With my daughter in high school, I read this post from Thomas Sowell with some interest. Never mind the ideology - what interests me here is the contrast: universities in the US - for good or ill - are fairly unbounded for students. The contrast is in what I see in high school - my daughter could get suspended or expelled for bringing cough drops to school, and I see stories like this one - police called on account of a steak knife at lunch - more often than I can count.

Things weren't wide open when I was in high school (late 70's), but you could bring cough drops and cold medicine to school without any fear that you were going to get tossed out on your ear. The thing I find odd is this: students go from the lockdown that is the modern high school into the complete freedom that is the modern university. I'm not sure what the right mix of control/freedom is at what level, but it seems to me that stepping directly from a straightjacket into free fall probably isn't it...

Technorati Tags: high school, college, university

Andres Valloud expresses astonishment at what passes for college level coursework these days. To be fair, the grade school level math he noticed was not coursework, but review - for the high school level math that was coursework.

A few years back, this might have surprised me, but my uncle has been teaching that level of remedial math at a university near him since retiring as a high school teacher. Some of the stories he tells about the students he gets are amazing, in the "how did they get to college" sense of amazing.

The problem seems to be an excess of compassion that is not linked to common sense. It is no favor to pass a kid through school when they continually fail basic subjects, and it continues to be no favor to them to send them to a college where they are certain to fail. Without basic standards being enforced, all this compassion yields is tragedy. Better to fail kids early, when there's a chance they'll learn something from it, than to feed a sense of entitlement.

Technorati Tags: schools

David Buck is running an Intro to VisualWorks course in Ottawa, April 23-27. Interested? Give him a shout.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

James McGovern asks a question about corporate education classes:

Have you ever noticed that the vast majority of educational courses targeted at corporate America are introductory? Have you asked yourself why aren't there more courses that teach advanced concepts? We all understand that advanced concepts logically depend on simpler concepts but thinking should stop there. Humans don't learn using predicate logic, so advanced concepts can be taught even to children, so as long as the person teaching them has some level of competency.

Back in the old days, when I was a VW instructor for ParcPlace, we faced exactly this quandary. Customers would ask us about advanced material, since our public offerings were mostly introductory. There was a reason for that, and it was based on the actual behavior of corporate customers.

When we gave an advanced course, companies would send people to it who weren't prepared. Happened every time I was involved in an advanced course, even when sales and services management made a point of telling the customer that the material assumed a certain level of pre-existing knowledge. We would show up, and find that half (sometimes more) of the class was completely unready for the material - and that made the entire thing unfair to both the prepared students and the unprepared ones - neither group really got the instruction they needed.

I suspect that we weren't unique in this regard - ask around the professional training ranks, and I'd guess that they would all say the same thing.

Scoble points to the last Gillmore Gang - Dana Gardner and Jason Calacanis got into a pretty good fight over public/private charity. I started listening to that a week ago while jogging; I've actually looked into some of the issues they were arguing over, and was a teacher 20 years ago. I stopped listening, because every additional second I listened, I lost respect for Gardner. Why?

He was arguing that Jason Calacanis' entirely admirable efforts to rescue a few children from bad schools was an act of evil, designed to "destroy" public education. That's a really, really stupid argument, without regard to what issue you try and deploy it against. The bottom line is, any effort to help people in need is admirable, and Jason should be saluted for caring enough to try. Gardner can go suck eggs. When you let ideology (of any stripe) blind you to good acts, you've lost some of your humanity.

Technorati Tags: Calacanis, Gardener, Gillmor Gang

Ted Leung reports on what he's using to teach his girls about programming:

The new regimen involved another Windows shortcut to pop up Notepad. The girls then had to learn to save a file, switch windows (on purpose, not by accident) to the Python interpreter window, reload the module, and look at the Tk output window. I found myself barraged by questions that had nothing to do with turtle geometry or programming. All the questions were about the environment -- forgetting to save a file, getting windows out of focus or behind each other, forgetting to reload the module, etc. I suppose they were learning computer "literacy", but it really reminded me as to how much stuff you need to know in order to do some simple programming. In a way, it was easier when I was doing AppleSoft Basic on the Apple II -- no separate editor, no windows to lose or have out of focus.

At Mind Camp, Todd Blanchard brought by a copy of "Squeak: Learn Programming with Robots", and the girls got excited by paging through it. It looked pretty good, and Squeak/Smalltalk certainly has the programming constructs that I want my kids to be exposed to straight off (at least if they are going to be programmers). Also, one of the original motivations for Smalltalk was for allowing kids to do programming and simulations, and that heritage seems to have carried through into the Squeak community. For a great/depressing look at some of the learning applications, you can check out this video from ETech 2003.

For teaching software neophytes, nothing stays out of the way and lets you learn like Smalltalk. Which makes you consider the impediments that most people have just gotten used to :)

Joel decries the movement of Java into CS departments - he wavers a fair bit, but seems to think that students should still be working with languages like C (during the first half or so of the post). He gets to the right point at the bottom though:

The most sympathetic interpretation of why CS departments are so enthusiastic to dumb down their classes is that it leaves them more time to teach actual CS concepts, if they don't need to spend two whole lectures unconfusing students about the difference between, say, a Java int and an Integer. Well, if that's the case, 6.001 has the perfect answer for you: Scheme, a teaching language so simple that the entire language can be taught to bright students in about ten minutes; then you can spend the rest of the semester on fixed points.

That's the problem, and I'll say that using C or C++ are even worse. The students get bogged down in irrelevancies instead of learning something useful. That was the thought behind Pascal years ago, and it's why Scheme, or Smalltalk, or Python, or Ruby would be better choices than those dagnasty C based languages.

Meanwhile, Scoble says that MS is having trouble finding enough C and C++ programmers:

Almost every team I interview with my camcorder says they can’t find enough C or C++ programmers to get their stuff done. Some on very exciting teams with hundreds of millions of users. Some that, gasp, actually have budget to hire real programmers.

They could try doing it the old fashioned way - hire smart people and train them. When I went to work for the DoD (Lo, those many years ago now), that's what they did - a lot of the software developers that came out of DoD weren't even CS grads (I wasn't). You get fewer bad ideas that way, and can train people in your shop idioms.

Ted Leung details how he got started with computers. Fascinating stuff - the last paragraphsreally grabbed me:

School played a very limited, and if you are ungenerous, obstructionist role in all of this. Everything that I learned about computers I learned outside of the established school system, and I actually had to work around one of my (well intentioned, I"m sure) teachers. I learned on my own, and at the feet of actual practitioners. Perhaps it's not all that surprising that Julie and I have chosen to home school our kids. Some of you know that they've done a little Python, and they're just about to get started on Squeak (more on all of that in future posts). Whether they turn out to be hackers is not for me to say, but I'm at least going to do my best to make sure they got the kinds of opportunities that I got.

I find that I'm supplementing the local school quite a bit for my daughter. Their teaching of history is especially atrocious.