communicate with others. It's really a must have skill.

jcfrei 8y ago

Files, directories and paths are such a fundamental concept, yet I am surprised how few computer users are actually familiar with them. To me it seems that most computer classes at the high school level can be divided in two groups: One which is basically a class for typists, where you learn how to type fast and how to edit documents. And then another one which directly (and often exclusively) teaches coding. However what's often missing is a class which teaches basic computing concepts. Files and directories are just some of them. The basic von Neumann architecture (a CPU changing ram), what a program is, how the internet protocol and the domain name system work, different parts of a URL, how a frame buffer determines what is shown on the screen, how colors are encoded with RGB values, etc. These are all very interesting concepts that could be taught at the high school level. There's a lot to be learned even without going into the technical details and I am confident that these students would then find (desktop) computers much more accessible. Smartphones and their touch interfaces have been a runaway success and I think this is in part because most people never got comfortable with traditional desktop computers (and their GUIs) due to decades of misguided computer classes.

deleted 8y ago
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munk-a 8y ago
But files, directories and paths are just abstractions we use for convenience. There is no mechanical reasons computers should have a single inheritance structure for locating files except familiarity and files being what files are now isn't a necessity either, zip files have a whole collection of files inside of them. I think as time goes by we'll see which of the concepts of computing we grew up with end up being core to the usage of a computer and I'd be especially excited if we went in the direction of relational linkage of assets the computer has access to.
- DC-3 8y ago
  > But files, directories and paths are just abstractions we use for convenience Abstractions common to literally every home computer operating system from the last several decades.

thrower123 8y ago

I don't think this was any different ten or fifteen years ago when I was in high school. We even had actual keyboarding classes and Mavis Beacon and everything, and I wasn't able to consistently touch type until about a year and a half into my first job as a software engineer. This was coincidentally about when I started using IBM-layout mechanical keyboards almost exclusively; I'm still regularly thrown for a loop when I switch to keyboards with other layouts, so I probably am still not actually touch typing properly, I just have built up enough muscle memory that I get by on the particular hardware I spend 8-12 hours a day hammering. As far as pathing goes, and specifically the use of the particular convention we have around . and .. meaning present directory and parent directory, I'm not sure I was even exposed to that until I took a C/Unix programming course in college and had to get used to navigating a Linux file system in a terminal. The first computer I ever had started out with some type of Curses-style DOS shell that abstracted most of the nitty gritty details, and from there went to Windows 95->98->XP->Vista->7. As a regular PC user on Windows, you don't deal with the command prompt, you deal with the file explorer and the save/open file dialogs. When I started programming in high school, it was QBasic, then VB6, then basic C++ with Visual C++ 6 and Bloodshed, then Java working out of an IDE (JCreator or Netbeans?), and again, pathing was not particularly emphasized. Building out student-level projects, I think I just dumped whatever files I needed in the cwd, or in paths under that tree, or popped open file picker GUIs. You really have to live and breathe this stuff day in and day out for a while to internalize it, and I wouldn't say I was really comfortable until maybe a year or so into being a "professional" programmer.

matt_j 8y ago
I finished high school in the late 90s and we learned to touch type on mechanical typewriters for 2 years. I'm not the fastest typist in the world, but it sure is a skill I've put to use every day of my life. Programming is a little different from typing prose, and intellisense helps if you're using an IDE that supports it, but even then, a few characters > tab > a few more characters > tab, it really helps to be able to hit those keys without looking. If there was one skill I wish I'd learned as a young 'un it's how to use a proper text editor. I was 32 before I used Vim for the first time. I'm getting better at it, slowly, but I wish I'd been exposed when I was younger to give that skill a good decade of exercise.

Aelius 8y ago

I am wary of making predictive generalizations, but I have been thinking about the effect of "just works" computers for roughly ten years. The robotics program in my highschool folded after I left, in part because no one was left who could write the programming. Watching my nephew grow up on iPads and iPhones: I learned how to use computers by breaking them, and then fixing them. iOS doesn't let you screw it up, and there are too many addicting games to suck up all his time anyway. I'm considering teaching him some things now and giving him a cheap laptop or rPi, but I doubt he'd choose to use that over the silly endless games on iOS, or the bottomless pit that is YouTube.

dmoy 8y ago
You can make the same argument about basically any technology that has gotten more reliable, cheaper, easier, etc over the years. Cars is a big one. Going back farther, textiles. We don't spend a staggeringly large percentage of our time making and/or repairing our own clothes anymore. For the most part, clothes "just works", and the average person doesn't have to worry about it.
- peter_l_downs 8y ago
  Taking cars and textiles as an example, though, is pretty disheartening if you would like to see a future with a lot of computer programmers in it. Although taking the cynical view, as a young-ish programmer today it probably points to a world where your skills only get much more valuable over time, as there will be less competition from a younger cohort in the future...
- Green_man 8y ago
  I'm not sure thats a perfect analogy. in both those cases, the big change has often been machine aided manufacturing (especially with textiles), combined with lots of engineering/materials science. engineering and materials science has definitely aided the speed and effectiveness of computer hardware design as well (and anecdotally, people seem to be buying phones and laptops less often, they last longer), but that isn't true of software- we need (or the market demands) more software engineers than ever, afaik. and, as far as i am aware, we are still a ways out from machine aided software design.

scotty79 8y ago

I code for more than two decades and I never learned to touch type. I tried for a bit but it didn't stick. I can't type in complete darkness but if I can see with the corner of my eye where the keyboard is I'm just hitting the keys. Touch typing for coding felt awkward because there's a lot of special symbols that are kind of hard and unintuitive to make if you try to touch same keys all the time. Also I wiggle in my chair quite a bit and believe it's essential for healthy sitting. I feel like touch typing could interfere with my wiggling. My style of typing is yet another factor why I get infuriated when I sit in front of a Macbook. For some reason Mac keyboard is about 3/4 of the key to the side of where I expect it to be (and literally every other keyboard is exactly where I expect).

RandomTisk 8y ago
I learned the symbols last, simply started adding a couple to every password and after a year or so, viola.
solveit 8y ago
Yeah, not too surprising given that typing speed is never the limiting factor for any programmer.
_Donny 8y ago
I am somewhat surprised how important fast typing seems to be for computer users, mainly developers. It is never the typing that is my personal bottleneck. As a developer, I spend perhaps 99% of my time thinking of the problem, before actually writing the best and most concise solution. When writing reports or other academic papers, I first construct the sentences before writing them slowly while reading out loud. I guess this is personal preference, but I think it is worth the time to type slowly, instead of letting the fingers do the thinking.
- ryl00 8y ago
  I'm not surprised, given the power of the CLI and the composibility of tools like grep, awk, sed, find, etc. IDEs are great, but sometimes what you need to do just isn't already defined in a GUI checkbox or menu item...

skywhopper 8y ago

I'm not surprised at all about the pathing things. I doubt there's any cohort in the last forty years who commonly had knowledge of "." and "..", though. But the typing thing is disturbing to me. There's lots of hand-wringing over whether or not to make students learn cursive, but my daughter was expected to write timed essays on computers (in tiny web textareas, even!) without ever being given even basic typing instruction. She's a junior in high school now, but never once in all her years of being in classrooms with computers, doing computer labs, doing online standardized tests, and being required to submit papers in electronic format, has there been any opportunity, much less a requirement, to learn to type. Somehow, miraculously, she's a prolific writer (of fan fiction, original fiction, and humor articles for her school newspaper--along with multiple completions of NaNoWriMo, which she's gearing up for again this year), but she still types half by sight and almost all with her first two or three fingers. I realize this can work fine, but nothing helped my own computer usage more than being forced to muddle through a typing class in high school. I'm agog we don't invest in such a basic skill in our schools.

rjbwork 8y ago
He was specifically talking about kids interested in computers. I had knowledge of this things with my first IBM clone as a small child, maybe 3-5 years old. I knew how to insert my game discs, navigate between directories, list the contents, and execute commands I found there. It's not complicated if you use it for a while, but kids these days just aren't exposed much to real computers.
- sevensor 8y ago
  It's not complicated if, like you and me, you have to learn it as a child if you want to get your games to start. Many a career in technology was launched by CONFIG.SYS.
WoodenChair 8y ago
It's strange to single out macOS when the vast majority of these issues (as stated in the original article) stem from users not using traditional personal computers at all anymore as primary computing devices (i.e. growing up on Android/iOS).

Axsuul 8y ago

The keyboard on mobile devices has the same layout as the computer's so shouldn't that translate somewhat to touch typing? At least they should have an advantage over those who never grew up with technology. High school students still talk to their friends via iMessage or Facebook Messenger so they have plenty of exposure to this interface.

celeritascelery 8y ago
But that is all thumb typing. Which is a very different notion then full hand typing.
- mastazi 8y ago
  In addition, on mobile you have on-screen keyboards, so you can never practice touch-typing (which entails being able to type without looking at the keyboard).
  - u801e 8y ago
    Years ago, I purchased a HP touchpad which has an on screen keyboard (big enough to use the traditional home key hand position). I'm a proficient touch typist, but I was never able to successfully touch type on it. Tactile feedback is a must and isn't something that you can get with touch interfaces.
    - mastazi 8y ago
      Yes you are right, my definition of "touch typing" was incomplete because it didn't mention the tactile element. There have been some prototypes where the screen has a surface that can produce "bumps" in response to electrical impulse, which could lead to having on-screen keyboards with some sort of tactile feel[1], however this is not available on the consumer market just yet. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JelhR2iPuw0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JelhR2iPuw0
- miccah 8y ago
  Very different indeed! I recently switched my phone's keyboard to Dvorak to learn the layout. Interestingly, my thumb typing speed has increased with no effect on my touch typing (using QWERTY). It's as if touch typing and thumb typing use different parts of the brain.

variable11 8y ago

Driving is a skill soon to be obsolete apart from specialists, yet schools and state governments go to extraordinary lengths to churn out millions of teenage drivers every year.

ux-app 8y ago

I'm a high school IT teacher, and can definitely relate to the lack of knowledge of the file system. It's particularly bad with students using a mac. We're now seeing a 50/50 split between win/mac and it seems that most kids are getting macs because that's the current fashion, but they really struggle with basic file ops. About 90% (no exaggeration) of mac students simply never discover the little down arrow that expands the file save dialog. This leads to students simply hitting save and having all their files dumped on the desktop. Then they minimize their app and move the recently saved file into another folder (usually also on desktop). Of course, in the case of a save as, this leads to a 'file deleted' message when they return to their program. Thus was a particular issue when I was teaching web dev and using vscode. I try to teach file management in context where it makes sense. Web dev is a good topic to focus on it. Creating a folder to hold a site, sub folders for css,js,imgs and then relative file paths in html and css. These concepts are a first for many middle schoolers. On the other hand kids are great at using virtual desktops on mac, whereas only maybe 2% of win users have discovered/use virtual desktops.

YawningAngel 8y ago
To be fair to them, the finder interface for files is absolutely fscking mad and lead to me using a terminal for all file management for more than a year because it was completely opaque to me how to get access to the "real" filesystem.
- vkou 8y ago
  As primarily a Windows user, who grew up with an orthodox file manager[1], I am not a fan of either Finder, or Windows Explorer. Still using FAR in 2018 does tend to make me one of the odder ducks in a room. I very much prefer it to the *nix terminal. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far_Manager https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far_Manager
  - diablerouge 8y ago
    Note that Linux often has GNU Midnight Commander, a clone of Norton Commander (Far is also a clone of NC.) So, whenever you're in Linux and wishing you had Far, check out MC!

snazz 8y ago

> In the future, kids will be less and less exposed to keyboards, and productive computing in general. I'll go out on a limb here and say that this isn't a new thing at all. It's just that, in the past, fewer students had access to computers, and those who did generally understood them better. Now, it's not that the average high school student doesn't have access, but that the vast majority don't have any interest in how the machine works. It's the same percentage of the total who are interested and good at computing but it's just that a much lower percentage of the computer users are good computer users, in my experience. High school "computer science" classes in my area seem to teach "you always need to type public static void main(String[] args) for your program to work", as opposed to teaching students what that means. As with in the past, the students who are really good at computing do most of their learning outside of school.

nextos 8y ago
I think it's more of a neomania problem. New and shiny equals better. Now "IT" is thought to be good, and lecture rooms are getting "digitalized". Where digitalization means something horrible, using tablets and slides (which will encourage shallow thinking and distraction). That's at least the trend now in some elite schools I attended more than a decade ago. In contrast, when I went to a (pretty forward thinking) kindergarden in the late 80s, we were taught Logo. During early elementary school I vividly remember how recursion blew our minds. From any possible point of view, the same school had a much more avant-garde education 25 years ago. Now try to convince policy makers. Same applies to CS schools. I was lucky enough to be taught Prolog, Smalltalk and ML during freshman year. We emphasized concepts over technologies. Now it's the other way round.
city41 8y ago
> "you always need to type public static void main(String[] args) for your program to work", as opposed to teaching students what that means. I've always wondered how practical it is to truly teach that though. Programming is incredibly abstract, and the less abstract you make it the harder it is to learn. I feel like making that leap from "just write this to get it to work" and understanding what's really happening will always take individual initiative.

sfRattan 8y ago

I have a distinct memory of 8th grade typing class: once a week over the whole fall semester we practiced typing on these awful AlphaSmart devices. Made almost no progress in our words-per-minute. Then, over Christmas break, we all started using AIM to message each other. Spring semester began and our teacher was flummoxed... We had all jumped up by 20-30 words per minute from where we had been on the first day back in class.

fma 8y ago
Back in the 90's I had a computer...a 386. It had Windows 3.1 but still I used a lot of DOS. I also played BBS games where there's multiplayer chat...so I typed pretty fast. I was fastest type in the class in middle school, even better than the teacher in our computer class. A year or two later, everyone gets computers, AOL...AIM....and the classroom is now clickity clack, full of fast typers.
maxaht 8y ago
I had a similar experience as well- I attribute most (if not all) of my typing ability to an unhealthy Runescape habit in my younger years.
- ebullientocelot 8y ago
  Typing "333333 to buy a R2H!" repeatedly led to my initial discovery of copy/paste in my younger days. +1 for nostalgic smiles.
  - Cthulhu_ 8y ago
    A friend of mine used a macro tool to automate things like mining, another thing you don't really learn in school.
bcaa7f3a8bbc 8y ago
Completely agree. Touch-typing in standard finger position is ABSOLUTELY NOT REQUIRED to be a successful computer technician unless you are doing office document processing. As long as you can type in a reasonable speed so it doesn't become a significant bottleneck of your human-machine interface, it is okay. It's good to have this skill to become a more efficient computer operator, but it is optional in many cases. I can type at 50 WPM minimum by just pecking two fingers on the keyboard, and even faster when I use more fingers. I barely need to look down at the keyboard, I only do it to readjust my hand position, but most of the time, I can do this by using the text I just mistyped on the screen as my negative feedback. Many people I know who are not touch-typers, have also naturally acquired a similar "just works" way of typing - you don't need to actually study it, if you use computers day-by-day, you have probably obtained it. In the same way, when the cool kids in the 2000s were using SMS to text all the days, they learned to type at an unbelievable speed on the 3x3 numpad phone keyboard. On the other hand, if one is struggling to type words and commands on the keyboard to operate the commandline, it doesn't mean one is merely an inefficient typer, but often indicates a larger problem: A LACK OF GENERAL EXPERIENCE ON USING COMPUTERS, and this is the real problem, as general-purpose computers are becoming less and less common and many people of the young generation do not share your experience, which was how the older generation learned to type.

Adaptive 8y ago

I work at a girls middle school and taught a class called "technology literacy" last year to 6th graders. I covered what I felt were basics: * Basic communications tools (email) * Word processing/Spreadsheets/Presentation software via g suite * Basic command line usage including bash basics, paths, file creation and edition, sshing * Basic HTML and "how the internet works" (also with CLI editing of html files in user directories) * touch typing (typingclub.com) These girls as seventh graders are coding in Python and nailing it.

Adaptive 8y ago
I should also mention that their "downtime" activity was CLI text adventures. I recommend using these to teach basic "verb object" CLI usage.
- stevenjohns 8y ago
  If you'd be willing to publish it, the study guide/course outline/lesson plans for this would be really interesting -- especially as its getting results.
- poormansevo 8y ago
  This sounds impressive. I too would be interested in seeing the teaching materials you are using for your curriculum. As a father of two girls, aged two and five, I enjoy reading about girls getting exposed early to programming. I plan to start introducing my oldest soon once she progresses her reading skills more.
pnloyd 8y ago
Pretty impressive, don't know if I'd consider ssh a basic computer skills though.. the rest seems rather practical.
- Waterluvian 8y ago
  I think if ssh is really just "time with a command line" then it's a super valuable exercise. You can remember none of it and still go away with the lesson that the CSI looking thing really ain't that complicated.

walrus01 8y ago

The increasing use of walled garden things like iOS which abstract the file system away from the end user, making it impossible to know what the system's actual directory structure looks like, certainly doesn't help. "where is your data?" "uhhh, it's in the app, or in the cloud" "yes, but specifically where?" "i dunno" The comment here nails it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18350671 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18350671 Children and teenagers these days spend a lot of time using passive media consumption devices. An iPad is great if you're watching youtube or netflix passively, not so great at all if you want to create your own content, edit it, manipulate it, back it up, transfer it places, etc. Touchscreen devices and phones are great for browsing web pages. It's a media portal with a walled garden app store, not a real computer, though its hardware may be capable of more than its operating system allows it to do. This comment could easily devolve into a "get off my lawn" rant, but I seriously believe that people who learned how to use x86 type computers from a command line first are much more capable of understanding what's going on underneath a GUI. If you spent time mucking about with config.sys and autoexec.bat settings in MS-DOS 3.3 and 5.0, a long time before you saw a Windows GUI, you could immediately grok what was going on when you did install Windows. I am not a big fan of Arch Linux, but in the modern era there's a lot of value to getting people to learn what is going on when they do a brand new Arch install on an empty disk. What's happening with fdisk, partitioning, formatting, grub2/bootloader, etc. And why it's happening. If you don't want to go that far in an educational environment, start people from a debian stretch barebones install with CLI only + sshd.

ryandrake 8y ago
> "where is your data?" > "uhhh, it's in the app, or in the cloud" > "yes, but specifically where?" > "i dunno" We can keep going: “It’s in /home/walrus01/docs” “But specifically where? What physical drive?” “It’s on /dev/sda2” “What cylinder/track/sector?” At some point it stops mattering practically. The abstractions presented to users today are often such that it doesn’t matter if the user knows what path something is stored in.
- brokenmachine 8y ago
  It will matter when that data goes missing or the abstraction stops working for whatever reason. From what I've seen, people who don't understand or aren't interested to learn about computers will only learn precisely one method to achieve exactly what they are trying to do. Not knowing how it works is a very fragile way of doing things and could fall over at any minute, and that's bound to be the worst possible minute, and in the worst possible way.

Sophistifunk 8y ago

Unpopular opinion: Relative paths (paths in general, really) are a terrible thing, and it's excellent that people are able to get by without that knowledge.

zaphar 8y ago
I don't think we'll ever get away from hierarchies as a useful organizational strategy as a species. Paths are a useful way to encode those hierarchies. They are concise and easy to read. Most of the replacements for paths try to pretend that there is no hierarchy or force people to not use a hierarchy. Personally I find the hierarchy to be a very useful tool and paths on a file system to be a useful way of representing them.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  There is always a hierarchy. Trying to pretend there isn't one is just stupid, because hierarchy as a concept is as fundamental to how our minds work as it could be. If a platform tries to hide the natural hierarchy, users will still build their own out of clues given by the UI, and the result can be unnecessarily confusing.
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    > hierarchy as a concept is as fundamental to how our minds work as it could be. Whether it's fundamental or a product of socialization, ISTR there is a substantial empirical difference to the degree to which heirarchy is used to model the world between men and women, so if that is true at all it may be true only for certain values of “our”.
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      Hierarchy is created when you start considering whether or not a thing is a part of some other thing. Sexual reproduction forms trees. Causality forms trees along time axis. I think the concept it's pretty fundamental, even if some specific connotations are learned through socialization.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

catchmeifyoucan 8y ago

Agreed. New schools give ipads to students in lieu of laptops. I think typing is very important, and schools should continue teaching typing as a skill.

paavoova 8y ago

Fundamentally, abstraction fosters illiteracy. You have an entire generation or two of people who grew or are growing up solely on touch devices, and many of these devices expose no native filesystem (e.g. iOS) to its users. And as the article says, these devices are used largely for consumption (media, social extensions), all by design. You now have to go out of your way to learn even the basic, trivial fundamentals, but kids handed a smartphone at age 9 may very well have no desire to do so. Of course, and to use an analogy, not everyone has the time or motivation nor even reason to become an auto mechanic. But something like transportation has always been a means to an end. The difference with consumer technology now is that nearly everyone fancies themselves a "tech" enthusiast in one form or another thanks to proximity and thus familiarity. But at the same time, many (perhaps most) remain underexposed to the very technology they use as a lifeline. There's a pervasive "just works" mentality that has influenced everything, partially spearheaded by tech companies like Apple circa Steve Jobs. This wouldn't be so bad, if it weren't for people spending so many hours of their own spare time using technology, but simultaneously learning nothing. The equivalent time spend in a traditional computing environment would teach the fundamentals whether one is interested or not, simply through exposure. But there's little such exposure in modern personal computing.

thewizardofaus 8y ago

Really interesting that touch typing is a skill lacking! Maybe it was growing up on age of empires that improved my typing. At age 8 I typed 32wpm At age 12 I typed 120wpm Typing speed never really improved beyond that, occasionally hit bursts of 140+wpm but eh. Regular qwerty non mechanical keyboard.

moduspol 8y ago
> Maybe it was growing up on age of empires that improved my typing. I'm definitely the fastest in the office at typing PEPPERONI PIZZA dozens of times in a row.

andrewclunn 8y ago

So less time on touch devices or with a mouse. More time navigating and typing using a keyboard.

justifier 8y ago

i advocate for computer education being complementarily folded into the current math curriculum i have interest in changing the math curriculum as well, but for people who like the current math curriculum I think there are enormous benefits of teaching computer skills.. science.. through implementation

jtnews 8y ago

"Instead it’s rote learning some particular IDE without real understanding." The reason for this is that very few of the people doing the teaching of computing concepts in high school understand themselves and all they can do is follow the script in the textbook. Teaching degrees focus more on the concept of teaching than the content of teaching. I have first hand seen teachers with years of experience "teaching Word" get lost and come to a full stop the second something doesn't line up exactly with the book. Using a computer does not translate into understanding a computer. I know very intelligent teachers, some with advanced degrees (Master's and Doctorate's), that have trouble navigating to a website that doesn't start with www and are unable to distinguish between a url and an email address. All of the letters and symbols (real strange ones like :, /, ., or @) might as well be part of a magical incantation that teleports words, pictures, and videos to their screens.

vezycash 8y ago

Not understanding paths isn't alarming they just haven't had a need for it yet. Teach em how to copy, delete, move, rename stuff via CMD and they'll get it fast! Make them use cmd exclusively for playing music, opening games, deleting stuff... And the concept of Path, directory and files will simply click. Besides they'll have something cool to show off to their friends If I only use explorer, I don't need to know . and .. However, if I do lots of file operations via CMD, then I'll get tired of using cd\ all the time when I only want to go up one level.

_ph_ 8y ago

Touch typing is one of the most underappreciated skills for tech workers. Few of my colleagues are true touch typists. So yes, you can survive without touch typing. But it is one of those skills, where a few weeks up to months of thorough practise early one give you a life-long benefit, as you save valuable work time and screen attention with every single word you type. As a touch typist you can not only type faster, but also can concentrate more on what you are typing as your attention never leaves the screen and the typing itself doesn't require any concious typing effort any more.

hrshlb 8y ago

typing.com is a great place to learn touch typing. I reached ~35wpm in less than 3 weeks.

codemusings 8y ago

I think what's worth noting is that users in general are less and less exposed to the concept of files and directories. Let's face it. The computer most students use are their smartphones. Everything is sandboxed. You never ever select a file path. It's more about context than location.

systematical 8y ago

Are you telling me kids don't click around the C drive anymore and all those "weird" folders in Windows just to see whats there? That's probably one of the first things I did when I got a computer (Windows 95), including deleting random files just to see what happened.

0x445442 8y ago
I think it has a lot to do with how phone and tablet OS's (iOS and Android) deliberately try to hide the notion of paths or even files for that matter.
- trey-jones 8y ago
  Windows has been doing the same since Windows 7 with the "Libraries" concept (Documents, Pictures, etc. instead of paths). Never liked it. Where's my stuff?!
  - 0x445442 8y ago
    Exactly, when I plug my phone into the computer I want it to show up as another drive so I can just drag my mp3s over to the music directory. It's sort of works that way with Android but the directory where your music lives on your phone is buried deep. It's one of the reasons I still use a Blackberry :)
Jackim 8y ago
Kids barely use computers these days. Schools buy tablets (iPads/Android) and Chromebooks. Neither encourage computer literacy. At home they have phones and iPads for the most part.
- systematical 8y ago
  You're right, hadn't thought of it that way. Never thought I'd be the old guy who prefers a "big clunky" laptop.
MarcScott 8y ago

MayeulC 8y ago

This is true in my experience. Even a (materials science) PhD student I'm working with told me he is so "bad with computers" that when someone asked him to open a specific directory, he answered "what is a directory?". I can only imagine it being much worse for the general population, and this makes me wish I could teach in high schools, even if just a bit. Unfortunately, part-time teachers, or teachers that just come for the odd conference/course on a specific topic seem to mostly be a uni thing, at least where I live. I was just thinking about this the other day: kids should probably get more exposure to cryptography, maybe even before high school, for the following reasons: - kids love secret messages - crypto math is quite basic algebra - even without the maths, asymmetric crypto and hashes are quite easy to grasp - maybe it will allow them to better understand security as adults I would love to see a future where public/private keys can be used as a general authentication mean, without it needing to be too dumbed down, as we can expect people to know the basics. It would also likely lower phishing issues. I agree that schools are to blame here, even when they try to broaden the scope of their teachings. But I would give teachers some slack, as they were likely not prepared at all on some topics. So, maybe the solution here is indeed to ask parents to come and teach students some bits of their speciality? It could be done in multiple domains, and I feel like this would be a lot better for kids to be able to relate and project the content their are taught onto a person's job.

gibsons77 8y ago
These guys are working on a solution to general authentication for the web https://universallogin.io/ https://universallogin.io/
MarcScott 8y ago
> and this makes me wish I could teach in high schools, even if just a bit Reach out to a local school and set up a https://www.codeclub.org.uk/ https://www.codeclub.org.uk/
Balgair 8y ago
> I was just thinking about this the other day: kids should probably get more exposure to cryptography, maybe even before high school > So, maybe the solution here is indeed to ask parents to come and teach students some bits of their speciality? My SO taught HS Math for 2 years in the US. One in a VERY low income school, one in a 100% college acceptance rate school. Via what we talked about over dinners at night, I learned that what kids need is food and guardians that aren't abusive/neglectful. Honestly, ~30% of her students, from either school, would not eat at all over the weekend. No, not that they would eat Cheetos or drink Coke. They plain-jane went hungry. Long weekends were not a source of excitement for them. Their folks either didn't have the money or just didn't care. The 100% college acceptance rate school fed the kids breakfast and lunch each day, for free. That was likely the largest single contributor to the success of the school (unproven, granted). So, if you are US based and want to help out with these issues, PLEASE DO! A lot of kids really do need very simple things like food or pencils. It's amazing how smart kids are if you just give them a sandwich and a pen to work with. They just amaze you. Boys and Girls clubs are a great starting place: https://www.bgca.org/ https://www.bgca.org/ Google your local after school organizations and volunteer Become engaged in your school boards and PTA. They need guidance and citizen participation.

jccalhoun 8y ago

I teach college and the problem is much more fundamental than that. Certainly I have tech literate students but I can't tell you how often I see students struggle to just log onto their email when they try to pull up a class presentation. The old cliche is searching for google is not only alive and well but now it is search for google, go to google, then search for youtube, then search for the video you want to show. Even when they actually have the url for a video, in the last several years since I have started paying attention I don't think I have ever seen a student use the "paste and go" option in the right click menu. They ALWAY paste it in then hit enter. Paste and go is right under paste! When I post a link to a survey or something I want them to go to I have stopped just copying and pasting the url. I now have to paste it in and make sure to delete http://www http://www because nearly all of them will type it in and a large percentage will do it wrong. showing them ctrl+f to find something on a page blows their mind. I have started teaching some sections of public speaking online and I was driven crazy by the complete tech illiteracy of some of the "digital natives." (pro tip: emailing and saying "it doesn't work" is not useful.) I try to keep the xkcd comic about being excited when I get to show someone something new but it is hard.

brokenmachine 8y ago
> Even when they actually have the url for a video, in the last several years since I have started paying attention I don't think I have ever seen a student use the "paste and go" option in the right click menu. They ALWAY paste it in then hit enter. Paste and go is right under paste! I usually go Ctrl-L to focus the location bar, then Ctrl-V to paste, then enter. Is there a keyboard shortcut for "Paste and go?" I agree - I'm not sure these "digital natives" are all they're cracked up to be. Of course there are exceptions.

maceurt 8y ago

The touch typing part is not true, at least from my experience. Almost every kid I know in my school can type at least 30wpm touch typing. In fact, we had 2 required typing classes in middle school that both were a semester long. This is not even a rich private school thing either this is a public high school that is composed of mostly kids from lower income families.

trey-jones 8y ago

I mostly speak from my own experience growing up (90s). Briefly, this was Apple II in middle school learning BASIC for 6 weeks, Windows 95 in High School, XP in college (Liberal Arts). I didn't start writing code until I was about 25, and was 28 when I started in tech. I can understand that it's possible kids don't know about paths, since most modern operating systems abstract this from the users, but I wonder if it has as much or more to do with never having been exposed to Linux. That was certainly my situation. One of the first pieces of advice I read when I started teaching myself to write code was "So you want to be a hacker? Ditch Windows and use Linux full time." I realize there are lots of good Windows programmers out there - not trying to bash anyone - but for the programmer on a budget I think this is the correct path. I will also admit that I haven't used a Linux GUI in many years and I suspect that one could get by without understanding paths using a recent version of Ubuntu. One of the reasons I suspect this is that I have had my parents using Ubuntu since 2011 or so. Nevertheless, many basic linux concepts were foreign to me when I started using it. Ever since, I've definitely thought Linux computers in schools rather than Windows would be a good idea. Linux computers without a GUI at all might be even better (at least for teaching computer classes), but I guess you might have difficulty holding their attention.

bischofs 8y ago
I would have been so much better off in my CS degree if I would have walked into computer lab in high school and there was just a terminal with a blinking cursor. It took me far too long to clear all the nonsense and finally get to that stage where I felt close to the operating system

vinceguidry 8y ago

His main complaint seems to be that he couldn't teach kids how to interact with a file system. I don't think the concept of a file system is an easy one to grasp. And it's not something we should be expecting schools to teach. I once had the privilege of doing the converse, teaching an 80 year old woman the same concepts. I had exactly the same problems he described. These things are not simple nor intuitive, nor are they really needed for basic usage of a computer. I taught them to her because that was what my formative years using computers was like, and because that is how you understand what's going on under the hood. But I had to quickly roll back my ambitions to non-CLI interfaces because she just didn't have the same kind of time I had when I was 13 to just spend hours and hours figuring it all out. It's not necessary to learn how to touch type, and it's not necessary to learn the file system concepts used by the userland. You can do amazing work with a computer without that knowledge. Pedagogy doesn't just involve knowing how to teach, but also in knowing what needs to be taught. You don't need to dive into the intimate details of radiocarbon dating to get kids excited about dinosaurs.

japhyr 8y ago

> I lay most of the blame on the schools. I'm a high school teacher, and I've been in this world for a long time. I'm surprised no one has mentioned the issue of pay yet. The median pay for teachers in the US is around $50k. Starting salaries are under $40k. Max pay is around $70-$90k, but it takes 10-15 years to get there, and in many states the max pay isn't this high. If you're a good high school CS teacher, you can basically walk out the door and get a job that will double your salary. How many of you have been in a field where your pay absolutely does not depend on the quality of your work? I am leaving the classroom after this year, to focus more on technical work. It feels entirely different to be heading into work where the better my performance is, the more I'll get paid. I've been teaching for 24 years, so I'm not leaving just for pay reasons. But I don't think we can look at solutions to better HS CS education without addressing the issue of teacher pay. If I were graduating college today with the skills I had 20 years ago, I'm not sure I'd go into the classroom.

rhexs 8y ago
Do a majority of public high school teachers still enjoy pensions, three month breaks a year, and legendary job security, or is that going away as well?
- japhyr 8y ago
  - Pensions are going away as states find they're unsustainable. My state (Alaska) has moved into a defined-contribution model, which I believe is like most jobs that offer any retirement benefits. - Yes, 2-3 month breaks are pretty sweet. - "Legendary job security." I believe this is going away. I have tenure, and my district still offers it. That's a good thing, I believe, because it allows good teachers to stand up for good educational practices. I am definitely able to support students and new teachers better because I am not in fear of losing my job. I know some states have moved away from tenure; I'm not sure how many. Are these enough to keep good CS teachers in education? I don't think so. If you're a good software developer, I believe you can manage a career where you take some time between jobs. You can build toward a much earlier retirement than you can as a teacher. You can live a wealthier lifestyle along the way. Neither career is a rosy field of happiness. But my point is that if you're a good high school CS teacher, you can probably find a much more appealing work situation outside of education. If we want good CS teachers available for high school students, we should probably look at this pretty carefully.

bitwize 8y ago

As it turns out, understanding hierarchical directories is really, really hard for most people, which is why iOS eschews them entirely, at least as far as the UI is concerned. According to Jaron Lanier, the concept of a "file" is an accidental one in the history of computing, not an essential one. If we want computing to truly be available to the masses, maybe it's time we leave things like files and folders behind, and not allow the dead weight of the past to hold us back now.

epberry 8y ago

File systems suck anyway. They’re useful for programmers and software but pretty awful for people organizing data. My exclusive approach for finding things these days is Spotlight on Mac or google drive search. Drive search is so good that it’s not even necessary to name documents correctly or put the right content in them. Sometimes it seems like the search is context aware and you can type ideas into the search bar and get a list of documents that might be relevant to them. I think of my document memory more as a hashmap than a tree and typing in part of the file and going straight to it is extremely satisfying.