4 ms·

I've mentored a great deal at the HS/college level and I can share the same sentiments. I hate to sound so crass but you're either cut out for it or you're not

I've mentored a great deal at the HS/college level and I can share the same sentiments. I hate to sound so crass but you're either cut out for it or you're not... People get shoved into STEM/tech/whatever because it has good career prospects without ever considering the nuance of what makes children/people successful in this. Frankly, most people won't even wrap their head around simple conditional logic/algebra. I say "won't" because in my experience they're fully capable, they just put in minimal effort to get past the exercises. I end up having to pace my entire instruction to those kids when I find them in my groups. It's worth noting that I'm in the US where this is sorta an unspoken social contract for getting through school: keep your head down and show minimal effort + don't make waves and you'll be passed right along without a problem (usually with good grades). Thankfully, I'm doing after-school program stuff and the kids want to be there; but, you'd be surprised at how many kids are there because their parents are forcibly bolstering college apps with extra-curriculars (gross). Sorry to wander a bit there... My main point is that regardless of whatever ideals we would like to hold not everyone is cut out for highly technical work, especially coding. Hopefully I don't come off as too much of a curmudgeon!

carabiner 6y ago
> Frankly, most people won't even wrap their head around simple conditional logic/algebra. What do you mean by this? I've met people who struggled with for-loops, but most people have been able to get if-then statements.
- folkhack 6y ago
  For sure. I'll just dig on the specific (and very anecdotal) experience: So many of those kids didn't want to be there, and couldn't be bothered to just wrap their heads around if-then logic, or storing a value to a variable... simple, simple stuff. They were capable, and we'd do true/false tables on paper etc. to talk about how their LEGO "vending machine" or whatever should work but it was pulling teeth and over 50% of the groups never finished outside of physical assembly. I got a real respect for teachers at that point and realized that so much of your work is sinking time into keeping kids who could give two-s#&ts less "on the rails" vs. actually mentoring a kid who has real interest/potential in the subject matter. I believe what I experienced is a common experience for educators =( But my whole original "won't" bit spells it out pretty clear... to rephrase: I'll venture to say almost all of those kids were capable, they just "won't" while trying to manipulate you to do all the thinking for them. "Welllll can't you just give me the next line Mr. folkhack.....? I just don't knowwww......" with puppy eyes sorta crap. Ninja edit: It's worth noting that general school population sorta stuff is where you get the above anecdote, vs. extra-curricular 90% of the kids want to be there which makes it night-and-day. I will never do a "general school population" thing ever again after learning I'm legit not cut out for it.
  - vezycash 6y ago
    I guess you're one of the few hners who'd be able to understand what I wrote here through actual experience[1]. > I've given the same tests to my students 3 times - word for word and many students still failed. The good students who cared raised their scores with each repeat. The non-nonchalant students sometimes, managed to score less. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21891325 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21891325
    - folkhack 6y ago
      I think so... and in their defense: I've been there. I was sorta shoe-horned into super-mediocre Midwestern colleges here in America due to my mother working at a private institution in the same city that I grew up in. I went for art and computer science... outside of a couple of exceptions the professors were horrible, and the student body even worse being a dumping grounds for rich Illinois suburbs that thought their kids couldn't/wouldn't get in trouble in small town Iowa. My point is - I can relate. So many of these kids are disenfranchised for some reason or another and I'm more empathetic to it because I couldn't haven given two s$@ts in college myself - there was zero value vs busting my butt on professional/personal programming projects. Like - teaching us Pascal in 2005 claiming "it's coming back" lacking of value. "Software isn't going to the internet" sorta lacking... I even had to "snap back" for some courses like my elective electronics course. The prof really cared, and wanted to give you a solid understanding of the basics. He even threw out a poor test class-wide and redid a week of instruction once because, "mathematically that was on me, I'm sorry." Somehow it was way easier for me to put forth 100% effort in his class where I couldn't be bothered elsewhere. He gave me an actual reason to be there/care. Overall I got burnt out on education, dropped out for a dev career that led to people calling me all sorts of "engineer" titles and learned in the school of the hard-knocks. Frankly, I sincerely feel apologetic to my past professors because I was dead-weight in their classroom just going through the minimal motions to GTFO to my real job which actually paid bills vs. putting me into debt. Just like the students failing the same test three times over: I could sincerely not have cared less... When a prof said I should chose between school and work expecting me to obviously choose school, I laughed in her face and dropped out the next day on general principal. I had a mom home going through chemo, my dad was long dead, my brother was an alcoholic, and I had bills. Definitely playing devil's advocate here, but... I imagine so many of these kids, for some reason or another, are burnt-out on education just like I was/am. I was just lucky by the time I was burnt out that I "had an out".
ghaff 6y ago
The other thing that I've observed tutoring in business school is that some people were probably not good at math in high school (and I'm guessing didn't care), were basically able to skip it in college, and now they have some required courses that have pretty easy math by the standards of people with technical degrees, especially engineering. But there were people I was tutoring who didn't what a graph was, didn't know how to solve an equation, etc. I'll try but I really can't get you through statistics and economics with some level of elementary school arithmetic. This was a particularly bad case but one can read any of a number of first year MBA books in a similar vein: The math is killing me.
Ashanmaril 6y ago
I think a lot of it comes down to whether or not it interests you. Basically every programmer I've ever known naturally got into programming because they screwed around on the computer in their free time and eventually stumbled onto some task they wanted to do that took them down that road. Who knows how many people are in the field now because they wanted to play around with Minecraft mods 10 years ago. I think if the power of a computer is put at your fingertips and you don't want to dig deeper, or see what else you're capable of creating, that's just how it is. I don't think it's any different from how some people never get into sports. It's fine to introduce kids to it and I'm sure it'll take with some of them, but there's no need to force it any more than you would with any other field.
racl101 6y ago
I absolutely agree.

carabiner 6y ago

> Frankly, most people won't even wrap their head around simple conditional logic/algebra. What do you mean by this? I've met people who struggled with for-loops, but most people have been able to get if-then statements.

folkhack 6y ago
For sure. I'll just dig on the specific (and very anecdotal) experience: So many of those kids didn't want to be there, and couldn't be bothered to just wrap their heads around if-then logic, or storing a value to a variable... simple, simple stuff. They were capable, and we'd do true/false tables on paper etc. to talk about how their LEGO "vending machine" or whatever should work but it was pulling teeth and over 50% of the groups never finished outside of physical assembly. I got a real respect for teachers at that point and realized that so much of your work is sinking time into keeping kids who could give two-s#&ts less "on the rails" vs. actually mentoring a kid who has real interest/potential in the subject matter. I believe what I experienced is a common experience for educators =( But my whole original "won't" bit spells it out pretty clear... to rephrase: I'll venture to say almost all of those kids were capable, they just "won't" while trying to manipulate you to do all the thinking for them. "Welllll can't you just give me the next line Mr. folkhack.....? I just don't knowwww......" with puppy eyes sorta crap. Ninja edit: It's worth noting that general school population sorta stuff is where you get the above anecdote, vs. extra-curricular 90% of the kids want to be there which makes it night-and-day. I will never do a "general school population" thing ever again after learning I'm legit not cut out for it.
- vezycash 6y ago
  I guess you're one of the few hners who'd be able to understand what I wrote here through actual experience[1]. > I've given the same tests to my students 3 times - word for word and many students still failed. The good students who cared raised their scores with each repeat. The non-nonchalant students sometimes, managed to score less. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21891325 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21891325
  - folkhack 6y ago
    I think so... and in their defense: I've been there. I was sorta shoe-horned into super-mediocre Midwestern colleges here in America due to my mother working at a private institution in the same city that I grew up in. I went for art and computer science... outside of a couple of exceptions the professors were horrible, and the student body even worse being a dumping grounds for rich Illinois suburbs that thought their kids couldn't/wouldn't get in trouble in small town Iowa. My point is - I can relate. So many of these kids are disenfranchised for some reason or another and I'm more empathetic to it because I couldn't haven given two s$@ts in college myself - there was zero value vs busting my butt on professional/personal programming projects. Like - teaching us Pascal in 2005 claiming "it's coming back" lacking of value. "Software isn't going to the internet" sorta lacking... I even had to "snap back" for some courses like my elective electronics course. The prof really cared, and wanted to give you a solid understanding of the basics. He even threw out a poor test class-wide and redid a week of instruction once because, "mathematically that was on me, I'm sorry." Somehow it was way easier for me to put forth 100% effort in his class where I couldn't be bothered elsewhere. He gave me an actual reason to be there/care. Overall I got burnt out on education, dropped out for a dev career that led to people calling me all sorts of "engineer" titles and learned in the school of the hard-knocks. Frankly, I sincerely feel apologetic to my past professors because I was dead-weight in their classroom just going through the minimal motions to GTFO to my real job which actually paid bills vs. putting me into debt. Just like the students failing the same test three times over: I could sincerely not have cared less... When a prof said I should chose between school and work expecting me to obviously choose school, I laughed in her face and dropped out the next day on general principal. I had a mom home going through chemo, my dad was long dead, my brother was an alcoholic, and I had bills. Definitely playing devil's advocate here, but... I imagine so many of these kids, for some reason or another, are burnt-out on education just like I was/am. I was just lucky by the time I was burnt out that I "had an out".

ghaff 6y ago

The other thing that I've observed tutoring in business school is that some people were probably not good at math in high school (and I'm guessing didn't care), were basically able to skip it in college, and now they have some required courses that have pretty easy math by the standards of people with technical degrees, especially engineering. But there were people I was tutoring who didn't what a graph was, didn't know how to solve an equation, etc. I'll try but I really can't get you through statistics and economics with some level of elementary school arithmetic. This was a particularly bad case but one can read any of a number of first year MBA books in a similar vein: The math is killing me.

Ashanmaril 6y ago

I think a lot of it comes down to whether or not it interests you. Basically every programmer I've ever known naturally got into programming because they screwed around on the computer in their free time and eventually stumbled onto some task they wanted to do that took them down that road. Who knows how many people are in the field now because they wanted to play around with Minecraft mods 10 years ago. I think if the power of a computer is put at your fingertips and you don't want to dig deeper, or see what else you're capable of creating, that's just how it is. I don't think it's any different from how some people never get into sports. It's fine to introduce kids to it and I'm sure it'll take with some of them, but there's no need to force it any more than you would with any other field.

racl101 6y ago

I absolutely agree.