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Anyone who's cheering this proposal should remember how well making mathematics compulsory has worked out for us. How many kids are (justifiably) disgusted wit

Anyone who's cheering this proposal should remember how well making mathematics compulsory has worked out for us. How many kids are (justifiably) disgusted with advanced mathematics because it's forced on them? It's also important to remember highschool teachers aren't college professors. You may have had awesome and passionate HS teachers, but from what I saw, there don't seem to be very many. I think the quickest way to destroy a future programmer is by forcing them to learn dumb ideas from half-interested teachers during their formative years, and it seems like this proposal will lead to that. It's hard to understand why people trust the modern highschool system to teach kids anything. Most of the kids aren't there to learn; they're there because they're forced to be. If an ambitious highschooler wants to learn programming, why not give them a way to learn it in a university early? I really hope I'm wrong, but in my experience the highschool system is a grim situation for nerds, especially in the Midwest. EDIT: Regarding highschool teachers vs CS professors: I meant that teaching programming requires programming ability, not just teaching ability. Maybe highschool teachers will become good programmers first. I don't know. And certainly, awful college professors exist just like awful highschool teachers exist. It just seems like the average CS professor has a higher chance of imparting useful knowledge to kids than a highschool teacher who has to learn it from the same book as the kids they're teaching it to. Worse, the kids have a high chance of becoming disgusted with the idea of programming if it's taught poorly, so this proposal seems at least as potentially dangerous as it is potentially helpful.

dragonwriter 13y ago
> It's also important to remember highschool teachers aren't college professors. You may have had awesome and passionate HS teachers, but from what I saw, there don't seem to be very many. I had some -- none in my programming classes, though -- but that wasn't all too different than my college experience. If anything, the high school teachers seemed, on average, better teachers, though perhaps in a worse teaching environment. The college professors obviously had more formal education in their subject area. > I think the quickest way to destroy a future programmer is by forcing them to learn dumb ideas from half-interested teachers during their formative years. I think the quickest way to destroy a potential future programmer is to have them learn nothing relevant from anyone during their formative years.
timjahn 13y ago
"It's also important to remember highschool teachers aren't college professors. You may have had awesome and passionate HS teachers, but from what I saw, there don't seem to be very many." So, because you had some lousy high school teachers, that means college professors are passionate and high school teachers aren't? Why are high school teachers inferior to college professors?
StefanKarpinski 13y ago
There does seem to be a lot of negativity about "math", but at the same time people do generally know how to do basic arithmetic, problem solving, and even some algebra – none of which comes naturally to humans. You could argue that in average schools, kids "learn dumb ideas from half-interested teachers" in all subjects. The question therefore, is whether computer programming/science will suffer the same fate as math and become cool to hate, or be more like english, history, or foreign languages, which while not universally beloved, are at least not typically reviled. Honestly, I think that learning programming is probably a lot more fun than any of the traditional subjects. The interactivity and immediate feedback could actually make it by far the least distasteful subject for many school kids. If anything, programming could indirectly get more kids interested in math.
- 001sky 13y ago
  At some level 'math' becomes an academic word, and what students need is more rigourous fundamental numeracy. I hate the phrase 'quantitative' reasoning, but many people outside of maths departments actually use math in fundamental, yet rigorous ways. Part of the issue seems the deference to authority in the schooling system, which is paralleled in other ways...deference to 'expertise'...or 'abstraction' when what should be the heart of the matter is actually rigor and fundamental soundness. The latter is at conflict with other pet ideas, though. Like everybody wins and the overpromotion of self esteem. The cool to hate ("fancy math") thing is just a channeled form of anti-authoritarianism. Whereas fundamental soundness is actually providing the tools for power and freedom for the individual. When schools (but rarely) teach proper maths notation...I wonder...how/are they going to swallow cs?
  - superuser2 13y ago
    Students are taught that "math" is doing arithmetic by hand, simplifying and factoring expressions, memorization, plugging-and-chugging formulas, and in general performing rote computations with pencil and paper. These things are simply not pleasant for a lot of people. Nothing anti-authoritarian about it, they're just unpleasant and repetitive tasks that any good hacker would be aching to automate. I had great science teachers who taught me about fundamental soundness, reasoning from first principles, developing/testing/revising quantative models, and describing the state and behavior of the universe (i.e. what calculus was created for in the first place). That was fun. But nobody was doing that thinking "so this is math" because it wasn't called that, it was called physics or chemistry. When you are in an a middle or high school classroom called "Math" with a book called "Math" you are doing rote algebraic manipulation, full stop. So that is what math is to you. No wonder people hate it. Fundamental soundness, proof, etc. has very little to do with numeracy in the sense of mental arithmetic, estimation skills. Those are useful too, but different things. I still can't multiply two-digit numbers in my head but that never posed a problem in calculus, computer science, chemistry, physics, or anything else.
deleted 13y ago
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dragonwriter 13y ago

> It's also important to remember highschool teachers aren't college professors. You may have had awesome and passionate HS teachers, but from what I saw, there don't seem to be very many. I had some -- none in my programming classes, though -- but that wasn't all too different than my college experience. If anything, the high school teachers seemed, on average, better teachers, though perhaps in a worse teaching environment. The college professors obviously had more formal education in their subject area. > I think the quickest way to destroy a future programmer is by forcing them to learn dumb ideas from half-interested teachers during their formative years. I think the quickest way to destroy a potential future programmer is to have them learn nothing relevant from anyone during their formative years.

timjahn 13y ago

"It's also important to remember highschool teachers aren't college professors. You may have had awesome and passionate HS teachers, but from what I saw, there don't seem to be very many." So, because you had some lousy high school teachers, that means college professors are passionate and high school teachers aren't? Why are high school teachers inferior to college professors?

StefanKarpinski 13y ago

There does seem to be a lot of negativity about "math", but at the same time people do generally know how to do basic arithmetic, problem solving, and even some algebra – none of which comes naturally to humans. You could argue that in average schools, kids "learn dumb ideas from half-interested teachers" in all subjects. The question therefore, is whether computer programming/science will suffer the same fate as math and become cool to hate, or be more like english, history, or foreign languages, which while not universally beloved, are at least not typically reviled. Honestly, I think that learning programming is probably a lot more fun than any of the traditional subjects. The interactivity and immediate feedback could actually make it by far the least distasteful subject for many school kids. If anything, programming could indirectly get more kids interested in math.

001sky 13y ago
At some level 'math' becomes an academic word, and what students need is more rigourous fundamental numeracy. I hate the phrase 'quantitative' reasoning, but many people outside of maths departments actually use math in fundamental, yet rigorous ways. Part of the issue seems the deference to authority in the schooling system, which is paralleled in other ways...deference to 'expertise'...or 'abstraction' when what should be the heart of the matter is actually rigor and fundamental soundness. The latter is at conflict with other pet ideas, though. Like everybody wins and the overpromotion of self esteem. The cool to hate ("fancy math") thing is just a channeled form of anti-authoritarianism. Whereas fundamental soundness is actually providing the tools for power and freedom for the individual. When schools (but rarely) teach proper maths notation...I wonder...how/are they going to swallow cs?
- superuser2 13y ago
  Students are taught that "math" is doing arithmetic by hand, simplifying and factoring expressions, memorization, plugging-and-chugging formulas, and in general performing rote computations with pencil and paper. These things are simply not pleasant for a lot of people. Nothing anti-authoritarian about it, they're just unpleasant and repetitive tasks that any good hacker would be aching to automate. I had great science teachers who taught me about fundamental soundness, reasoning from first principles, developing/testing/revising quantative models, and describing the state and behavior of the universe (i.e. what calculus was created for in the first place). That was fun. But nobody was doing that thinking "so this is math" because it wasn't called that, it was called physics or chemistry. When you are in an a middle or high school classroom called "Math" with a book called "Math" you are doing rote algebraic manipulation, full stop. So that is what math is to you. No wonder people hate it. Fundamental soundness, proof, etc. has very little to do with numeracy in the sense of mental arithmetic, estimation skills. Those are useful too, but different things. I still can't multiply two-digit numbers in my head but that never posed a problem in calculus, computer science, chemistry, physics, or anything else.

deleted 13y ago

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