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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 Teaching students irrelevant or outdated skills is a great way to encourage them to dismiss the profession as old, stodgy

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 Teaching students irrelevant or outdated skills is a great way to encourage them to dismiss the profession as old, stodgy, useless, etc. 2.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.

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.