[Edu-sig] more card play

[kirby urner]

On Tue, Nov 3, 2009 at 8:48 AM, Travis Vaught <travis at vaught.net> wrote:
>
> On Nov 3, 2009, at 10:04 AM, kirby urner wrote:
>
> On Mon, Nov 2, 2009 at 8:27 PM, Edward Cherlin <echerlin at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Cards: You are right on the merits for combinatory math, but you will
>> run into strong cultural aversions.
>>
>
> Yes, anticipated.  However, the Python subculture has done the necessary
> work to publish a Diversity Statement, which has an antibiotic effect
> against puritanical bigots (assuming you mean some people have moral hangups
> about gambling?).
>
> I was rather assuming that the hangups would be about the more cringe-worthy
> aspects of tarot cards.  The fact that people of faith may not get a good
> feeling about using a tool whose logo is a snake, introductory examples are
> using tarot cards, and whose theme music might be construed to be the rather
> irreverent creations of the Monty Python players, says less about the
> presence of puritanical bigotry and more about a complete lack of
> sophistication in marketing.

Thanks for clarifying Travis!

I'd completely forgotten that I'd mentioned the Tarot Deck as an
excuse to introduce more long-winded string templating, ala Madlibs
and Grossology (a recurring theme in my curriculum writing).

By way of background, a lot of younger kids especially enjoy
scatological material as it's something they can relate to, makes the
topic more user-friendly.  There's a genre of Madlib that focuses on
this theme (you know what a Madlib is right?).

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2009256554_grossology24m.html
http://tampabay.momslikeme.com/members/JournalActions.aspx?g=247205&m=388979

Probably the earliest introduction of scatology is in the first Snake
method, where you have both 'eat' and 'poop' methods, a way of
introducing the list data structure (as the stomach) and using it as a
queue (first in first out, ala FIFO).

I've had good experiences in my classroom of first introducing
string.Template using Madlibs of an entertaining nature, then
switching to more auster string.Templates having to do with generating
scene description language and/or VRML, for getting polyhedra either
ray-traced or brought into a browser plug-in such as Cortona's.

>From my slides:
http://www.4dsolutions.net/presentations/connectingthedots.pdf  (see
slides 11, 23-27 especially)

> I love a good example (and a good joke) as much as the next guy, but let's
> not lean on a diversity statement as an excuse to not attend to some basic
> tenets of marketing.  If we had examples that incorporated the various
> "Stations of the Cross" it would likewise go over like a lead balloon.
> Introducing Python as a unifying tool in early education (by some definition
> of early) calls for a particular discretion in the choice of examples.
> Best,
> Travis
>

Yes, I understand better what you're driving at.

However, the death of the mass-published text book as a primary
curriculum distribution mechanism means we're able to niche market,
not mass market.  I used to work at McGraw-HIll and remember how
editors would bend over backwards to develop some "acceptable to all"
pabulum, focusing mainly on California and Texas as the standard
bearers.  I think those days are finally coming to an end.**

The concept here is teachers will roll their own (develop their own
content), quite possibly using a "place based" approach, meaning they
up the relevance quotient by incorporating information from the local
environment (in story problems, in geography lessons, in history
lessons -- not just talking about math).

I've worked with the Catholic subculture in Portland some, helping a
protege us Pyblosxom to develop a blogging system for one of the local
priests (Father Bob), complete with "skinning" depending on the
liturgical calendar, with a few secular holidays thrown in for good
measure.

Coming up with a Python algorithm that'd correctly compute Easter was
especially challenging, with the US Navy proving our most reliable
source (I think it was -- some dot mil resource).

Here we go:
http://www.usno.navy.mil/USNO/astronomical-applications/astronomical-information-center/date-easter

Regarding Tarot, that'd of course depend on the school and local
community standards.  In Portland, we tend to celebrate pirates,
hackers, wizards and witches all in the same breath (it's the
Winterhaven Wizards where my daughter went to junior high).

If a student wanted to write a Tarot Reader is a school project, I
doubt that'd be a problem around here in any way.  YMMV of course.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/17157315@N00/4037589946/  (typical
Portland pro witch propaganda)

What some of us advertise about Python is that it fits well into
niches (a variation of "fits your brain" meme) i.e. you're not even
obligated to use Latin-1 except for the keywords.

Having religious themes for your content is in no way a problem for
the language itself, even if your language is Klingon (actually that
might be a problem as Klingon is only ancillary in the Unicode
standard and might be difficult to come by -- Damian does Klingon in
Perl though, so I'm thinking there must be a way).

http://www.archlug.org/kwiki/KlingonPerlProgramming
http://globalmoxie.com/blog/klingon-not-spoken-here.shtml

I regard the Diversity Statement as a way of protecting the niches
against any largely fictitious "majority culture" that wants to
steamroll some kind of "majority aesthetic" on the rest of us.

There's really no need to pay much attention to tyrannical majorities
anymore.  It's all about locale and localization (another way of
saying "place based" education is the way of the future, IMO).

Of course that's just one more debating position, not saying you're
compelled to agree, obviously.  Just my point of view and all that,
seems to be working well in practice.

Kirby

**  I remember the story about John Saxon, a retired military guy who
decided to get into curriculum writing, found his textbooks had a
large niche market among schoolers.  However, his story problems about
fairies and pixies were getting him into trouble with that group,
which regarded these Narnia-like creatures as too Satanic for comfort.
 He needed to change his text for the next edition.  Such is the
relatively joyless life of mass publishers.
http://www.home-school.com/Articles/SaxonEditorial.html

Related blog post (Oct 17, 2009)
http://controlroom.blogspot.com/2009/10/equipment-drop.html