-------------- Original message ---------------------- From: Blake blake@kingdomrpg.com
On Thu, 23 Aug 2007 22:33:37 -0700, mmille10@comcast.net wrote:
No, they didn't use the term "office suite" back then. I was relating the curriculum to what it would be called now. We did learn about how to use a word processor, spreadsheet, and database application, though. Yes, they were separate applications. May be I didn't make that clearin what I wrote. I remember we used AppleWriter (I think), and VisiCalc,and some database app. whose name I can't remember, all on Apple II's.
Well, let me apologize if I sounded overly picky. There was a very short window (historically speaking) for when "office suite" might have meant anything other than "Microsoft Office". It's depressing to hear that (at least in your experience) the needle went from oddball geek hobby to mundane replacement for typewriter, ledger and filing system. To their current state: Monopoly perpetuators.
Just a simple misunderstanding. :)
My experience with computing in Jr. high was fun, interesting, and challenging, largely because we were allowed to bring in our own creativity. From what I've been hearing this stands in stark contrast to what passes for computing in schools now, which sounds tedious and boring. IMO it's no wonder people don't want to go into CS. Their first experience with it is like "stale bread" compared to what I had. There are other reasons for the decrease in interest, but inspiration to move towards it should not be overlooked.
Too much of it is a matter of interest destroyed: A student attacks a subject vigorously but is crushed in some manner or another, say with the sort of ritualistic kind of "teaching" Alan describes, where there is no understanding, and these days where the rituals have been replaced with a shadow of something that "builds self-esteem" while even denigrating understanding. And of course the usual brutal traditions of bad teachers.
I agree with you about the moves towards "self-esteem" practices that only end up deceiving students and parents into believing the students are learning everything they can when in fact they're missing out.
I experienced the ritualistic methodology you speak of in a couple of the primary schools I attended. It didn't agree with me. Fortunately I didn't have to stay there long. I grew up with a single mother who just so happened to be a Montessori teacher. :) She wanted me to be in creative, interesting schools whenever possible. When I was young I was moved in and out of private and public schools. Things stabilized for me at 5th grade when she found a public school district that fit reasonably well with what she and I both wanted for me.
My mother and I recounted this recently. I was telling her a bit about this discussion on here. She said when she was evaluating what schools I should attend she looked at the curricula/programs and she talked to the principals. She said principals had a lot of power to shape the schools. They hired the teachers. If she liked what the principal had to say, she'd consider sending me to that school.
I had a mixture of good and bad teachers, and as Kay said in response to your post, I had some that inspired me, even years later, to study further what they taught.
One was a civics teacher in Jr. high. He was the only teacher I can remember who made an effort to really show us what goes on in politics, democracy, functioning governments, and courtrooms, by setting up these scenarios in the classroom, and then showing us our own behavior in these settings. In one exercise he set up a scenario where the class was "on a spaceship" and had landed on a livable planet, and we were setting up a new government from scratch. He then let us loose debating and agreeing to systems of government, and laws that would govern our society. It was simplistic, of course. The interesting thing was what new ideas emerged when existing constraints were removed. These exercises were fascinating, because we were participating in and observing a society in a microcosm.
We were allowed to be as opinionated as we wanted to be, and we were allowed to discuss those opinions with the other students. Sometimes the teacher would jump in to provide some clarity and adult experience to the conversation. I still remember some of the experiences we had in that class. Interesting stuff.
Another was a CS professor at the university I attended as an undergrad. My goal was to take a graduate level course on compilers since I was curious about them. Before I could get there I had to take a senior level course on programming languages, where we explored different types of languages, their conceptual underpinnings, history, and some of what made them tick. This was in 1991. We did some labs in a few of the dynamic languages, including Smalltalk. I remember the professor explained to us that Smalltalk was originally not just a language, but a computer system. I don't think he used the term "operating system" to describe it. From what I understand now it would fit well in a course on operating systems, though the CS curriculum apparently didn't recognize it for what it was. This professor did. He said the language was a part of the system, and the system could be modified via. the language while it was running. He also said it had a graphical interface with windows. I remember being a bit dazzled by this description. It sounded very interesting, but it gave me a bit of headache trying to understand what he was talking about. I eventually got it after pondering it for a while. It's too bad he didn't have any of the videos of the ST-80 demos from Xerox.
We didn't use the full Smalltalk system for our assignments, but rather GNU Smalltalk, using only its scripting mode. I had a great time, brief as it was, programming in it. It was my first OOP language. What I liked about it is it seemed that one could "program with concepts" rather than with types. I had the experience of creating a domain-specific language (that's what they call it now), and the pleasure of doing that came from it feeling so natural to use. I could express a problem in a notation that was basically native to the domain. I still remember the experience. It's the reason I even thought to look at Squeak last year once I heard about it.
BTW, Alan, your presentation at ETech 2003 on Squeak and Croquet, and the history it built upon blew my mind. I watched it online. It took the Smalltalk experience I had in college up to a whole new level. The feeling I had afterwards was, "What have I been doing all of these years?" Thanks for that! :)
But you know, it doesn't seem to matter much what subject it is, I've seen the same thing in all of them: if the student is interested, nothing will stop him; if not, nothing will help. Some of this is a matter of native interest: We are not all interested in the same things, and no matter how delightfully presented, the subject will remain at best a mild curiosity.
I guess I can relate to this through a couple of experiences I had with math subjects, but usually this was not the case with others. If a teacher made an effort to teach a subject well I tended to get interested enough to learn it. There was meat to these subjects, and the teacher tried to convey an understanding of that.
I had decent teachers in Calculus and linear algebra, insofar as they made an effort to cover topics completely using their methodology and engage their students, but I had a hard time getting interested in the subject and/or relating to it. I think it was largely because what they did was teach a few basic concepts in depth, and then spent the rest of the class on high level concepts, never delving into what was really going on. So basically all I learned from them was pattern matching and symbol manipulation. This only got interesting when I took a CS class where one of our assignments was to create a Lisp program that did symbolic differentiation, which heavily used these same skills.
The part of all this that felt so empty was I could go through the motions and get a correct answer, by following some rules, without having a real grasp of what I was describing with my algebraic equations. It's a scary feeling, actually. I felt like I was learning very little, and in retrospect I think that feeling was correct. In large part the classes were a waste of my time, unless the goal was not to teach me math, but these other skills. I've sometimes wondered if that's the reason the CS curriculum requires one to take Calculus. I've heard more than one person tell me that it's good for CS students to take lots of math, because it indirectly teaches you how to approach problems logically. Well, it did that for me, but I don't think I really learned Calculus.
I had a few experiences back then that demonstrated to me that I had very little understanding of linear math, despite being able to produce correct answers in it by following some rules. I didn't come to truly understand the subject until I took physics.
---Mark mmille10@comcast.net http://tekkie.wordpress.com
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