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I'm a middle-school Computer Science teacher at an all-girls' school where CS has been promoted to a core subject. And a software developer. I don't see much s

I'm a middle-school Computer Science teacher at an all-girls' school where CS has been promoted to a core subject. And a software developer. I don't see much substantial disagreement between the OP's post and the comments here--she's basically making three points: 1. The (secondary) education system's role is to show students how to engage with the field, not tailor their training to the specifics of a job posting. It's more important that students be able to pick up new paradigms than it is that they know any particular language. 2. Education is iterative. It's ok to learn something that fudges the details or that's not a best practice if it means you're making things now. We all return to domains of knowledge with finer granularity when we need it. 3. Content knowledge is important for teachers, but their expertise is in pedagogical content knowledge--the knowledge and skills of how to productively open a domain to new learners. Do we disagree about any of these? Sure, there's some unnecessary heat in the post. But that's true of the comments here too. I wish some folks here were able to bring more introspection and empathy to conversations about education (yielding insights about who they are as learners, and how others are different). And I wish we stopped dumping on teachers as the source of all our problems (let's talk more about why this is happening later...), so teachers didn't have to feel resentful and defensive in public fora. If you're interested in CS education and you haven't spent any time in a classroom/after school club/coder dojo, I'd invite you to come get some firsthand experience. I teach in Palo Alto, come on over...

hunterloftis 12y ago
1. Must the two be mutually exclusive? Teaching students irrelevant or outdated skills is a great way to encourage them to dismiss the profession as old, stodgy, useless, etc. 2. That's true. Is there a reason not to fudge the details of a current, employable technology stack? 3. Let's examine the logical extremes. On the one hand you have an incompetent teacher who can nevertheless communicate well. On the other hand you have a competent teacher who is a poor communicator. Frankly, I would rather have the latter. Otherwise, what's the point?
- cproctor 12y ago
  A note on 3: It's not really a dichotomy between communication skills and content knowledge. Pedagogical content knowledge builds on content knowledge--it's about knowing the structure of knowledge--the paths different learners will take through ideas, the common misconceptions and the examples that will resolve them, the ability to infer the shape of a learner's web of ideas, and knowing your way around the content knowledge well enough to offer something just beyond what the student has considered, but which is close enough that she can make the leap and thereby add it to her web.
- fredophile 12y ago
  Someone else addressed your third point but I wanted to address the first one as well. I write code in C++ almost every day for work. I wouldn't teach C++ to a child as their first programming language. I'd probably want to teach them a simple language that focuses on the building blocks of code that allow problem solving. Things like loops, conditionals and variables. I wouldn't want them to ever need to worry about things like integer overflows, floating point arithmetic, memory allocation, preprocessors, templates or any low level details. This doesn't mean the ideal teaching language would be stodgy and useless. It just needs to offer an appropriate level of abstraction for the current age and experience level of the learner.

hunterloftis 12y ago

1. Must the two be mutually exclusive? Teaching students irrelevant or outdated skills is a great way to encourage them to dismiss the profession as old, stodgy, useless, etc. 2. That's true. Is there a reason not to fudge the details of a current, employable technology stack? 3. Let's examine the logical extremes. On the one hand you have an incompetent teacher who can nevertheless communicate well. On the other hand you have a competent teacher who is a poor communicator. Frankly, I would rather have the latter. Otherwise, what's the point?

cproctor 12y ago
A note on 3: It's not really a dichotomy between communication skills and content knowledge. Pedagogical content knowledge builds on content knowledge--it's about knowing the structure of knowledge--the paths different learners will take through ideas, the common misconceptions and the examples that will resolve them, the ability to infer the shape of a learner's web of ideas, and knowing your way around the content knowledge well enough to offer something just beyond what the student has considered, but which is close enough that she can make the leap and thereby add it to her web.
fredophile 12y ago
Someone else addressed your third point but I wanted to address the first one as well. I write code in C++ almost every day for work. I wouldn't teach C++ to a child as their first programming language. I'd probably want to teach them a simple language that focuses on the building blocks of code that allow problem solving. Things like loops, conditionals and variables. I wouldn't want them to ever need to worry about things like integer overflows, floating point arithmetic, memory allocation, preprocessors, templates or any low level details. This doesn't mean the ideal teaching language would be stodgy and useless. It just needs to offer an appropriate level of abstraction for the current age and experience level of the learner.