6 ms·

A while ago, I taught CS for a year in a local high school. I can very much relate to the notion of "astonishing facts were presented without astonishment": as

• hfgjbcgjbvg 2y ago
  Imagine if they taught the history of English to kids before they could read
  • moffkalast 2y ago
    Since most people throughout history couldn't read, I guess it would be relatable?
    • cafard 2y ago
      How many of those who couldn't read knew the history of their or other languages?
  • internet_rand0 2y ago
    they might just remember it all once they're adults! imagine that!? an historically informed populace??? you'd need more expensive lies and higher quality fakes... the government would be costlier to run. ideally, in the long term this would make the national currency's value in the international money market rise up. but why wait for that when one can directly manipulate money through trade fraud and covert military ploys?
    • RogerL 2y ago
      That's not the point, the point is the ordering is inverted, not that history shouldn't be learned.
      • deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
  • milesrout 2y ago
    The history of English is taught in English classes. Historical context is important and interesting. You don't really understand a subject without knowing a bit of its history. My favourite classes were those where we didn't just get taught facts and theorems but we also got taught a bit about who proved the theorem for the first time, who discovered this fact, what this algorithm was first used for, etc. So much easier to remember too. This is one of the best things about studying law: the very nature of it makes it impossible to teach it without the historical context.
    • Zambyte 2y ago
      The key part to me is the "before they could read". I think the history of computing is probably far more interesting when you have more context as to where that history got us.
• PicassoCTs 2y ago
  Those curiculums developed by sould-dead gremiums in consensus on the minimum knowledge you goto have are a blight on western civilization. Instead of giving students the ability to discover a topic, or built something they are interested in themselves and then give them a understanding and fascination with the discoverers who have gone before them. Instead they kill the subject.. I must confess, it gives my dry old heart some joy, to see the anti-education masses coming from this, voting and storming the fortresses that produced the paywall around education, that only money with tutors could or accidental intrinsic motivation could overcome and burn & salt those outposts of classists academia.
  • mlinhares 2y ago
    Yes, definitely, destroying education as we know it without any plans for what the next thing is will definitely work. Developed countries really need a come to Jesus moment, because the disdain for everything that made them great places is unbelievable. People will understand, after great suffering, that destroying stuff is much easier than building it.
    • immibis 2y ago
      We're in the destroying phase right now. Unless you live in China - I hear they're mostly doing well. Or middle of nowhere Africa, where there's nothing to destroy because there's nothing there. But systems can rot from within too, or just decay naturally, and don't need to be destroyed. What if the core ideas that built our current civilization were ideas of the past, that we don't have any more, and we don't know what to do when The Machine Stops? Doesn't have to be a literal machine - it's a good metaphor for how democracy fell apart.
      • PicassoCTs 2y ago
        The do as well as the USSR did. Meaning "excellent" till the last day!
        • immibis 2y ago
• slicktux 2y ago
  I think the whole teaching the history of computers is a big failure at an attempt to Segway into computer organization and architecture. Nonetheless, I get what is happening. If it’s a pure Computer programming class then the goal maybe to have them understand the “basics”…like what is the hard drive vs RAM (memory allocation) or what is a transistor (Boolean logic) and what is a punch card (mnemonics and abstractions of those mnemonics to what is now just a computer programming language).
  • SoftTalker 2y ago
    > have them understand the “basics”…like what is the hard drive vs RAM (memory allocation) or what is a transistor (Boolean logic) You must understand these things at least conceptually if you want to really understand how to write efficient programs. Maybe not at the level of how memory can electronically "remember" a 1 or a zero, or how a hard drive can magnetically do it, but at least the relative speeds e.g. register vs. cache vs. RAM vs. disk.
  • 0_gravitas 2y ago
    Personally, I struggled a lot in my earlier CS/Informatics education, partly because I never felt like I understood what was actually happening/how we got here, everything was just factoids in a void. When I took a gap semester between my A.S. and B.S., I finally studied/explored a bit of the history and it put a lot finally in perspective.
    • barrenko 2y ago
      Well, you need to come up to something like analysis to appreciate something that's seemingly simple like the number line and that's a loot of math if done only in spare time.
  • nightpool 2y ago
    (Unless you're riding a motorized vehicle, the word is segue, not Segway)
    • 2y ago
• alnwlsn 2y ago
  I've loved the history of computers since I was young, although if I was forced to learn about it in school I know it would suck.
• liquidpele 2y ago
  This is why most good teachers don’t use the books but find creative ways to still meet the standards. More work though, so fewer do it now with pay being so shit.
  • kleiba 2y ago
    For what it's worth, the pay in my case was quite good, and there weren't any books, so that wasn't the issue.
• ern 2y ago
  I can really relate to your experience, even though mine was from a parent's perspective rather than as a teacher. I found a similar thing when tutoring one of my children in trigonometry. The way the material was being presented in school didn't click with him, but astonishingly, despite having studied it decades ago both at school and university, explaining it to him, it finally made sense to me. The unit circle definition of a tangent is a thing of beauty. I had the time to get my child to appreciate it as well, because of the extra time I had to spend with him, whereas the teacher had to hit curriculum benchmarks. I also think this is where things like intergenerational math-phobia come from: parents who don't grasp core concepts and are scared off, and can't help their own children, creating an ongoing cycle.
  • BeFlatXIII 2y ago
    > I also think this is where things like intergenerational math phobia come from: (elementary) teachers who don't grasp core concepts, are scared off, and can't help their own students, creating an ongoing cycle. I hope you appreciate my addition of the other common path of math phobia.
    • ern 2y ago
      Absolutely, I do appreciate that addition — I definitely had teachers like that. It’s probably why, when I got to university and tackled subjects like probability theory, discrete math, and theoretical CS, I did extremely well — they weren’t reliant on the shaky algebra and trig foundation I had from school. Once the focus shifted to logic and conceptual thinking, without the baggage of poorly taught fundamentals, everything clicked
• 999900000999 2y ago
  I basically found this in college too, I quickly gave up on computer science as a major. I'd rather just go out and learn how to build what I want to build versus hearing a 3-hour lecture about how the jvm works. The answer is it's magic and no one cares, now let's go build some games
  • bruce511 2y ago
    Firstly, and this is worth pointing out, "computer science" is not about programming. It's about science, in this case specifically the science that makes computers work. At school I thought "computer science" meant "programming" - which it doesn't. So well done for recognizing this before wasting your much time. (Seriously, not sarcastic.) programming can easily be learned outside college. To other general readers here though I'll say that understanding the science can be really helpful over a career. It's not terribly applicable in getting that first job, but as you progress more and more of those theoretical fundamentals come into play. Ultimately there are a small fraction of people who need to understand how it all works, all the way down, because those people build the things that programmers use to build everything else.
    • milesrout 2y ago
      This is a myth. Computer science absolutely is about programming. The science that makes computers work is called physics. There are theoretical parts of computer science, but it is fundamentally a practical subject. All of it is in service to programming. Type systems are about typing programs. Algorithms are implemented using programs. Data structures are for use in programs. The very worst computer science lecturers are those that forget it is a practical subject and try to teach it like abstract mathematics, because they believe (whether they realise they believe it or not) that it is more prestigious to teach abstract concepts than practical concrete things. It is the same in mathematics, where unfortunately there has developed a tradition since Bourbaki of trying to teach abstract notions as fundamental while concrete problem solving is left to the engineers. The result is that many engineers are much stronger mathematicians than many mathematically-trained students, and those students have to relearn the practical foundations of the subject before they can make progress at the graduate level. If they don't, they get stuck doing what looks like maths, but is actually just abstract roleplaying.
• tlb 2y ago
  What a horrendous crime, to turn a fascinating subject into a boring curriculum to be forced on teachers and children. I've received great intellectual satisfaction from various well-taught subjects. I would rather chop off a finger than lose them. So curriculum committees that make subjects boring are doing something worse than chopping off millions of children's fingers.
  • lloeki 2y ago
    > Children ask: 'why?' So we put them in school, which cures them of this instinct and conquers curiosity through boredom. - Paul Valéry
  • Akronymus 2y ago
    With any kind of history especially, its just rote memorization of facts and not the connections between those facts.I hated history in school because of that, but now I actually find it interesting to learn that x happened because of y that also led to z and such. Or just rote memorization of technical facts, like how many wires does a PATA cable have. Or why must kids memoroze how an ethernet frame is built up? Sure go over it in class and show it as a lesson in how to read how binary protocols are defined. Because either you forget it anyways because its not relevant to your job, or you can look it up and memorize it over time as you use it often enough. I really wish that teaching of history will get better for current and future kids.
  • brainzap 2y ago
    its a job, not a mission
• cainxinth 2y ago
  > 13 year old kids don't care about the history of computers Speaking for myself, and I’m sure many others on hn, I was very interested in the history of computers at 13!