[Edu-sig] Elementary School Instruction

[Kirby Urner]

> So, my question is, if you wanted a group of certainly-not-stupid 16 year
> old kids to at least get a taste of programming, understanding that many
> of them are there because it's a required course, and they're not 
> predisposed to be interested in it, what would you do?  What is a minimal 
> set of things they ought to be exposed to?  How much time would you spend 
> on it?  What do you think they ought to be able to do at the end of the 
> time?
> 
> Thanks,
>     Andy

Hi Andy --

It's difficult to judge an ecology remotely -- even up close we don't know
how to manage wildlife successfully (is Crichton's point, or one of his
character's, in 'State of Fear', my recent airplane reading).

In other words, I'd have to be in your classroom for awhile in order to
speak specifically of my impressions.

In some schools, there's a conspiracy among the students to make teachers
work hard on the most primitive basics, a kind of unionization around the
premise that any "star students" make the others look bad, so if you think
you're going to study hard and show off, forget about it (if you want a
social life that is, and we can make sure that you do).  Funny thing is:
many of these students grow up to become classroom teachers and continue
operating along these same principles (a union of grown-ups, fancy that).

In my recent teaching experiences where Python was involved, the students
tended to not know each other socially outside of my classroom.  They
converged to an unfamiliar, high tech, vaguely industrial location (not
their familiar school) and the teacher (me) was clearly not like a classroom
teacher, e.g. he (me) didn't seem to spend a lot of time in classrooms (this
was an exception, not the rule).  All of the above changes a huge number of
parameters, including that "not predisposed to be interested" part.

In other news, I was invited to speak at Europython and have been listed on
the web site as a speaker, Education track.  To that end, I've produced a
PDF outlining my specific objectives regarding Python in a mathematics
context, K-12 or college (my focus is K-12, given my background as a high
school mathematics teacher in New Jersey).  I've linked to this PDF from my
blog:

http://worldgame.blogspot.com/2005/06/dot-notation.html

Kirby