Here's an email from the front lines. I asked Shelley's permission to post it to edu-sig and she gave it -- and of course I invited her to join this discussion list, which she says she'll plan to do soon, once she gets some other things out of her in box. My reply to Shelley's letter follows (next post). I hope this might generate some further discussion on our list. Shelley will be able to catch up on the thread via the web archives if she likes. Kirby ============================================= Date: Sun, 06 Apr 2003 00:29:48 +0100 From: Shelley Walsh To: urnerk@qwest.net Subject: Python Anxiety Hi Kirby, I don't know whether you remember me, but I have seen your posts many times in the various math education groups, and it was through you that I discovered Python. The first time I saw it, I was absolutely delighted with its potential for helping with math understanding. But lately I have become disillusioned, because I am constantly finding that students don't like Python, and I can't at all figure out why. I thought at first it was because I was teaching students who were very computer illiterate, but then recently I have had the opportunity to teach a Discrete Mathematics for Computing distance education class, and again I saw great potential for using Python to make the abstract ideas more concrete, but again it has fallen flat. Many of these students have programmed in C++ and Java, so you would think they could learn enough Python for what I was suggesting in 5 minutes. I don't know C++ and Java and it only took me a slight bit longer. I have given them so many opportunities for extra credit projects having to do with it that they could all have perfect scores for the class if they wanted, but nobody has taken the bait. But partly this doesn't surprise me, because these distance education students are very lazy. There are a lot of people that do DE for a free ride, and the familiar is always more comforting to such people. But what really shocked me was the experience I had today with my colleagues when I tried to show it to them as something with great potential for help with understanding algebra. I was just showing them how you could use it as something better than a hand calculator for doing such things as solving equations by searching, which I think is a really good idea for keeping students in touch with the base meaning of solving equations. And one of my colleagues practically expressed horror and said that this would totally put him off of mathematics. And others expresses similar opinions. I remember the first time I saw you write about how you could define a function in the console mode def f(x): return x**2, and then proceed to evaluate it on form a composition function, I immediately thought that was just such a great way for students to see such things right in front of their eyes, for them to no longer be abstract. But he seemed to think it would take him hours to master the syntax of it and for the students it would be just one more thing to learn when they were already afraid of the subject. And partly from some of the reactions I have gotten from students, it seems that he is likely to be right. For him the fact that it there is a : and a return instead of just an equal sign was totally daunting and the ** makes it even worse. So my question for you is have you found this kind of Python anxiety, and if so how have you dealt with it? -- Shelley Walsh shelley.walsh9@ntlworld.com http://homepage.mac.com/shelleywalsh