[Edu-sig] More news from Oregon

[kirby urner]

Reviewing some of the history from my angle:  we did some pilots with Python
in Portland Public Schools at the geek flagship, Winterhaven, both before my
family joined, and afterward, me picking up McCarty's 8th grade one day a
week for some field testing of new ideas, including projecting Google Earth,
xml-rpc, etc. (Python + DOM might be a better name for it, would change the
mix more in favor of JavaScript if doing it again).  Then I switched over to
older students via Saturday Academy, publishing write-ups to edu-sig and to
my blog.  Now we (my partnership) is hammering out this Python Briefing and
promoting it to such as the Software Association of Oregon and the Center
for Advanced Learning, places like that, with the idea being to help with
inservice training of already embedded faculty.

The situation in Oregon has been:  Java for AP compsci (high school level),
but the state institutions of higher ed not being that keen on accepting ETS
certification, meaning many bothering with AP compsci have been aiming at
higher ed in neighboring states, Utah especially, where I understand the
Java curriculum gets college credits.  Python has made inroads in this or
that classroom (I don't pretend to having a lot of overview data on this,
don't sit in State offices set up to monitor such things, if they even
exist) based on anecdotal evidence collected at SAO planning meetings at
Willamette University (attended with a team from Free Geek, a few years ago
now).

My approach has always been different (though not original with me, Kenneth
Iverson an inspiration):  to challenge the standard mathematics curriculum
to update or die, meaning if you stick with those calculators, you'll get
creamed by the new charters we're floating.  That's a polemical way of
stating it though, need to be more diplomatic on the ground, plus it's
usually not the teacher that's the bottleneck, but the subservient attitude
of curriculum writers towards big publishing houses and their paper-wasting
ways.  Computer programming languages are "disruptive technology" pure and
simple, and there's no easy way to phase them in to high school mathematics
classes without breaking backward compatibility in some ways, duh.

Internationally, it's a somewhat different picture, with some schools
systems realizing they have nothing to lose, and so more willing to
experiment with the new tools.  And of course homeschoolers are all over the
map with this stuff, often regular school students by day, i.e. they
homeschool after hours, when having access to YouTube, other essentials.  So
I've found a lot of international collaborators willing to leverage what
we're able to develop for our Oregon and Washington region (Silicon Forest),
Gerald de Jong for example (a Java guy more than Python).

Anyway, the long and short of it is I'm still working with that charter in
Alaska I mentioned in my Chicago talk, hammering on ASCII - to - Unicode as
a "major story of our time" don't care what class it's taught in
(sociology?  anthropology?).  Basically, if it's taught nowhere in the high
school, it's not up to standard.  Of course that doesn't mean "state
standard" in all cases, which is where we might say something not entirely
charitable about this or that slow poke of a state, doesn't even teach kids
the very basics.  But then, who said state legislatures should be in the
curriculum writing business in the first place, is a legitimate question.
In Oregon, private industry still has a say too (and why not, we know what a
lot of the jobs are like).

I'm also continuing to collaborate with Ian Benson on some of this SQL stuff
(need to be teaching SQL in algebra, or what good is it?), other
professional mathematicians.  Not everyone wants to get out in front in the
"math wars" understandably.  Especially this Bucky stuff is controversial,
lots of media stirrings thanks to Whitney Museum in New York, on to Chicago
next.  Plus there's a play opening in Portland soon **, which only helps me
with the geometry teachers, as they see a way to connect more to these
extra-curricular events.  As for how "Bucky stuff" ties to Python in my
little world, that's too big a topic for here.  Hypertoons and rbf.py are
two points of contact, or check these Focal Points in my blog:
http://mybizmo.blogspot.com/2006/09/focal-points.html

Kirby Urner
4Dsolutions.net

** http://www.pcs.org/bucky/
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