Ugh...I saw the title and had positive expectations because usually, it seems, letters to high school teachers are positive, as in: "My teenage child was depressed but your class made her love school again, etc. etc."
A couple of takeaways:
1. The fact that the OP's daughter signed up for programming class because she wanted to impress her parent is truly a parenting win. Not just for programming, but anything, at that age.
2. I consider myself pretty open minded about gender diversity...but as I was reading the OP's post, I completely assumed it was written by a programmer-father, until I got to the part where the OP describes being harassed. Still, the mental stereotype was so strong that when writing this comment, I kept having to not refer to the OP as the father of the daughter. The trolling that the OP describes is troubling. But it's easy to be angry at the trolling, and raise awareness about it. Unfortunately, I think women in tech still have the much more difficult task of fighting pervasive, subconscious stereotyping and assumptions in the industry.
edit: 3. The OP treats the use of Visual Basic as an ancillary problem...and it is, compared to what her daughter had to put up. But yeah, VB, seriously? I respect people who do VB -- and do it well, because they have to maintain legacy software at a big company...but if you're a programming teacher, you should have a passion to make your subject as relevant to your students and their contemporary lives when possible...nevermind that using VB, in this day and age, has some considerable barriers to just "dive into" compared to, say, Javascript. It'd be like a physics teacher who didn't make a single reference to CERN, Elon Musk, or physics as it applies to modern athletic competitions.
Is there a modern (or better suited for introductory courses) language that has the kind of curriculums built around it that VB and Java do?
Codecademy and the like are awesome for independent learning and exploration, but it doesn't work for classroom instruction. There don't seem to be many curriculums designed around modern, web-focused languages like Ruby or Javascript that your average teacher can use for high school CS classes.
I never took programming in high school, so maybe I'm setting my sights low...but even with a well developed curriculum, it's hard to imagine that the class gets very far.
Whereas with JavaScript, they can literally start executing code as soon as they open their browsers. I think that makes up, at least a little, of the time lost in not having as mature of a curriculum.
But I think the big win with JS is opportunity. Whatever crappy program they might come up with, they can immediately show it to their classmates and also to any friends or family with a simple link...it's not quite as easy to distribute a VB or other compiled executable. This kind of sharing makes programming...I would think...much more dynamic and lively.
And in addition to that, they get some web development experience...which is handy now and likely to be useful in 5 years. Whereas with VB, and most other programming languages...it's possible to learn them without gaining any hands-on experience with the Web.
I'd tend to agree with you. But the problem of teaching it still remains. While it'd be great for dedicated teachers at each school to create a flexible, Javascript-based curriculum built around online courses and projects, I think the reality is that very few would have the time, energy, or motivation to do so. So far as I know, there don't exist very many Javascript textbooks aimed at the high school, middle school, and (hopefully) elementary school levels. Without that kind of traditional material, it's difficult for even passionate teachers to get classes approved by administrators.
The questions/problems that the exam board sets (considering the number of hours the students get to solve them in) are really suited to VB, or another Visual based language. What I'm trying to say is that the language chosen also has to fit the requirements of the exam board, as the students, school and myself are all judged by our results (GCSE grade etc).
My 2004 CS class was Visual Basic. The instructor didn't know anything, but its hard to hold that against a guy making ~$40k/yr at midcareer. Instead of a competent teacher, we had textbooks that we were expected to work through one chapter at a time. I suspect the OP's daughter was brought in for a similar type of education, and the textbooks just haven't been updated since the early 2000s. That's really the only logical explanation for teaching a class in VB in 2013.
Javascript has HUGE barriers compared to Visual Basic. Picture who you're teaching. These aren't generally kids who know anything about programming. They're kids who have never seen anything even similar to programming before. In fact, the vast majority of them probably don't even want to be there.
So you teach Visual Basic, because it has less "gotchas" than Javascript, it reads more like english, it has less intimidating symbols, it can be made to be strongly typed so that they'll receive feedback at compile time, it comes with a powerful WYSIWYG tool built into the IDE, and it has a vast, VAST suit of powerful first and third party libraries that can make the kids feel like they're performing magic.
Visual Basic gets shit on a lot by people, and perhaps justifiably in the business world - but in the teaching world (especially when you're teaching people who are ignorant of and generally apathetic to the subject matter), there are few languages that compare to it favorably.
my theory is that there are not a lot of women in tech jobs because the men in tech jobs generally don't know how to interact with women. any woman that shows an interest in tech is not disuaded by the material, but rather by the inability of her male coworkers to treat her normally.
I would not want to work or study in an environment surrounded by social akwardness and harassment either.
Yes. Those classmates didn't invent that sandwich stereotypes on their own, they got it from the environment.
I think the problem is not with men or women in particular, but society in general, as it has a concept that genders are socially different while they're [mostly] not. I strongly suspect, neither men, nor women are prerogative carriers of such stereotypes - although, naturally, as those stereotypes are discriminating to women, they're primarily opposed by them, not men.
Hmmm ... with that theory you'd also have to explain the odd concentration of socially inept males in tech. Why are they pooling there? Is it a "low spot" where gravity leaves a puddle? (street cred based on brain-cells instead of muscle and the ability to completely avoid physical interaction sure sounds like a win to a severe introvert).
Unless you are a minority in the field in which case your success apparently requires tolerating disproportionate abuse from your socially inept peers. Hardly the meritocratic environment we like to imagine here.
But that seems impossible. Most men I know that program have general social problems, not just relating to women. The field itself is of interest to the slightly colder, and more rational mindset.
I'm not saying we can't fix this problem. We can do that by hiring more well rounded people for programming positions. The same type of male techie who would mistreat a woman at the workplace, would mistreat a man too. I don't necessarily think being odd is wrong as long as you're not hurting someone.
Personally it's the tech industries fault in general, which continues to pander to the academic and elitist groupings to foster talent, which is in and of itself unequal. Add to the fact that these groupings contain their own patriarchal problems and the picture becomes even more complex. Personally I don't feel like we need 50% women in the tech industry. I feel like everyone should be given an equal chance at learning as many skills as possible in a fostering learning environment. The fact that schools, parents, etc don't accomplish this can't all be blamed on the industry itself. Many engineering subjects suffer from these larger societal problems that relate with entrenched social roles and patriarchal institutions.
Making the average Joe reading hacker news aware of these problems are important, but laying the blame on all men, or even a subset larger than a choice few who benefit from the systemic patriarchal tendencies in unfair however. The core issue is equality. And society isn't equal. This is more of an effect than a primary problem.
I don't think this applies to anywhere near the number of men the stereotype would apply it to. I've worked in very successful mixed teams in a variety of companies.
What's more I think the stereotype is harmful in itself. It provides an excuse for some men to act like assholes and it affects the perception of the rest by the outside world.
I have also seen misogyny and incredibly awful behaviour in the workplace. This was invariably carried out by men who thought they were good at what they did but were sadly mistaken.
I agree with you, as someone that heard from a colleague "to go to the kitchen and do the dishes", instead of helping him with the problem he was facing. I was his superior at the time.
We could make that argument a decade ago. A decade ago, geeks were just weird, and prone to incompetent and awkward social advances that could scare a young lady. A group that's incapable of making her feel comfortable.
And in a sense, you can't really blame them much for that. Social clumsiness and normal loneliness and desire aren't exactly crimes.
But what the author describes isn't like that. He described an actively hostile and misogynistic classroom.
Maybe I missed it (and I could've missed it since I'm a dude), but the modern culture of full-out misogyny that's infected young programmers wasn't present when I was a student, and it scares the willies out of me.
>* He described an actively hostile and misogynistic classroom.* //
It may be misogyny but my experience of groups of youths makes me feel it's "just" verbal abuse. She's not being targeted because she's a girl she's being targeted because [almost] everyone is.
High-schoolers pick on others because those others have traits that make them stand out. There's probably a kid in the same class being picked on because he's short, another because he's stupid, another because he's poor. So, this one is being picked on because she's a girl - that's what stands out most about her against the common traits of the group. Is that really misogyny is it disproportionate because she's a girl.
In some ways that the only thing that they latched on to was her gender is positive - hear me out on this one - that suggests that she's good looking, she's not poor, not fat, not spotty, not known amongst the students for moral deficiency. In fact I feel it's basically a confession that they've got nothing else to pick on her for.
If the worst she got was a well recycled joke it sounds like she was probably having an easier time of it than most kids in the classroom, no.
None of that is to say nothing should be done about someone feeling the environment they're in isn't conducive to education of course. It just strikes me that sexism isn't the root problem - if instead she was picked on for being a swot [that's perhaps UK-ism, a conscientious and attentive student with a hint of toadying] would that have been better somehow?
I just went through several interviews before accepting a position. At various companies the following was said to/asked of me.
"Why should I take on the liability of adding a women to my engineering team?"
"I've never had a women answer any hard math questions correctly so we can skip those." It was great when I insisted we walk through them together, he got one completely wrong and couldn't remember the basics.
"I normally delete any resumes from women applying for engineering positions without actually reading them." =recruiter who didn't know I was within earshot. I assume he was forced to bring me in by HR. Which is yet another annoyance. I don't accept token female positions. See below.
"I need a women on the engineering team so the guys don't have to deal with the women in marketing." - actual job offer.
"Do you plan on having children?"
I recently left a job, because I couldn't get my other team members to stop leaving commit messages like "fuck heroku in it's whore ass', 'fucking cunts'. The hilarious part is that my background is in porn, I wasn't offended, I just couldn't figure out what the fuck they were committing. When I asked them to write more descriptive messages they said I was too sensitive. The guy who took over for me constantly emails me and asks if I remember when x was done....
I'm very active in my local tech community and I spend my free time teaching, so I know that 99% of guys in tech are not like this. (at least on purpose) But the attitude is accepted and even defended, which is obvious just reading the comments on any article involving women in tech on HN. But, it doesn't happen to them so how are they to know that I hear the 'hilarious' Tits or GTFO joke hundreds of times. The only reason I've started to become vocal about it is because I hope that it gives someone a little insight into what we have to deal with. I'm not at all a SJW and hate the concept of check your privilege. I think SJW are actually making women in tech look like weak victims.
I don't want to sound sexist but could be, just could be, is it possible that women are not as capable as when it comes to programming. waits for flames
I was a student assistant. I gave lab courses (lots of different types, cs 101, ai, graphics etc) and there wasn't a single girl that can actually do good. Sure there was some who can memorize a whole textbook and get A in grades thanks to exams but that was it. They were at best average for my case. And In my school, girl ratio is not that bad either. Even when I was a student, there was a single girl that applied and graduated as same year as males, all other females failed and prolonged their schools.
I am sure most of you met exceptional woman programmers, I am not denying that there might be exceptions. But from my personal experience women is not as capable as men in tech. That is pretty much my reasoning why there are so low interest in tech related courses/jobs for women
> I don't want to sound sexist but could be, just could be, is it possible that women are not as capable as when it comes to programming.
It's a flawed argument. In a group of male programmers, fully half of them are below average (yes, I'm sure). Should the less accomplished 50% be subject to ridicule as intellectually inferior? No, they should be given equality of opportunity, and let the cards fall there they may.
All women want is the same equality of opportunity that every male programmer gets without question.
> But from my personal experience women is not as capable as men in tech.
I'm sure you've heard of "confirmation bias", but, in case you haven't:
>In a group of male programmers
As I said, male-female ratio is not that bad. Maybe 25% of total class? I am not sure about the numbers though.
I am not trying to ridicule people, It is just some facts I encountered before.
"confirmation bias"
It is not like I can be biased now, because there is no longer a data set for me. There is like 2-3 women (out of ~50) in the department I am working and they are not directly related to my area, weird huh?
If CS education in the USA is anything like here, the teacher of this class will be the unlucky fellow assigned with maintaining the school networks and other random "computer stuff". His qualification will be that of an interested layman, augmented by several one day seminars on random topics from Office to Java.
There is simply no curriculum, there are no standards and no requirements, and if we are honest, the level of computing in most schools and even businesses are a very far cry from the high-tech filter bubble we surround ourselves in.
My Programming I class was taught by a math teacher (who was an excellent algebra instructor). Unfortunately he was only a chapter ahead of the class in computer programming. But that wasn't the worst part. For guidance, he turned to his brother-in-law, who was a manager of developers at Motorola. He stated as much the first day of class, boasting "You're going to have the rare treat of learning how programming is done in the real world!"
All the joy of programming was quickly sucked out as we had to meticulously document our code. Sub routines needed 2-3 paragraph plain-English explanations of what they were doing. Each variable's purpose needed to be stated. And before you could write a single line of code, you first had to write it out in a form of "pseudo code" which had its own syntax rules that we had to follow. Lots of emphasis was placed on the process of what we should be doing instead of the how and why. Students struggled.
I understand what he was trying to do: having us write everything out gave him a window into how our minds were breaking down the problem. But in the process, he turned what should have been a fun, exploratory class into a grind.
The notion that programming could be a fun activity, and not just mindless, process-driven office work was completely foreign to him, and I suspect the same is true for many teachers who are stuck teaching Programming classes in both public and private schools.
Edit:
And on the issue of gender, my class had 25 students, 11 of whom were girls. I remember being amazed at how a programming class could have a 50/50 ratio. I didn't notice anyone being bullied or teased. I imagine once women reach "critical mass" women won't be singled-out to the same degree. A few bad apples or even a sexist teacher can't "single out" 44% of their class. Why were there so girls enrolled? I don't know, but the class did have a reputation for being an easy A, so perhaps it was viewed as less intimidating.
How does he get through the course certification? Shouldn't he has to demonstrate he has the qualification to teach CS class? Is this a high school from a small town? I'd imagine in NYC this could mean firing the school's principal if New York Daily finds out.
Why? On paper I can describe those lecture in glowing terms, if necessary. Just rewriting spamizbad's comment with the right buzzwords, and leaving out the student dissatisfaction.
Well same is true for any class right? haha. the question is, why would we want someone no experience with programming to teach programming class to our kids?
Because it's that, or nothing? It's not like high schools are rolling in money. Even if they could afford to hire an extra teacher just to teach programming, what programmer would want to teach for $20k when he can make (at least according to HN) $120k in the industry?
$20k? There is no full-time public school teacher making that. In Jersey City, teachers averaged in 2012 $67,412 with a contractually-limited 183 work days per year, that includes inservice/training days and excludes up to 8 personal days and additional sick days; with each day lasting a maximum of about 7 hours, including about a 40 minute lunch period. If a programmer gets 3 paid weeks of vacation per year, they work approximately 219 days per year. At an average salary of say $100,000 that's about $456 per work day. And often that includes no pension/retirement benefits. A teacher makes about $368 per day, however a teacher in New Jersey with 20 years service gets about 36% of the average of their three highest salary years as retirement income -- for life.
I'm not crying over teacher pay. That they don't get paid enough is propaganda from the teachers unions. Yes I realize that teachers work after hours grading papers, etc. However programmers often work late into the night as well without extra money too. Programmers often spend their own money (along with teachers) on extra software, tools and other things to help them do their job better without necessarily getting a reimbursement.
I'd rather be crying over administrators that continually make unenlughtened decisions about curriculum, methodology and creativity.
My starting pay as a high school teacher was $30k. I lived in a one room apartment, didn't have cable, had a cheap used car and a $30 a month "dumb" cell phone. I didn't go to the bars or buy new fancy gadgets. And I still had 6 months before I had to start repaying my student loan.
Including grading papers and planning lessons I was putting in 10 hours a day.
Add I had a second job at the mall movie theater to make up the difference between by income and my bills, so I worked 8+ hours on Saturday and Sunday as well.
You know what I did on my school vacations and personal days? I worked extra hours at the movie theater (the extra money almost always went to fixing my broken used car)
I make more money now than I would have made teaching with 20 years experience and a PhD (which I would have had to pay for myself) and my job now is far less difficult that the easiest day of teaching. And I can pay my bills without working on the weekends.
> with each day lasting a maximum of about 7 hours, including about a 40 minute lunch period.
HAHAHA
My girlfriend is a second year high school teacher. You are technically right that she is required to be on campus for the required 7 or 8 hours. But, there is nowhere near enough time to grade, plan, prepare, work individually with kids (makeup work mostly), etc, in that time. She puts in 12+ hour days. Everyday. Including weekends.
And over the summer, you are right that it is mostly free, except for several weeks you give up to do professional development, AP course training, and any schoolwork to move up the salary schedule a bit.
Her salary schedules are here [1]. With a masters degree, she would top out at $58k/year after 20 years on the job (assuming the masters track). Starting salaries are in the $35k range.
Meanwhile, I am a computer programmer, working a legit 8 hour a day job, making much more than she is now.
What annoys me more than just teacher pay though is the other spending in the school. She was pulled in to teach english this year. When the english department met to work out the plan, they had to blow their whole budget for the year on a single class-set of a paperback. (30ish copies). That's it. No more books, no miscellaneous DVDs / Documentaries purchased. That's it. Well, except for when she just goes and pays for it. Which she did last year to the tune of $350ish.
Does NYC/NYS have certifications for programming/CS? It appears the only NYS certification for technology is a content specific one called "technology education" which I doubt has much of a focus on programming and probably more of a general "how to use computers" focus.
Although I am from NYC I have very little idea on how their certification works. What I do know is all my CS teachers back in HS are "qualified" (however you want to put it). They either have a degree in CS (one of them does), or have taken classes and passed some exams to demonstrate their ability prior to taking the job. I was really surprised to see our math teacher did a CS undergraduate.
I assume you went to either a private HS or Stuy? I know at my high school in PA, the programming teacher had an EE undergrad but was a math teacher who happened to be the most computer literate of the faculty. Our Cisco teacher was an accounting teacher, who I don't think had any sort of technical undergrad but was the most computer literate person they could find.
This was not part of the AP curriculum, but it was billed (by the school) as a pre-req for AP Computer Science.
It also wasn't really a CS class. It was more like a clumsy introduction to computer programming. The class never intended to cover data structures or algorithms.
My high school programming course, in 1977---IBM 1130 FORTRAN 'IV'---was taught by a coach. Who, without referring to notes, nor was it in the book, one day taught us 2s compliment representation on the blackboard (and boy was it useful to get a peek under the hood!).
I suspect, like in the real world, programming ability still sometimes counts more than credentials. Pity that unlike my teacher he wasn't so good at the teaching part of it.
Heh, Louden's book? Still got it here somewhere. For an hour of nostalgic fun and an excuse to burn a Bass Ale while your wife watches DWTS, take a look at the 1130 emulator at http://ibm1130.org/sim
I thought the most hilarious thing about the HN comments was the 100% sexism oriented response WRT general HN culture, and nothing about hetronormativity or whatever its called, I currently work with a great tech, who happens to be female, and she also happens to have a wife, and I've worked with other women with the same family life as that in the past, so I was LOL the whole way about the HN "belief system" that apparently in 1950's HN world, only men can have wives.
Another epic HN failure was confusing an obviously single word substitution issue like using the word wife instead of spouse as if it changes anything in the discussion other than the political correctness level, with actual intentional hate speech. You have to prioritize your problems and this is like "cut yourself shaving and also have a broken leg" one should be prioritized above the other.
Something never discussed about sexism in tech, at least on HN, is its an almost purely coastie "brogrammer" phenomena. I am not part of the apparently locally dominant dirtbag coastie culture, so I literally do not understand how it perpetuates itself. To explain myself, locally, behavior that is rewarded tends to be repeated and behavior that is punished tends to be suppressed, and simultaneously a highly effective way for a guy to make sure all females will never be in contact with any of his precious bodily fluids is to go all "make me a sandwich" on any other female. Even a false accusation is fairly effective at enforcing celibacy. So I'm fairly mystified why this problem perpetuates. Like are all men on the coasts 40 year old virgins or gay, so they don't care about lack of "fun time" with women, or perhaps the women on the coasts refuse to stand up for each other and this is the inevitable result, or maybe secretly most women really love that kind of treatment and its only a small vocal minority who complain (although I find this last theory unlikely)
The only real problem seems to be the lack of tech jobs in the midwest. Tech women, if you want to be treated with respect as human beings by professional gentlemen, move to where the gentlemen are if you want things to change. I'm off the market, but speaking for the local single gentlemen, I'm sure they'd greatly enjoy your presence here, unless you really secretly like how the brogrammers are treating you...
Wow, you could be very right. I grew up and retired to SW Missouri (Joplin), which is actually part of the cultural South, although with plenty of Midwestern and Western influences since they're so very close. At least in my time way back when such degradation of women (not at all to be confused with the "mating game" or whatever you want to call it) was just not tolerated, including by the sub-group social leaders I was around (which included me in some groups). We were a little past the era of standing up when a woman enter a room (never taught to me by my parents), but e.g. holding the door open for a women was expected (or anyone with their hands full), and getting castigated for that unthinkable.
And, yeah, the concept of a gentleman was, and I think still is, very much in play. However much feminists complain about it, it sure seems to result in women getting treated a whole lot better. And at least where I came from, there was enough Midwestern and Western pragmatism that female ability in things you might typically think as male was not such a big thing, or threatening. E.g by some distance the best shot on my high school rifle team was a girl, an old friend from kindergarten. The rest of us were boys, and her example (not to mention help) pushed us to strive harder vs. tear her down. Maybe it was in part the genre (yeah, right, harasses the school's best shot???), but I read all this high school harassment stuff of the demean the woman type and wonder if it swept the nation later, or is in part a regional phenomena.
Your comment about threatening was interesting, and I had not considered it. For example, some guys are pretty tough on tall women although most don't care, and from a lifetime of locker room observation, those with the worst attitude toward the tall ladies statistically tend to be correspondingly unusually short in one particular physical attribute.
Given that, I would not be entirely surprised if the root cause of some anti-woman brogrammer behavior could be statistically highly correlated with one anatomical part being unusually small. Aka if the girls are going to laugh at him anyway, may as well pre-emptively strike against them first, not much to lose. Although why this behavior is seen more on the coasts than the midwest and the other civilized areas, is still unclear under this theory. We may simply grow 'em larger here thus less root cause for the anti-social behavior. I do not have enough observational data, and frankly I've gathered it all inadvertently rather than intentionally. A suitably geo-located chatroulette image analysis program might help. Although a theory that seems to "explain it all" is highly appealing, it none the less may or may not be proven out by actual statistical research. I would assume some sociologist with a ruler could probably figure it out for us, along with a questionnaire about brogrammers opinions about their physical self image (in other words they may not actually be shrunken mutants, but inaccurately think they are...). I don't think population migration necessarily disproves this theory; consider if hormone contamination in the water causes shrinkage or perhaps some other environmental toxins; the coasts certainly have plenty of environmental toxins compared to other areas.
I actually considered the hetronormativity thing when I wrote my response (my response was "the hga is female" one).
Initially my response was much longer and included a discussion about female-female partnerships. In the end I cut it right back, because as far as I know "wife" is always a term used for a spouse who identifies as female.
First of all, you need to go do some remedial math. The percentage of DWTS watchers who are women is no predictor of what women do. This fallacy is called confusion of the inverse, and it's a probabilistic variant of the better-known converse error.
Second, even if 99% of women were to be DWTS fans, it has no bearing on anigbrowl's comment. The reason that "while your wife watches DWTS" is part of the problem (as anigbrowl identified) is that it implies that (watching DWTS) is to women as (checking out 1130 sims) is to men. It implies that in situations where men do interesting tech things, women watch TV (I assume "DWTS" is some kind of TV?). It's basically a put-down against women collectively. Note that if someone were to be putting down humanity collectively, I wouldn't complain.
Third, "politically correct" is a label principally used by reactionary dullards to dismiss arguments or objections that they see as excessively leftist. It's equivalent to calling someone a commie. Mind you, some people are communists, some people are knee-jerk excessive leftists, etc... but if that's true in a particular situation, you can just explain why it's true. Calling it "political correctness" is just a lowbrow dismissal.
That's a lot of incorrectness for one 20-word sentence.
First, Dancing with the Stars is one of the highest rated shows on TV; the fact that it has a 2/3 women audience indicates that very many women will make the time to watch it.
Second, setting aside households with two TV's, only one spouse can enjoy passive entertainment at a time. Presumably while we watch football, women can do something fascinating and productive.
Third, political correctness is a phenomenon of white liberal prigs who go out of their way to take offense because they have nothing useful or productive to contribute to the public discourse. Of course they would react unkindly to being called out on it but I would advise you not to take their defensive lashing out at face value.
To the first, IF as you say it's 2/3 women, and IF as one short Google search suggested to me it has around 13M viewers, and IF we agree that those are all in the US and the US has around, what, 100M adult women?... then that's 8% of those adult women watching it. If those 13M include people outside the US, then it's lower than 8%. Apparently 92% of women do not watch DWTS.
In response to the second, I don't understand your point at all. Help me out here?
As to the third, I agree that there certainly exist some fools, most of them white and liberal (and maybe prigs?), who have a mental pattern wherein they make knee-jerk complaints about certain behaviour being offensive, without having a well-considered ethical system that justifies this complaint, instead using these complaints to signal their belonging to a certain social clique. If that's what you mean by political correctness, I agree that it exists, and is odious. Whether or not such fools object to your remarks should be entirely beneath you, however. So raising the potential political incorrectness of your remark appears, to me, to be saying "I'm going to use this straw-man argument to attack those who disagree with me". And this is why I brought up the fact that it's a lowbrow dismissal, and suggested that on those rare occasions when the label does fit, you can instead construct an independent explanation of what's wrong with the political correctness.
I don't want to defend a sexist comment, but I think the point the opposing comment was making was that of the viewership of DWTS, 2/3 are women - so, 2/3 of 13M, not that 2/3 of the US population watch DWTS. I think that thread of your comment is looking for a fight where one probably doesn't exist. It's also not sexist to identify a specific TV show with a female demographic.
Second point was pretty easy to understand - if a household has 2 adults and 1 TV, only one Adult at a time can watch their preferred TV shows. If there is a second TV, possibly more, the Adults stand a fair chance that they will be able to watch their shows.
Okay, fair enough, understood, and I'll direct my response to my disagreement about the math of it.
Why would it matter that 2/3 of DWTS viewers are female? Suppose that I publish a fanzine called "jh's dumb stuff", for which 100% of the readers are female (that's right, my mom is the only reader). Would it make sense to say "you can look at this awesome thing while your wife reads 'jh's dumb stuff'"? No.
The relevance, here, is that original oafish-seeming comment was "while your wife watches DWTS", which appears to imply that it's typical for wives to do that. And, based on the stats I could find, it is NOT typical for wives to do that. Over 90% of American women do not watch the show, right?
Mathematically, the fact that 2/3 of DWTS viewers are female is just not relevant.
A specific event doesn't have to have >50% probability to work as an evocative example. For Christ's sake, you're missing the forest for a quarter square inch of bark on one particular tree.
Likewise, you can probably construct a more sophisticated argument than calling people "reactionary dullards", but you curiously choose not to. Somehow that isn't a lowbrow dismissal.
Actually, I did construct a more sophisticated argument, at least in brief. That's what that whole paragraph was about.
Also, I didn't call you a reactionary dullard. I see that your literacy is as poor as your numeracy. What I said was that such was the principle use of referencing political correctness, and advised that you could do better yourself. If I was sure, at that time, that you were a dullard, I wouldn't have bothered getting into it.
So it wasn't, at that time, a lowbrow dismissal. By now, you're getting a dismissal. I guess that the collective audience can judge for themselves whether it's lowbrow or not.
> Third, political correctness is a phenomenon of white liberal prigs who go out of their way to take offense because they have nothing useful or productive to contribute to the public discourse.
If you've defined it that way, of course that'll be how you see it and nobody will shake your conviction. This makes conversations with you on the topic as dull as someone who doesn't grasp enough statistics to understand trivial errors, but so be it.
The rest of the world has a more nuanced take on it, which begins with the idea that being rude to people who lack relative power in a given situation is still morally wrong and tactically quite stupid.
> Second, setting aside households with two TV's, only one spouse can enjoy passive entertainment at a time. Presumably while we watch football, women can do something fascinating and productive.
I happen to enjoy watching the same shows and movies my wife watches on TV, and I somehow assumed it was true of the majority of couples.
Do neither of you ever watch anything the other doesn't care for, or do you just choose to put up with stuff you wouldn't otherwise watch for the sake of spending time together? With my wife I have maybe an 80-90% overlap in what we like to watch but the other 10-20% we can each generally do our own thing while the other one watches something.
First, Dancing with the Stars is one of the highest rated shows on TV; the fact that it has a 2/3 women audience indicates that very many women will make the time to watch it.
Indeed so, but it doesn't follow that they are watching it instead of writing code, which implication was what I objected to in the first place; although it wasn't malicious, it was a lazy piece of stereotyping that I didn't feel was appropriate in the context of a discussion about sexist stereotyping.
Second, setting aside households with two TV's, only one spouse can enjoy passive entertainment at a time.
???
Third, political correctness is a phenomenon of white liberal prigs who go out of their way to take offense because they have nothing useful or productive to contribute to the public discourse.
Well most TV shows air at a particular time of day, so if you watched it you presumably wouldn't be coding at that particular time of day, either. Women code while their husbands watch football.
I regretted that as soon as I hit the "reply" button... but really, that's the way it is in my house and I meant it innocently. Bernice was literally watching that show a couple of years ago while I installed the Hercules S/370 emulator and the MVT 21.8F Turnkey system on my Nokia N900. Mainframe on a handheld! I was laughing like a maniac while she wondered what in the world I was doing in my office.
Well, no harm done. but I'd point out that my wife watches talent shows at the same time as doing stuff in Code Academy. I can't figure this out but she grew up in a household where television was almost always on and likes having some background noise (or likes having it focused through the TV, or something).
(Actually I don't know hga's gender, but wow - I have never seen an example of gender stereotyping as explicit as that on HN, and in a discussion about sexism in programming too. I'm really hoping your comment was supposed to be ironic)
>I have never seen an example of gender stereotyping as explicit as that on HN
does gender stereotyping manifests an intellectual failure on the part of the one expressing the stereotypes? If yes, does such intellectual failure is localized, say to the area of percepting and understanding gender relations in the industry, or is it a system-wide failure of the intellect of the stereotyping (i.e. something like a habit/instinct of using stereotypes)?
Harold Gerard Ancell is very much male, thank you.
I can't remember if there were any women in that high school class, but there were in the summer programs I took after it, and as far as I can remember they didn't get treated any differently than the men. Of course, back then, computers, especially serious ones, were scarce and getting lots of time on them wasn't trivial. I also wasn't the sort of person who would put up with harassment or bullying in my presence, nor were the instructors, but as I recall it was never a problem (all the local stuff was in the cultural South...).
Long before the zero-tolerance bullshit, so my entirely serious threats of disproportionate including sometimes lethal force were taken as "don't do that crazy thing" vs. I was the problem for objecting. E.g. after the incident that went the furthest, to my drawing live steel in college, a counselor did pull me aside to make sure I wasn't the type to do that except when needed to prevent a felony. I gather a very different time, no cell phones and therefore no helicopter parenting, unsupervised play outdoors with a very few rules, the high school rifle teams used .22LR firearms instead of air guns, etc. etc. etc.
This was all new, neat stuff and perhaps we were having too much fun exploring and learning it, and helping each other (I did a lot of the latter, including joining the college computer "club" for which that was our mission). There was no doubt serious self-selection, including it being long before to the "do this for lots of money" concept and the pathologies that brings. And it sure sounds like my college bound peers and I were a lot more polite that the sort of things I'm hearing from more recently (I don't think "make me a sandwich" was even in the lexicon, one source I just found dates it from nearly two decades later). It was certainly a while before serious pushback to feminism inevitably developed in the communities I was in, the ethos was "women are good", not yet "and men are bad".
My high school CS class was taught by the softball coach (who also taught AP Calc), so yeah, credentials aren't everything, even though he probably had them. The only gripe I had was that spring semester suffered since his passion was definitely softball, and not so much the math or programming. Somewhere deep in the back of my head are the remnants of C++ thanks to him.
From what I understand (gf just finished her education degree, michigan secondary ed), there isn't really a teachers certification for computer programming/CS classes in secondary. It is generally taught by someone who shows interest in teaching it AND if there is an opening for the class in the schedule AND if there is a budget to allow that elective AND it doesn't get in the way of whatever the school's administration deems to be important. The state of it is quite sad really...I know at the high school I graduated from, there was a programming course that was taught by the typing teacher, at one point (was no longer available by the time I would have been able to take it).
Its not just a prep issue (and yes, there are only a handful of CS Education programs in the US) but a state certification and curriculum issue. Education in the US is a State/local funded and regulated (only like 10% of public school funding is from the Federal Government). Teaching requirements for CS vary wildly from state to state, but in most places CS courses actually fall in the Business dept.
The course most likely used VB because that is what the district mandated.
I had a similar high school teacher, minus the brother-in-law, teaching a high school
Pascal class 1-2 years out of college, being barely a chapter ahead. She would often state things like "you should always/never xxx". I happened to have been very comfortable with pascal at the time, and raised points with exceptions to the rule, and was told its "always/never". This lasted till next week when she would read the next chapter.
She also demanded that every line be commented, however would only take a small percentage away (I think 5 or so), if one or all comments were missing. As I couldn't bring myself to comment everything, I would just use inline asm, which pascal supported at the time, with absolutely no comments. Since the rest of the grade relied on the program functioning, I did well. I thought it was cool at the time. Now I realize I didn't make her life easy, and probably should have.
There are two topics here, and the more important one is getting neglected.
Almost by definition of being on this website, all of us are well advanced of our pre-college computer science teachers. My first was actually a chemistry teacher. My second was biology. One had me doing tech support in junior high. It wasn't until the AP class that I found one who could teach me. But teachers using outdated technology isn't the issue.
The real issue of the article (and complaining about Visual Basic detracts from it) is a teacher who sets up an environment that tolerates harassment and bullying. It doesn't matter the discipline, the teacher failed all the students. The teacher failed the girl who dropped out of programming, and the teacher failed the bullies, by not pointing out that this behavior is wrong.
That's a really sad comment. Teaching may not pay well, but the tenured teacher has significantly higher job security and potential for other incomes. Yes, it's not a typical programmer pay, but if you are taking it upon yourself to teach children, you take on far more responsibility than any pay can justify and you should act like it.
That's easy to say but the world isn't so easy. being a teacher is hard and not paying well means you don't always attract the best people to do it.
programmers also have job security of knowing they are basically always employable right now unless completely hopeless. and programmers have ethical responsibilities which are frequently ignored too.
That's a very high expectation of teachers, full stop. What are they supposed to do? They only have influence over these people for an hour a day, which is the time they are supposed to be teaching the subject.
> The real issue of the article (and complaining about Visual Basic detracts from it) is a teacher who sets up an environment that tolerates harassment and bullying.
You are being unfair. Children while growing up can be cruel. Bullying and harassment isn't a new phenomenon. May be the teacher could have done more, but "who sets up an environment that tolerates harassment" is a bit far fetched.
That's pretty much exactly the same as the programming classes I took in high school (New Zealand). After that I mainly kept to programming on the side as a hobby rather than for work, I'd be lying if I said my school experience didn't have some influence over it.
If students are being harassed and driven away from a subject by their peers I don't think the out of date curriculum is the most significant problem in that classroom.
This is a high-school, so pubescent boys making disparaging remarks and teachers unable to control class are both expected and completely mundane. Certainly they wouldn't make it into a USENIX blog post, and I don't think anybody would infer from these events that "tech is sexist".
So the curriculum was the best reason I could figure why this is on USENIX.
(I certainly don't want to excuse the shortcomings of this particular teacher, and there are many, but I think the system is setup for failure)
That's not the problem described in the article though - it's an entirely non-technical issue about harassment, sexism, and general acceptable classroom behaviour. It's not about the level of computing knowledge at all.
I think you're missing the point of the parent comment. All teachers have to go through a degree/certificate program that would train them on how to deal with high school kids and what to do about harassment, etc. The guy teaching this class is probably just an IT guy at the school whom they recruited into 'teaching' this class.
That's how it was at my high school. It was the network/IT guy that taught the class. He was really cool and a pretty damn good teacher, but I don't know if he'd be able to spot harassment like this or do anything about it. We didn't have any girls in our class anyway, so I guess my anecdote can't add anything to that.
Edit: Actually reading the other comments by the parent shows me that you interpreted it correctly. Still I think what I said has some merit to it.
When I took my first programming class in Junior High they chose the teacher because she was the typing instructor, and you know, how different can a computer be from a typewriter? After all, they both have keyboards.
Thankfully I had already taught myself one programming language so I was able to pick up another without much difficulty.
A little off tangent but this year I started volunteering for an organization called TEALS (http://tealsk12.org/) that's trying to address this by having developers teach into and AP computer science in high school. I'm currently teaching AP CS remotely to a school in Kentucky - it's extremely challenging and a huge time commitment but being able to get students excited about computer science and seeing them succeed in their programs is worth it.
I suggest everyone to check it out - if you're near a local school you can actually teach a class in person.
Also - if you have any questions feel free to email me - username @ gmail
I don't think that's off-topic at all. Getting kids enthusiastic about computer science at a critical age, in an inclusive learning environment, with knowledgeable passionate mentors, is highly commendable and relevant.
In this economy, someone with any worthwhile amount of knowledge and interest in programming has better opportunities than being a schoolteacher. And that's on top of the mediocrity-enforcing effects of the unionized teaching profession.
Here's the thing - I would love to teach computer science to young people, but in order to do so, I would have to pay for more education and certification for the privilege of participating in a much tougher job market for significantly lower wages. I just can't see any way that it makes sense, and that's a real shame.
Our high school programming teacher was a math teacher who knew to keep the kids in the back -- the ones who finished reading the textbook in the first hour or so of class -- completely alone. We didn't cause trouble, and we were quite helpful to the other students in the labs.
At one point we were asked, politely, to stop crashing the county's mainframe (which was the platform we were using). So we stopped.
Girls? I don't recall girls. They must have been there; I don't think we noticed. We certainly didn't harass them, and we probably tried to help them. We were geeks and tools and had no idea how to interact with 'em, for the most part.
I think the key point is having a zero harassment policy. It should not matter if the victim/subject of the harassment appears to be tolerating it (or even enjoying the attention). Chances are he/she is just being a good sport and is socially intimidated.
The worst thing about harassment culture (even when it's largely good-natured) is that it creates and reinforces a power dynamic and subtle "law of the jungle" status hierarchy where the most inappropriate, brazen harasser becomes the dominant figure.
In my opinion, this is particularly dangerous in the way that it obstructs critical thought and group problem solving. Not necessarily relevant to high school but highly important if a team of coworkers evolve toward such a culture.
Yes, none of the teams you've worked on have needed any explicit bans on behavior that's considered unacceptable in society. That's because you've worked on teams with adult humans (maybe assuming here), who don't need to be told the rules. High school kids still need some reminders that there is a normal way of interacting with others, like not suggesting that the only girl in the class be relegated to the kitchen. A bit of extra regulation is absolutely called for among teenagers.
That being said, your general point is good -- absolutist policies like zero-tolerance rarely work well, simply because human behavior is complicated and difficult for the policy maker to predict in advance.
I have zero tolerance for zero tolerance policies. How many poor kids lifes' have been ruined by pointing their finger and saying, "Pew, pew" by idiot school administrators that are too stupid to think objectively?
That said, this teaches does need to be reprimanded at very least for laziness and not paying attention to what was going on in his class and possibly for creating the environment where it was allowed as well.
Nah. Nothing about this course was done well. No competent teacher needs a policy to notice or stop crap like this. Here you have some time-serving cypher filling a slot to help the administration check a box. With everything else done so thoughtlessly, why would we expect them to perk up and get intraclass dynamics right?
Even if you exerted enough political pressure to suppress _this_ stuff, it would still be a bad and poorly taught class. Fix the quality of the teaching and you fix a lot more besides.
You probably didn't go to public school(/end ad hominem). The teacher are so dense that you need rules like that so the parents have something to point to when their kids come home and tell them they are being harassed.
One, if the teacher is that dense, then the key problem isn't the rules, is it?
Two, yeah, I went to public school. I've seen all sorts of well meaning "policy announcements" that hack solutions to glaring embarrassments without doing anything about the underlying problems.
I also had a teacher in HS that taught Visual Basic in a computer programming class. Not VB.Net, but VB6, and this was 4 years ago.
And they removed AP Computer Science that same year, when I was about to take it, that's why I had to settle with the class that taught VB. The state of HS education in this country makes me sad.
It used to be C++ for AP Computer Science, no? Anyhow. It used to be C++ for my high school and just a year or two before I was a freshman (that was 2006) it became Java.
I imagine VB classes came for the most part in the mid to late 90s where it made GUI applications nice and easy. Compared to console applications and Logo, it was a nice way to give a first-time programmer a more fulfilling experience.
I taught at a school with a VB 6.0 curriculum at the end of the last decade. The (veteran) teacher just continued using his old materials; he was a math teacher with some CS experience. He kept it because budgets were tight, everything ran snappily, and new computers and textbooks are expensive.
As long as a teacher is teaching programming fundamentals, it really doesn't matter (in the long run, educationally) what a student's first language is. They'll get it. Better to go with something that the teacher's good at and that interests the students.
Poor people not learning to read does not follow from having privatized education.
If in 100 years the government provided clothing, and I advocated privatizing clothing, you'd say, "Becuase poor people don't need to wear clothes!"
Where I'm from (in the US), many poor people _don't_ achieve a basically acceptable level of education, because the public schools don't ultimately serve them well for various reasons, and they drop out (or just don't learn but keep getting passed on through the grades). We're talking like high schoolers at a 5th grade reading level, for example.
That is a good point as well - beyond the monetary needs is the need to cut out the bullshit that has impeded our school systems. We've got a lot of people lining their pockets at the expense of quality education, and we've got a lot of terrible teaching strategies/ideologies that have hurt education more than it ever helped. Would a private system help that, or would it stratify who has access to education at all? I don't honestly know the answer to that. But something has got to give.
Since when it is alright to tell teachers how to do their job in bullet pointed letters?
* Be an adult and talk about any issues, complements or concerns during the class.
* Talk with them in person or on the phone.
* If you wish, post to your blog after the issues have been resolved. To put a global context on the situation should be supported with evidence as it pertains to life as a women in the IT industry.
(See what I'm doing here with the bullet points?)
Parents theses days...
--edit--
As I'm reading some of the responses to my post, I have to ask, what pillow soft existence did many of you grow up with? Kids (and people) say terrible things. This isn't the sign of a bad teacher, it's an opportunity for this blogger to prepare her kids (Not just the girls) for the real full-contact brutal reality known is the the real working world. Life gets waaaay harder than this.
> I suggested that she talk to you. I offered to talk to you. I offered to come talk to the class. I offered to send one of my male friends, perhaps a well-known local programmer, to go talk to the class. Finally, my daughter decided to plow through, finish the class, and avoid all her classmates. I hate to think what less-confident girls would have done in the same situation.
2. Well, the issues were, in one way, "resolved" because the daughter passed the class (with an 'A') despite her apparent unhappiness. If you mean that the parent should wait till the issues are actually fixed before blogging...well, if the teacher doesn't respond, then I guess the parent should not blog at all?
edit: My bad, the sentence in context would indicate that OP offered to go talk to the teacher, but the daughter declined. Whether or not the OP should've gone ahead and met the teacher is a whole other issue.
When this child grows up, there will be no parent to write a blog post. My point being, we all have to learn to navigate this difficult world. Stern letters from mom eventually have to stop.
It needs to decrease over time. This girl is at the end of her high school experience, she should be handling social interactions with her peers on her own.
The mother is not paying this school to give her child a lesson in how to deal with bullying. She is paying to allow her daughter to learn programming.
The school has failed because the daughter no longer wishes to put up with the bullying that comes with learning programming (at this particular school).
Seems like a failing of the school that should be addressed.
> While I was attending SC '12 in Salt Lake City last November, my daughter emailed to tell me that the boys in her class were harassing her. "They told me to get in the kitchen and make them sandwiches," she said.
Even if you think the parent is overstepping their bounds here, I would rather a parent be too concerned as oppose to not being concerned at all. Double so that he is in the tech sector while we are facing the huge gender issue. If the teacher is not doing their job stopping the harassment and thereby enforcing the stereotype, then perhaps is should be spelled out.
Kids say terrible things. This isn't the sign of a bad teacher or a worthy of a internet rant, it's an opportunity to prepare her kids (Not just the girls) for the real full-contact brutal reality known is the the real working world.
Just curious, where's the line on this? Like, what things is she allowed to attempt to draw public attention to, and what things should she just counsel her daughter to learn to live with, and accept as a part of life?
How should a person know what sorts of circumstances belong on which side of that line? Are these written in a book somewhere that I missed?
I'm pretty sure the general consensus is that if you're female and you want to speak up about feeling belittled or harassed, the problem is in you, and we will gladly tell you that you need to stop bringing this subject up because we are so darn tired of hearing people like you try to bring us down.
If, however, you are male and you are feeling belittled or harassed, we're pretty interested in having a serious discussion about your experience. We may not agree with you and we may tell you that we don't think you should feel that way at all, but we won't tell you not to have the discussion.
If you're a woman, though? You're not allowed to have that discussion. Leave it to the menfolk.
When does any male get an audience for whining? If anything there is a huge social stigma against men complaining about anything because of their "privilege."
If you graduated from high school more than three to five years ago, you missed it, but there's been a huge uptick in formal efforts to end bullying in the United States, and especially California.
I can't really speak to efficacy, but a formal accusation of bullying is a big deal these days.
What kind of relationship do you have with your kid that she has to tell you important information like this via email? Does she have a dad? I am guessing NO? Honestly, just the fact that the OP is writing the letter after the class is over, rather then confronting the teacher during the class does not sound right to me at all.
How is the presence of a father relevant? The mother was away at a conference, possibly in a different time-zone or otherwise not contactable. Email seems perfectly reasonable to me.
The girl does a lot to please her mother and chooses to communicate about important subjects over email.
Let's put it this way, I am not Dad yet, but when I am, my daughter or son will not be bullied in school because:
1. They would know how to deal with bullies.
2. And if they ever have problems dealing with it on their own, I am going to help them by doing something more then writing a letter on a tech blog.
And no matter what time of day or night it is, I would make sure that my children know they can CALL me any time they need to.
It's not whether the author is going too far as a parent, but that that she is not handling the situation appropriately. She showed bad faith by not ever actually talking to the teacher. She sat and accumulated complaints about this class only to blast the teacher on the internet after the fact. That's not productive and it betrays intentions other than helping her daughter succeed.
Be carefull with the rage. See my comment. Basically, we don't know the whole story. All we know was she was bullied, she got A, the teacher didn't notice, and the mother didn't talk to the teacher and here we are reading her post publicly. Well, she got A. That's all we know. Did she behave differently in her clasroom after the incident? Say, shown more aggressive behavior or come to class with a sad face? No. The article did not say that. Can we see it is possible that the daughter carried a fake smile to class and because her performance fooled the teacher? Don't jump to the table without facts from both sides.
Public shaming seems extremely excessive when this teacher is just a symptom of the real problem. The real problem here is that we don't fund schools well enough to reduce the class sizes to the point where her suggestions are reasonable. Her suggests would be great in a world of 10 student classrooms - and that is a world that we CAN MAKE HAPPEN. If we were willing to loosen our wallets.
As it is, in a world of 30-40 (and climbing) students per classroom and 5+ classes a day, a teacher who tried to one-on-one mentor every student they came across would be fired. They wouldn't have the time to actually teach the curriculum of the class, and would quickly find themselves out of a job.
Let's not blame and shame this teacher - that's the equivalent of blaming a brick that falls off the roof of a shoddily-constructed building for killing a bystander. Instead of blaming the contractors who built the roof, let's put the brick on trial.
Speaking as a teacher, I would love to get detailed feedback from a parent regarding their perception of my classroom environment.
Of course, if I had a parent suggest I needed to talk to a student and/or them about a classroom issue (the post was pretty explicit about it), I'd start there instead of waiting until the end of the semester and thereby provoking them into writing a bullet-pointed letter.
One time in college, I went to a busy ice cream restaurant with some friends of mine (Fenton's in Emeryville).
After entering, we saw there was just one single open table, so we went and put our jackets down on it and then got into line. After getting our ice cream we went back to the table only to find our jackets gone and some fat people sitting there, eating ice cream with their fat kids.
When I asked where our jackets were, a man, presumably the father of the obese family, told us that there were "some jackets" on the table but that they had the security guard come and clear them. As we went to find our coats, he informed us that "putting your jacket on the table doesn't count" for reserving a table.
In reading your post I am reminded of the certitude with which this large, stupid man asserted the correctness of an arbitrary and stupid set of rules, completely of his own making.
The system doesn't work if everyone reserves a table, it really grinds my gears when people do that in fast food joints etc. You don't need the table at that moment, people don't take long to eat there, you're bringing down the efficiency of the place by doing that.
What if everyone sat at the table and one person ferried the money and ice cream back and forth from the counter? Would that be better? Actual utilization of the table for eating is still zero, and the table is still engaged for the same length of time.
But try and evict bodies from their seats for the sole reason that their ice cream isn't in their hands yet and you would look crazy.
It's every bit as irritating, not that I would bother to confront anyone over it, it's not worth the effort. Still rude though.
Take a table when you need one in a fast food place, not as you're joining the queue. Reserving tables before you have food makes it less likely that people with food can get a table.
I get it, I really do. But if you want to stop being annoyed about this, just realize it's the norm and do it yourself. It's definitely a waste of time/vibes to be irritated about other people doing it. It's not like a grave moral issue or something. The world is full of inefficiencies and stuff to be annoyed with and a lot of them aren't actually a big deal. :)
Seriously? You should be thanking the large, smart man for teaching you the correctness of a wise set of rules designed to maximize the number of people who can use the limited number of seats in a popular fast food joint. Unless you called ahead and made a booking, you had no right to reserve those seats and inconvenience all the other people (including said gentleman and his family) looking for a seat.
A) I was in college then. I'm inclined to agree with the reasoning you gave here now.
B) But, the reason he gave was that it was against "the rules" -- that's the point: no, it's not. It's rude and inconvenient, maybe. It's not an abrogation of a code that everyone knows. It's an unwritten agreement, at best.
From your telling of the story, he was referring to the set of unwritten rules that I personally refer to as "the social contract," which you absolutely broke by selfishly reserving a table ahead of a family that, by your own admission, had their ice cream and was ready to eat before you were.
I'm not saying what I did was right or defensible -- in fact in the comment you're replying to I said that I agreed that I was wrong. And in a reply to a sibling comment I apologized for thoughtlessly slamming obese people.
I wrote about a time I was a jerk and put my name next to it. You ran to your throwaway account so you could show that you're effectively illiterate.
I think your comment reveals more about you than me. Do you think people only post to flatter their own egos, or that the purpose of posting is vanity? Going by votes, many more people find my comment helpful, additive or interesting than those who had some criticism.
It began a discussion so that was a bonus: human interaction. I learned that I was wrong as other people made good counterpoints. So what's the problem? That I wasn't the all-knowing master of the universe at the time I posted?
Of the critics, some simply don't understand the point of the story even though it's spelled out clearly at the end. Some people have taken exception to the fat language, which I understand. I am not particularly sympathetic to them but I do admit that it was insensitive of their feelings and have apologized.
What should I be expecting here? Petals in the street?
I've been a jerk plenty of times, and those are my problem and I feel badly about them. I try to be a better person through introspection, patience, and humility.
> the reason he gave was that it was against "the rules"
That's not how I see it at all. He informed you that there was not a jacket rule. He did not in fact make up any rules or tell you anything about said rules or in fact acknowledge that there are table-reserving rules. I don't understand where you're coming from.
> After getting our ice cream we went back to the table only to find our jackets gone and some fat people sitting there, eating ice cream with their fat kids.
> When I asked where our jackets were, a man, presumably the father of the obese family, told us that there were "some jackets" on the table but that they had the security guard come and clear them.
Is it just me, or is this comment really absurd, off-topic, and offensive?
First, why would you leave your jackets on a table out of your sight? The whole "put your jacket on a table to reserve it" thing is somewhat socially acceptable (though irritating), but it usually also involves keeping an eye on your jacket. You're lucky it wasn't on the floor or taken by someone other than the security guard when you got back.
But the larger issue I have with your comment is your reference to the size of the people who you're still mad at for taking "your" table. What does their obesity have to do with your story? In response to an article about discrimination, it almost seems like you must be trolling. Seriously, you could just substitute "slanteyes" or "niggers" and the substance of the story would not be at all changed. It read exactly that way to me.
Normally I'd just move on and assume others were offended as well, but this is somehow the highest voted reply...
You're right. Well, maybe -- I'm not agreeing that obesity slams are on the same level as racial slurs, but what I wrote was needlessly offensive and I can understand that it was hurtful to some others. I apologize to you and anyone else, I could have written the story without those references and the point would still remain. I should have known better.
funny, you're mad because he broke your untold rule on method of reservation, on basis of his untold rule on method of reservation? And why is this particular anecdote constructive to the discussion, in any way?
It sounds to me that the kind man even let the security personnel know of a possibly lost and found articles of your belongings. I'm not going to bat you further on blatant bullying on the man's physiques, as many other have pointed it already.
One, there was one open table, they had purchased their ice cream and were entitled to a table before you do. You don't "call shotgun" on tables. So what, the family who has their ice cream has to stand now while you wait in line (during which time another table may clear by then that you can sit at).
Your rules are just as arbitrary and inconsiderate. Let the people who got their first and need to eat their food sit first, there is no point in having an empty table go to waste while you wait in line.
Right. So how did you react? Did you have your mom write the family a letter? Post it to tumblr? Write an angry post about the poor management of the restaurant? Or did you handle the situation as an adult and move on with your life?
In my experience, life gets much better after the end of high school, because in my experience, adults don't bully adults [1]. And if you are bullied, you can generally leave.
[1] except the TSA, NSA, IRS, CIA, etc., but that's a different issue
>In my experience, life gets much better after the end of high school, because in my experience, adults don't bully adults [1]. And if you are bullied, you can generally leave.
In my experience, life does get better but also one's ability to handle bullying gets better which leads to less bullying.
As a teacher, I know that it is the job of a teacher to do better. Allowing an environment that takes engaged, bright students and grinds them down is in fact a failure to do a teacher's job: classroom management is tied with content delivery in a high school teacher's job description. Yes, there are many bad teachers, but why do you excuse doing bad work, essentially arguing that wasting kids' time and potentially doing them damage is just good preparation for the real world?
Did the student tell the teacher? Did the parent tell the teacher? From the story I get the impression that no one actually brought this issue to the teachers attention. The only context we have is that the parent offered to talk to the teacher for the daugher. The daughter declined and just put up with it for the rest of the year and avoided her classmates.
Kids are really good at hiding what they're doing, especially in high school. It's easy enough to not get caught by a distracted teacher that has 20 or 30 other students to assist. If this was happening in the open and the teacher was aware of it then there's an issue, it's very possible that's not the case. Unfortunately I saw the behavior described in this article in a number of classes during my own time in high school and none of them were CS classes. There are people that will be cruel regardless of the context.
"The World" is not this static, unchanging place where everyone has to be a dick, and all you can do is learn from the school of hard knocks.
Over time, "The World" CAN be improved, and the people who inhabit it can be better to each other than they were before. It'll only change if we get youth to change, though, and teachers allowing the status quo to continue unquestioned is not the way to make sure that things are better in the future.
Seems like people generally are agreeing with my interpretation. I am rewriting my comment.
First, it seems to me that she simply told her daughters what she could do. When her daughter said no the mother just left it to her daughter to deal with. After the semester is over, she's publicly denouncing the teacher.
So this is a little bit wrong because she could correct the issue by letting the teacher know the problem when it first occurred.
Let's not really speculating whether the teacher is old, simply doesn't care, sexist or what not. The daughter still got A. According to the mother, she assumed this was due to her daughter's long-term involvement with technology. I am sure she is a bright girl too. '
So can we just say there are two possibilities:
(1) the girl had hidden her sad face when she was in her classroom and since she did her homework and continued to excel on her quizzes and exams, the teacher didn't notice much
(2) the girl did show her sad face but the teacher failed to acknowledge that sign
If #1 were to be true, then we should say the mother has a bigger responsibility here than the teacher. First of all, she did not take action. Kids are weak but they wanted to play strong so they often hide their true feelings. I think any parent should step up to help solving bully issue right away. Not in a public way to name a few kids, but work with the teacher in a very constructive way (such as bringing in more women to talk about tech industry. That's better than bringing a man in.... if you want to show women can do the job too).
We don't know much about how the kid actually behaved in the classroom so we really shouldn't blame the teacher too much at the moment. What we need to realize is poor communication among the kid, the mother and the teacher. It's tough because half of the parents don't use email or they don't have time to talk to the kids or speak with the teacher reguarly. PTA is usually dead with a couple parents from time to time.
So the mother should learn her mistake, help reconstruct her daughter's confident and stop making her rants public now. It's not helping. It is sort of one-side if I had to be really harsh (you can downvote me if you want), but that's how I feel as I read through the post again and again.
Also, please, please, be careful when your daughter adds people she is still not very familiar with to her FB.
I suggested that she talk to you. I offered to talk to you. I offered to come talk to the class. I offered to send one of my male friends, perhaps a well-known local programmer, to go talk to the class.
None of that said she actually did. The previous sentence said she was suggesting all these options to her daughter.
edit here: "I consulted with friends — female developers — and talked to my daughter about how to handle the situation in class. I suggested that she talk to you. I offered to talk to you. I offered to come talk to the class. I offered to send one of my male friends, perhaps a well-known local programmer, to go talk to the class. Finally, my daughter decided to plow through, finish the class, and avoid all her classmates. I hate to think what less-confident girls would have done in the same situation. "
Yep. If a teacher were offered to have a well known software engineer come into their class, I can promise you they'd jump on it - if for no other reason than that it'd give them a break for an hour in their otherwise insane workdays. That was the biggest hint to me that she never actually said this to the teacher himself. What public school teacher wouldn't take her up on that, ever?
Wow. Feeling pretty good about my HS Pascal class (yeah, I'm old, so what) now. I was only ignored and dismissed, not harassed and told to make sandwiches (!).
The OP's daughter sounds awesome. The OP's daughter's teacher sounds like a real idiot.
So, was this article about the student's experience or the mother's? Because it reads like it's about the mother. The guys in class suggested that their peer go make a sandwich. That's the only accusation actually made against the class and the teacher. While I don't endorse such teasing, it's certainly in no way specific to computer programming, and it's not anything like the intensity one would expect when trolls find an article.
Minority entities will be teased practically any time they exist, regardless of sector or age, and they need to be taught to handle it well. We can continue to attempt to stop the teasing altogether, but in the meantime we have to live in the Real World, and if this child quit programming because a few guys made a kitchen joke, the mother is really misdirecting her efforts by writing a letter to the teacher.
It's hard to imagine that any rape joke would be allowed to fly in our classrooms where students can hardly wield pencils anymore, and if you read carefully, you'll see that it doesn't appear to have occurred. It appears to me that the author is attempting to use some clever wording to create an impression that the "harassment" was much more intense than it actually was by subtly crossing over into her personal experience with online trolls.
It is about the student's experience reflected in the eyes of a mother. Parents are not known for their objectivity when it comes to children, but in this case the (rather far fetched) idea that the evil boys and their sandwich jokes made her daughter dislike programming found fertile ground in the whole "designated victim" narrative of women in online environments.
There is no violence and rape in this story, there's only a mom with an axe to grind and a daughter who might not be interested in programming.
This is a learning moment for you, Mr stefantalpalaru. What you've just said, although I know you meant it sanely and sensibly, has been interpreted as lacking in compassion. This is not your fault; what happened is you have made a comment from a position of unrecognised privilege. For your own good, and the good of any women you may have any kind of relationship with now and into the future, it would be a very good idea for you to read up on the concept of privilege, with an open mind. You will find it uncomfortable, and you will probably prefer to fight back rather than acknowledge a flaw in yourself, but in the long run it will prove to be the best thing to do, and you'll be glad you did.
Poe's law in action. I have legitimately no idea whether this is mean-spirited satire or earnest bullshit.
If you are NOT being sarcastic: there are productive ways to talk about these (important) issues, be it gender, race, whatever--but this sort of "privilege" circlejerk is a huge waste of time as well as hugely condescending.
If you have a point to make then make it. Sitting around in a Privilege Circle saying "oh, no, I'm worse, you're white but I'm straight" is slacktivist bullshit at its worst.
Not at all! My goal is to respond to someone who is unkind with something close to kindness. If he goes on the way he has been, he'll do himself as much damage as he does to the people around him. The reasonable response to that sort of privileged blindness is anger; I was aiming for something a little more compassionate.
You, however, don't get the same consideration, because I strongly suspect you're a pillock.
It's probably safe to assume that you're parodying the nakedly Orwellian nature of third-wave feminists, but I'm going to respond just in case this is a serious post.
This use of "privilege" as a targeted weapon to silence specific demographics has to stop.
Women in the western world have always been among the safest, most privileged people on Earth. This entire thread, in fact, has been a shining example of female privilege.
No one cares that women soundly outnumber men in university admission, and university graduation, and even high school graduation. Heck, no one cares that it is men who overwhelmingly make up the bottom of society.
Instead, we're having a collective anxiety attack because a hyper-privileged white woman is upset that her hyper-privileged white daughter might have had her feelings hurt in high school. This is surreal.
You must have had one horrific childhood if your bar for "nothing wrong at school" is "no violence or rape". If you ever have kids, I hope you aim a little higher for them.
A school with "no violence or rape" wouldn't be just nothing wrong, it would be extraordinary. Even elite schools in developed and rich countries are filled with bullying: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/28/swedish-school-... Maybe you really ought to think about which school you went into in which neighborhood, which social clique you were a part of and if you still think no bullying happened, maybe it's time to think back on school and reevaluate some of your actions (hint: pranks and teasing might not be seen as that after all).
Although I'm not really sure why your defense of rape as normal high school experience managed to turn into a subtle accusation that I may have been a bully myself, and I probably should have ignored that.
It wasn't a subtle accusation, because in my experience people who say school violence doesn't happen or they never saw it happen are/were actually bullies themselves. This post just confirmed it with the nice twisting of words, 'defense of rape as normal high school experience', oh really?
I was pointing out how much, much worse stuff happens in schools than just being told to 'make a sandwich' and trust me, I would have been a very happy little boy if only that had happened to my friends and me. To be honest, starting from the author of the article, this entire thread displays just how sheltered of a life many of this community must be living to start an Internet crusade (because this is what it is going to end up when the social justice warriors get wind of it) because of a boring class with an unqualified teacher.
I think you may be using violence to mean any kind of bullying, which is a little vague. Teenage girls certainly engage in a lot of bullying, but very little physical violence, perhaps even less so in the rich private school environment I was in. I'm sorry you don't believe me. And I think claiming that not-rape would be extraordinary is pretty solidly in line with saying that rape is normal, yes.
To me the thread illustrates that for a community that gives so much lip service to disruption and progress, a lot of people are really unwilling to put up with the idea that high school shouldn't have to be the pit of misery that is apparently common in American public schools. But über is solving real problems!
But there isn't a problem to solve for this community, because bullying isn't actually seen/acknowledged as a problem. Education officials are also only paying lip service and even that only after some very horrible case hits the newspapers and teachers are very underpaid for the amount of work they do. And the people who were bullied either won't get into any position of power with the capability to enact changes or are truly trying to forget it all.
You're right, i completely discounted the possibility of female-female rape. I'm still pretty confident, but I take back the definitely. And I was using violence to mean physical injury, sorry if you were confused. I think it shouldn't be an unrealistic goal to have high schools where no one is raped or physically assaulted, I'm very confident i was at one, and I think that people who consider that so outlandish a suggestion that I must be an unwitting monster must have some sad backgrounds.
And now I should apologize, because I realized I was thinking only of the student body when we did have some male teachers. So although I would be shocked to learn of any incidents, it is not as impossible as I said.
Well, since almost everyone else completely discounts the possibility of female-female rape - probably including the teachers at your school - I wouldn't be so confident. After all, how would you know?
I feel like I should come to the defense of mixed-gender schools here a bit, even though I realize your comment doesn't necessarily advocate gender isolation (but it does sort of imply the benefits of it).
I went to a mixed-sex high school, albeit you might choose to take this anecdote with a grain of salt since that was 20 years ago in Germany. There was certainly some bullying, although not on the scale I discovered much later in life was common elsewhere. There was almost no intra-school violence. I feel pretty confident in saying this because these things were taken very seriously by both staff and students alike, and the few cases where there had been confrontations between students quickly became very public and a matter of much water cooler talk afterwards. I can also say with about the same level of confidence as you that there was no rape, or other forms of gender-based violence. And coming back to the article's subject, CS class was mandatory for everyone at first - and even though in later years the course became one of those that could be voluntarily dropped, the gender balance stayed the same after that.
That said, school wasn't ideal for me as I was in it. CS class wasn't exactly great, mostly due to utter disinterest by 90% of the students who took it. At the time I had the feeling the school was a bad choice for individualists like me, though in hindsight I would revise that conclusion a bit (as a humanist-themed middle/high school it was actually much better than any other school I could have gone to).
I think it's important to bring young people up together and not artificially separate them into two groups. Of the many social problems present in my time studying there, gender issues were not one of them. There was no us-versus-them mentality, and informal social groups were almost always mixed. I can't help but wonder if that sort of normalcy is something single-gender schools actively campaign against.
I also went to school outside America, ten years ago. I don't have a decided opinion on mixed schools either way - there are definitely benefits to single sex education, but they need to be weighed against the artificiality of the environment, as you say. Its worth noting that many of the straight up academic benefits of gender separation appear to be stronger for girls - higher participation in STEM subjects, more participation in class, better performance in general - but there is some evidence that boys perform better academically with girls in the class. (this might be a little out of date, I am less interested in the theory of school since I left it myself). I got the impression that the idea was basically to reduce social distraction during school: one could always hang out with the opposite sex after school (and most people did).
Whenever the topic of K12 .edu comes up, two loud and inherently conflicting arguments always percolate to the top:
1) Either we need to make school even less like the real world, by separating the sexes as per the above suggestion, or turning the school into the chronological opposite of a work release prison,
or
2) We need to make school more like the real world by banning unnatural things like homeschooling, because obviously no human beings work are home or own their own businesses and self direct themselves. Or no human beings carry a tiny swiss army knife on their keychain, so we need to ban that too, etc etc.
I read this comment as normalizing violence and rape - saying that it is expected, as a matter of course.
I disagree with that characterization. Bullying, violence, and rape should never be normalized, nor acceptable, regardless of the age of the perpetrators. This is aberrant, immoral behavior and should never be treated as anything else.
It's not as much about "evil boys" in general, like other commenters have pointed out similar jokes are heard in all classes. But it's much harder when you're the only girl, guy, white kid, black kid, ect. Even if it's an innocent joke it starts a me against them mentality.
>It's hard to imagine that any rape joke would be allowed to fly in our classrooms where students can hardly wield pencils anymore,
Zero tolerance tends to create situations in which schools/teachers/administrators do nothing since they don't want to get someone expelled. This creates an environment in which students say/do terrible things with little or consequence. Best case the teachers look the other way but often the teachers will harass students as well (I saw two teachers in my Junior High School sexually harass students). Occasionally the school will overreact and have someone arrested for using the word gun in an essay. The general rule is to expect them to do completely the wrong action, every time in every situation. At least that was my experience.
> Minority entities will be teased practically any time they exist, regardless of sector or age, and they need to be taught to handle it well.
Yeah? So this high school programming class isn't so much a programming class as a crash course in coping mechanisms for gender-based harassment?
Please. It's the educator's job to create a safe space for, you know, education--for every student in the class, not just the privileged majority. It's their job to track their students' education and interest level, and make adjustments if either starts dropping. It's not their job to facilitate a hostile environment and let minority students flounder in the interests of 'real world training'. It's not their job to decide that since it's hard for women in tech in real life, it should be hard in their class. Education isn't about maintaining the world we already live in, it's about shaping the world our kids will live in.
You want real world training? Show me an HR department in a software company that's fine with comments like "get in the kitchen and make me sandwich". Which real world are you advocating this high school programming class introduce to a 16-year-old girl?
I agree with the thrust of your comment. But as a member of the "privileged majority" who did not have a safe learning environment for most of my school years, I'm tired of getting dumped on online and being told my experience is not valuable or valid in these discussions.
School sucks for nerdy white boys, too. Yes, I'd like to see a safe and healthy learning environment for everyone.
>Which real world are you advocating this high school programming class introduce to a 16-year-old girl?
The real world where HR thought police aren't sitting in every room of every company. The real world where even HR people try to "make jokes" and be funny. The real world where HR people generally judge the severity of a harassment complaint by favoritism, which reality a blunt HR person (not employed at my current employer) just relayed to me recently. The real world where real humans, not perfectly politically correct robo-trons, must work, play, and engage.
I don't endorse teasing that harms a person's feelings. But I also think we shouldn't be so thin-skinned that we shrivel up and quit the first time a trite, cliched joke is thrown our way, because that happens all the time to everybody (your peers _will_ find a difference to comment upon no matter how mainstream you think you are), and if you can't handle it, you'll have a lot of difficulty handling more serious emotional situations, like getting passed up for a promotion.
It'd be great if the programming teacher first, was made aware of this problem, and the article never claims he was, and second, was able to stop the problem, but there's no guarantee he could've effectively done so even if he tried (and he may have), just as corporate HR departments can't stop all incidents of "harassment" even though they "try".
I believe the author probably wrote the piece primarily as a hypothetical, but I also believe it was bad taste to do so since this supposedly is traceable back to a real person who may not deserve that type of criticism, and I don't believe her fundamental complaint ("someone said something that made my daughter sad, so you all should feel bad :( ") is very worthy of the community's attention.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why 16-year-old girls leave programming. Remember, guys ganging up on you and telling them to make them a sandwich is just funny! You're so thin-skinned, ladies! thought police!
I didn't say it was funny or that being offended wasn't an OK response. I simply believe that we should handle potentially "offensive" situations wisely, instead of curling up and quitting. It is more than fine to voice your complaint and indicate that a so-called joke makes you uncomfortable and expect your peers to respect those feelings. It is also an effective requirement to recognize that you aren't always going to be able to get people to stop saying things you don't like, and that you can't let it cripple you.
And I only see hits in two squares on the "sexist joke bingo", not that it matters.
It's just an easy algorithm for detecting trite arguments! Makes some of these discussion more amusing for those of us who get to hear 'em a lot, and Lord knows we need some amusement.
> Third, "politically correct" is a label principally used by reactionary dullards to dismiss arguments or objections that they see as excessively leftist. It's equivalent to calling someone a commie. Mind you, some people are communists, some people are knee-jerk excessive leftists, etc... but if that's true in a particular situation, you can just explain why it's true. Calling it "political correctness" is just a lowbrow dismissal.
The post I was responding to did refer to the sandwich comment as a "joke" and jokes are generally defined to be "funny." I would not consider the sandwich comment a joke, myself, since it doesn't fulfill the criteria I have for a joke, but apparently the poster I was responding to does consider it a joke (even if not one he likes, per se). Thus to the poster it does fulfill the criteria for a joke, whether good or not, and thus it is not inaccurate to rephrase those criteria, including funniness.
The poster characterized it as a joke, but did not say that that excused it. Your reading of the post as defending every aspect of the situation is what I object to.
And unfunny, bad-taste jokes are still jokes. I can talk about the KKK member's standup routine and call his words jokes without saying that I found them funny.
Will you take the free space kaltai, or can we stop trying to use rhetorical tricks like talking dismissively about(rather than to) and trying to out-meta the other?
I think we're evaluating the circumstances with different criteria. You're looking at the story and relating it to a thin-skinned woman who can't handle non-politically-correct humor in the workplace. I'm relating it to a 16-year-old kid who hasn't had the time or experience necessary to develop the thick skin and snappy retorts that would shield her from her peers' disrespect. She's not getting passed up for a promotion; she just wants to learn programming. It's entirely within the job description of a teacher to notice, step in, and set standards for behavior in the classroom. Even when they're not met, they communicate more than tacit acceptance of bad behavior.
I completely agree that people in general, and women in tech specifically, have to be thick-skinned to survive professionally. Nobody's advocating HR thought police--they'd be unnecessary in this case anyway--or politically-correct automatons. We're talking about kids. Kids! Surely it's not totally out of line to suggest that they could learn better behavior than "get in the kitchen and make me a sandwich". Surely there's a better response to the whole situation than "that girl needs to suck it up and learn how the world works".
For what it's worth, I remember the first time those trite cliches were thrown at me, and they felt neither trite nor cliched. They hurt. I thought I was part of a team, among equals, brothers-in-arms, friends, and I wasn't. I was different, I was other, I was less, I was not welcome. It's a paradigm shift that happens in an instant, and it can be pretty shattering--great for killing enthusiasm and developing thick skin in the future, maybe, but not for learning things in a programming class.
I agree. While gender-related issues in the software industry are important and worth talking about, this article seems to have pretty little justification.
I was in high school a few years ago. Put that many teenagers in a room and of course they're going to fuck with each other.
I've heard sandwich jokes made in liberal arts classes, biology classes, even a badminton class--which also had only one girl in it. The takeaway is not that the badminton industry is misogynistic or that the Phys Ed teacher is failing womankind; the takeaway is that high schoolers are dicks.
High schoolers grow up. When they grow up, do they remain dicks, or do they change? I finally watched 42 the other day. There's this scene where a white dad is screaming at Robinson to get off the field, that they don't want him there, calling him all sorts of names. His son is hesitant at first, but starts following suit. The implication was clear. What you see as acceptable when young can stick with you for a long time until you have a shocking wake-up call. And seriously, who in society has really seen these wake-up calls happen more often than not? Especially given the amount of evidence we see of it not happening.
>the takeaway is that high schoolers are dicks. //
Sure. But not exclusively [which I know you weren't claiming].
I had some pretty degrading and misandrist remarks made about me in situations with lots of women in; where I've been the only man (mothers, women of an age to marry and more mature women too).
I think these things are a lot about group dynamics.
> I think these things are a lot about group dynamics.
I think that's right, particularly male group dynamics.
I'd say all guys are bullied, except most of us wouldn't call it such - it's the establishment of hierarchy, and bonding.
Is that right? Is that right when they don't differentiate their bullying towards girls? I'm not even going to wade into that.
However, I feel (through personal experience) masculinity is being more and more removed from young men, and at a high cost.
Child gets bullied (shock horror), mother assumes it's sexism (it ain't, it's bullying. I'm a dude. Got bullied at high school. Does that make my tormentors homosexual autosexists?), rants.
I'm so bored of this sort of thing. Yes, there are man-children who post stupid and hurtful crap on the internet. Yes, there are cretins who make dick jokes on stage at conferences. There are also women who are complete and utter asses to all men because "all men are rapists", which IMHO is a far more misandric view than the kind of offhanded misogyny of "sudo make me a sandwich" shit nerd guys come up with.
People are dicks. People do stupid crap. People hurt each other.
People who use gender as an emblem and weapon are also dicks, because they create a line of demarcation and balkanisation where there IS NONE. We are PEOPLE. Not "Men" and "Women" who are some kind of antagonistic polar-opposite species.
Edit: Rape jokes. Interesting one that. I recall being 12, on a school bus on a trip to some camp in Michigan (am mostly schooled in the UK, spent a year in 7th grade in the US, loathed it), and being astounded at the fact that the gaggle of girls sat behind me were all cracking rape jokes. I actually couldn't parse at first what they were talking about "rip? ripe? rope?", until I clocked the macabre subject of their humour.
It took the (male) bus driver to ask them to all kindly shut the fuck up.
... hello wilful misinterpreter? You don't fix a gas leak by buying a new sofa. I'm just saying that the thing being posed as an issue isn't the actual issue.
Either you have serious reading comprehension issues, or you make a habit of deliberately misconstruing others statements - or you're a troll, and I'm stupidly feeding you.
I am saying that it IS an issue, but that the issue is not one of gender discrimination, just one of kids, and humans, being dicks - and you can't combat it purely on gender lines as all you're doing is treating a symptom rather than the disease.
The problem in and of itself is a valid problem that can be worked on. By lots of small, manageable efforts we can make the world a better place. Abstracting problems away - making them more generalised - only turns manageable problems into philosophical debates.
Btw, you need to get away from the habit of directly attacking the author and focus instead on attacking the argument.
You're right that by abstracting things away you can just create a philosophical point with no path to resolution, but you can also actively inflict harm by tackling an issue in isolation without evaluating and understanding the root cause.
This is the same philosophy (general problem, specific problem within that general problem that we think we can act on, so act, without looking at the general problem) that lead to rampant mercury poisoning and insanity across the globe in the late 19th c., as a poultice of mercury nicely clears up the sores from syphilis - but does not cure syphilis.
I don't understand your point. The syphilis example is, as you say a specific cure to a specific problem. Good. It's also good science. This is the opposite of what you were arguing earlier.
>I am saying that it IS an issue, but that the issue is not one of gender discrimination, just one of kids, and humans, being dicks
Wrong. You're assuming that all forms of bullying are equally bad. This is patently false. Bullying based on traits that already set you apart can reenforce imposter syndrome. Specifically in the case of programming, a woman in a male-only class will already feel isolated and like she doesn't belong. Being bullied with gender-specific insults is much more harmful to this persons potential as a programmer than being bullied with gender neutral ones. So addressing specifically the sex-based bullying is necessary in addition to bullying in general.
All bullying is based on traits that set you apart. People don't bully "one of the crowd". They bully the outliers, the different ones, the ones who are female, or fat, or thin, or clever, or stupid, or black, or white, or old, or young, or even the kid that wears last season's "cool clothes".
It's not about gender. It's about ostracism. You don't have to be female to be ostracised. You just have to have something, anything, that sets you apart from the crowd.
This is the societal control mechanism we have culturally evolved to ensure conformity and "strength" in groups. It is really, really, really fucking dangerous, and leads to fun shit like Nazism. It's also really powerful, and is the basis of nation states.
Ergo, the problem needs treating at its cause, which is a cultural illness, and is far from simple to treat. You cannot simply resolve one emergent aspect of it and then expect to treat each aspect the same way. You do not cut down a tree by plucking at its leaves.
>All bullying is based on traits that set you apart.
This is certainly true. What I meant to convey was that in the context of a programming class, being bullied for a trait that is itself already suspect within oneself reenforces it and thus is more damaging. If that girl had been bullied in the programming class because she was fat, it may not have had as much of an impact on her decision to pursue the career. Being bullied because she's a girl on the other hand, had the secondary effect of reenforcing the idea that she doesn't belong in tech.
That's a fair point, and I agree that in the circumstance due to the framing of the situation it could be more harmful - but it doesn't change the fact that the root cause is bullying.
We as a species have a remarkable proclivity to be very unkind.
Your deliberate misrepresentation of the posts you are replying to is simply dishonest. There is no way for a constructive conversation to come out of that.
"Life's tough." is a truism, whining about it or demanding everyone "be nice" is fail. You have control over yourself, believing you have/can control others is delusional and dangerous (to society).
The way to deal with it is "Suck it up." i.e. have self-confidence and act you, yourself, personally, better than others. Lead by example, not legislation.
Two things stood out in particular: Bullying and sexism can coexist and feed off each other; and 'all men are rapists' feminists are actually extremely rare - far, far rarer than the 'man-children' you reference.
She went off on some tangent about comments on an article she wrote - what the hell does that have to do with her daughter's computer programming class?
This was a rant about the mother's issues directed at a seemingly innocent teacher.
Also, is it common for 16 year olds to ask for a car in the US? I asked my mum to make my favourite food, and some money so i could go out with friends. Compared to "a car" or a Macbook Pro, it sounds like i had a deprived life.
If you're in a community where driving is common/necessary, and most family incomes are high enough for teen drivers to have a car – that is to say, lots of US middle-class suburbia – then yes, it's common.
There are some indications that denser-development, economics, safety-concerns, and the rise of alternative attention-demanding status-objects like mobile phones are now shifting the norms. See for example:
Yes, very common, at least in the wealthier regions. Many kids have a car available as soon as they can legally drive.
That said, I've noticed a trend among my son's peers. Many of them delayed driving until they left for college. Not sure why. When I was that age, everybody skipped school on their 16th birthday to go take the driving test.
Yes, it is common for them to ask. (It doesn't mean they get it, though).
A large part of the US is not practically walkable and has insufficient public transportation. In order to "go out with friends", sometimes to even see said friends, to hold down a job, to go to the store, transportation in a car may be necessary. Teenagers prefer to not rely on their parents to take them places. Thus, car ownership represents freedom and autonomy to US teenagers.
Is Visual Basic really any worse than what you'd be exposed to at a Drupal conference? I think you'd be hard-pressed to explain why you chose anything beyond a 4th generation scripting language if you were starting a new class with an unlimited budget.
Schools are often behind with this sort of technology, so depending on the development environment available, isn't one language as good as the next to explain concepts like assignment, boolean operations and program flow? (My high school computer classes were BASIC on a Burroughs B3300 mainframe and my first COMP SCI class at college was Fortran on an IBM s360 mainframe, so maybe I haven't got a clue!)
I don't disagree with you, strictly speaking, but I do understand how VB might not be the best way to get people interested in programming. While JavaScript is, in my very humble opinion, a rather poor "first language", I understand why so many people seem to want to use it as such, because it is easy to get "neat" results.
When I was a youngster, I thought the copy of VB 5 my dad got me was the coolest thing ever, because being able to create "real" computer programs like the ones I used every day was super-awesome-sweet. Today, kids are much more likely to interact with mobile apps and web sites. So teaching them to make those things is more likely to be exciting, the way Windows GUI apps were for me in the 90s.
Not only is it easier to get neat results in JS but it has a very low barrier to entry. Everyone uses the internet and is just a shortcut away from executing javascript code in console of their favorite browser on a live page. That and the language itself is very "loose" when it comes to rules and strictness. It just gets the work done. Nothing like cpp for example. Now it can be both good thing because the results are easy and instantaneous and a bad thing because this gives a false notion to newcomers of how programing is done (but then again js is pretty ubiquitous on any modern computer, so it is as "real world" as it gets.)
I'm a IT/Computing teacher in the UK. We've only just started to teach Computer Science recently and although I was a developer before retraining as a teacher I chose Visual Basic.
Why? Well, we don't have to pay to install it, our technicians are happy to install it, the GUI design stuff is easy for students to use, I think it is easy to learn quickly and most importantly it allows our students to get high marks easily. Also I'm the only person in my school who can program - others will have to pick it up as the number of classes increases - again VB is easy for a novice to learn.
The exam board dictates what programing assessment is to be done and the amount of time it is to be done in. As much as I'd be happy to teach another language VB is the best fit in this case.
This is exactly the scenario I was guessing led to the choice of VB. I'm also going to agree with many of the comments saying Javascript might not be a great first language for new CS students.
These situations are always regrettable and awful. High school strikes me as the place to expect immaturity and shittiness the most, and because of that, I would expect teachers to be all the more committed to fighting that shitty, dumb sexism.
By not stopping the shitty, dumb sexism dead in its tracks, the teacher also did a huge disservice to the boys in the class.
They've now had a chance to learn that treating women in CS this way is okay. I hope that in the <5 years it takes them to get to the professional world, they have realized how damaging they were. More importantly, I hope the author's daughter finds the personal strength to pursue CS.
The author's main point is well-stated and deplorable.
As for the ancillary issue of the class material itself being crap: yeah, duh. And it's not just computer programming. You only notice how bad that class is because you have relevant expertise.
It's a safe bet that the other courses are similarly terrible. Send a biologist or physicist or mathematician or historian to observe a randomly selected high school class and they will find that their subjects too are being taught by people without the slightest appreciation or aptitude.
I got a feeling that the OP was ranting due to her own hurt feelings rather than her daughter's. I failed to see anything out of the extraordinary that made the teacher deserve such harsh criticism. Yes she was harassed by some boys, I agree that sucks and the teacher should do something about it.
I have a baby daughter my self and can imagine the feelings if I heard she got harassed by her schoolmates, but then I would write a letter that focuses on THAT problem and not criticizing irrelevant points like the teacher's choice of programming language and overall teaching methods.
Also, if the girl truly has an interest in programming than years of encouragement is not even necessary, she will naturally be attracted by it and there is no parent who can stop her from it.
> I got a feeling that the OP was ranting due to her own hurt feelings rather than her daughter's. I failed to see anything out of the extraordinary that made the teacher deserve such harsh criticism.
The classroom culture is the teacher's responsibility. If a student is being harassed and has a hostile environment in this classroom, the teacher has failed in a serious way. Doubly-so when the harassment is driven by bigotry.
Then she should have kept the criticism relevant to that and not attacking the teacher's technical judgement:
"Visual Basic? Seriously?? Yes, I know I said I'm not writing to complain about your choice of programming languages, even though I'm still scratching my head on this one"
That only moves the focus from the real problem and creates a dispute that is not even relevant and necessary.
She provides almost zero details of the harassment and lot's of details on irrelevant things. How will that help the teacher to stop this from happening again if he is not told what went wrong?
It's too bad the teacher was too weak to protect your daughter's honor, and ensure decency in the classroom. High school can be a cruel place. I hope she realizes those hurtful comments didn't represent her at all. It was just scared boys searching for some semblance of masculinity they may never find.
Johnny, you did great in my class. You did well in the assignments and were heading for a nice B. But you know what? I'm knocking that down to a C for one simple reason -- you acted like a sexist fool towards Susan and created a hostile environment. You're not the only one. Karl and Larry and getting downgraded too. This isn't on your permanent record...yet. Don't do it again. Grow up. What made you think this behavior was acceptable?
Believe it or not, most teachers can't do this in the real world anymore. Grades are supposed to be objective and based on a student's demonstrated work. In the schools where I've worked, a teacher would find him/herself in a world of pain for knocking down a kid's score by an entire letter grade for being a jerk.
These days, school policies generally insist on separating disciplinary and academic issues.
That is also terrible teaching. A good teacher sets up a productive classroom environment from the beginning, with expectations set out in words and also modeled in behavior (calling on a wide variety of students, modeling how to ask questions about a student's thoughts, modeling how to give praise and criticism, giving a continual example of how to work through problems). When issues like negative interaction between students come up it's easy enough to set up a group work lesson that separates problem personalities, put people in groups with supportive folks, leave alone students who want to be left alone and try to channel energy in the right direction. I've worked with nerdy teenage boys and socially awkward types of all genders, and it's a matter of skill to deal with this but that is after all the job!
For instance, I had a student (13 yrs old?) in an advanced math class that was all male (I'm female) and he had a habit of starting to blurt out mildly veiled sexual comments to me. I said a few things to him about what was appropriate in class, in a kind way and privately, and I also arranged for a male administrator to chat with him. It stopped. Grades have nothing to do with this -- they're not effective in any way in setting classroom tone, especially as they're feedback far after the semester ends.
I'm sorry for all these Hacker News readers who had shitty high school experiences, but you do need to grow up and realize they were shitty. Turning around to dump the shit downhill -- or indulging in some sort of Stockholm syndrome -- is not going to make the world a better place and it does not make you a better person.
I don't always do things perfectly; I remember one female student who was being aggressively and unwillingly courted by a football player in one of my classes and I wasn't able to prevent all the distraction. But I noticed and did what I could, and commented to them separately about what is and isn't alright in the classroom. Seriously, folks, it's not that hard to have expectations for appropriate behavior and enforce them.
> During the first semester of my daughter's junior/senior year, she took her first programming class. She knew I'd be thrilled, but she did it anyway.
Edit: before anyone harangues me, I don't mean to take away from the shitty circumstances surrounding the core message in the post, just got a chuckle out of the subtle dad/daughter humor inserted.
Dunno, now that you mention it. There’s some research[1] that correlates word choice and grammatical structure with author gender, predicting gender with ~80% accuracy. Presumably I do something like that without thinking about it.
[1]: Shlomo Argamon, Moshe Koppel, Jonathan Fine, and Anat Rachel Shimoni: Gender, Genre, and Writing Style in Formal Written Texts
Maybe it's an age thing, but is it just me or is this phenomenon really new? When I was a kid, geeks were inclusive. Weird and horny and therefore prone to awkward creepiness, but not hostile.
Was it always like this and I just need to "check my privilege" as a dude or has the 4chanification of geek culture invaded real life?
And as for the VB, VB.Net is actually an okay language if you expose them to modern features. I mean, the boolean algebra syntax is weird, as are the array sizing, and the "Dim" keyword is just dumb... but other than those legacy issues the rest of the language is just "C# with words and a smaller community". Not great, but not that bad - there's modern closures/lambdas and full OOP and generics and all that great stuff.
The money probably has something to do with it. In the distant past (80s, 90s, earlier I'm sure) there perhaps wasn't quite the connection between computer programming and money in the eyes of the general population. Of course there were the Jobs-types and such, but the whole thing really moved into the public consciousness in the early 2000s I think. This has, perhaps (this whole comment should be read as speculation that seems reasonable to me) driven up the level of competition and general testosterone and brought in people who are less likely to see themselves as underdogs and more likely to look on their "competitors" (classmates) with disdain.
I highly doubt it's a new thing, unless it has evolved simultaneously in young and old people. Look at the constant debate on these forums on whether or not it's productive to treat coworkers like shit. I think the root cause is the same: people projecting their anger from their own mistreatment onto others and people looking to establish someone else as the runt of the pack in order to prevent themselves from being the weakest link.
Harassment is one of those things that I think a lot of men don't recognize as such because we generally aren't subjected to the kind of sexual harrasment in the letter. But once you've seen it in action and recognize it as such, you can't unsee it. All of sudden, things you never thought about before, like sandwich jokes, are suddenly seen in a worse light.
While recognizing it means it seems like a new problem, it actually improves the situation because people will be less likely to engage in such behaviors if they don't think of it as harmless fun.
Are geeks very likely to attend a Visual Basic class at school? I somehow doubt it. Also "sudo make me a sandwhich" isn't necessessarily that hostile. Having a an overzealous mum who blows things widely out of proportions could become a problem, though. That girl might even have been primed with some "gender attitudes" before class had even started.
"how were you even able to make programming boring?"
Puts into words the question I've been trying to ask some of my teachers for so long, but haven't been able to.
I know programming isn't intrinsically interesting to everyone, but I think there is still magic to be found in seeing your instructions (in VB, Pascal, C, Logo, whatever) translated to something on the screen.
The basics are not always interesting, especially when you 'get them'. But its through this repetition you build upon the knowledge. Eventually every fancy thing falls back to the basics.
Think about Chemistry; the instructor can show all these cool reactions but you eventually have to sit down and mindlessly run through on paper the chemical reaction.
Now think programming-wise; I can show you wireless communication between two Arduinos and some XBee radios, but eventually you have to explain how variables are stored in memory, or how the communication is made, or some other basic.
Intro classes can be boring because there doesn't seem to be an endpoint, but that's why everyone encourages open source communities, they offer that real life feel to everything you learn.
My experience in the professional world is that its full of assertive, aggressive individuals men and women included. There are only so many slots at the top and the ones not occupied by the CEO's nephew belong to thick skinned individuals who have endured a careers worth of mental/emotional abuse. How many times have your heard someone utter the words "My boss/colleague/lead is an idiot." Is it a disservice to create these mushy teeball environments where everyone gets to be an astronaut?
I understand that you're advocating for helping people develop a thick skin. Where I take objection is when you start talking about abuse. There's enough other kinds of adversity out there to be resilient against.
> My experience in the professional world is that its full of assertive, aggressive individuals men and women included.
It's possible to be assertive and aggressive without being abusive.
> There are only so many slots at the top
Not everyone wants to get to the "top".
> Is it a disservice to create these mushy teeball environments
They certainly sound better than environments full of mental/emotional abuse. Why can't we create abuse-free environments in the real world, too?
Obviously I use the term "abuse" facetiously. However, no one buys the memiore about the individual that coasted into prosperity with the love and support of everyone around them.
> Not everyone wants to get to the "top"
sure, but how about you let them make that decision rather than taking the liberty of handicapping them in advance.
>They certainly sound better than environments full of mental/emotional abuse. Why can't we create abuse-free environments in the real world, too?
Sure but they will need to compete against the environments filled with vicious, agogi-bred cutthroats who are there by choice.
I agree. You can't protect kids from each and every threat. you cannot fight their battles for them all the time. But what you can do is prepare them with the confidence and the knowledge to begin fighting. At some point your kid needs to build character by encountering adversaries. The boys telling the girl to make sammiches are one of many that she'll encounter in life.
I would of posted this in her comment section, but the requirements for signing up are beyond the pale of acceptable.
"Thanks to my career, my daughter's Facebook friends list
includes Linux conference organizers, an ARM developer
and Linux kernel contributor, open source advocates, and
other tech journalists."
I, am so jealous right now.
"but I was unprepared for the harassment to start in
high school, in her programming class."
but her mother seems to have an interesting idea of what High School actually is.
"Did you not see her enthusiasm turn into a dark cloud
during the semester? Did you not notice when she quit
laughing with and helping her classmates, and instead
quickly finished her assignments and buried her nose in
a book? What exactly were you doing when you were
supposed to be supervising the class and teaching our
future programmers? "
That's hard to notice for a specific student when that's happening to 30% of the class, don't you think? That your god child should be spared, because she's female? I wasn't spared, why should yours be? She didn't get subjected to anything that I haven't gone through. At least from your description.
"I'm no teacher, so forgive me if you think I'm out of
place when it comes to telling you how to do your job.
But I am a mother, and I've spent years encouraging
girls and women in IT"
and he will have to forgive you, up to him though.
"Recruit students to take your class. Why was my
daughter the only girl in your class? According to her,
she only took the class because I encouraged it."
Because women are free to do what they want, and they're choosing not to. This discrepancy manifests everywhere. More deeply in countries with a focus on personal liberty. There are few male orderlies in hospitals.
"My daughter said she [didn't know] about the programming
class ... Have you considered hanging up signs ... asked
the school counselors to reach out ... spoken to other
classes, clubs, or fellow teachers ... asked the
journalism students to write a feature ... asked current
students to spread the word"
It was a full class. Wasn't it?
"Set the tone. On the first day of class, talk about the
low numbers of women and lack of diversity in IT"
You do not understand teenagers. Evidenced by that the teacher should single someone out to lessen harassment.
"Don't be boring and out-of-date. Visual Basic?
Seriously??"
You also might not understand schools. I can tell you four things that have a high probability of being true:
1. The professor doesn't have a choice.
2. The professor doesn't care.
3. This is all the professor knows.
4. There is no one to replace him.
"Check In ... Follow Up"
How many students? ~30? In one class? In the ~5 classes he teaches every day?
"my daughter learned why there are so few women in IT"
They choose not to be, and because they are so few, the ones that remain are singled out. There are few male orderlies in hospitals too, despite the fact that there's an "objective" demand for them (I was furious when I was confronted for the reason. It's to help lift patients, and help deal with patients experiencing an episode.
Sure, but care about the right things, and not construct a gednder issue where thete isn't one. Do you think gender issues are the most important problem schools are facing?
> That's hard to notice for a specific student when that's happening to 30% of the class, don't you think?
Not to mention 70% of the teachers.
I took a mandatory class (keyboarding) from a friend of my grandparents', the first year he taught. I saw first hand how much the apathy of the class wore him down. He started the year hoping he could get people at least vaguely interested, but no one cared, and there was no way he could force them to.
He's upset that men are naturally stronger than women and female orderlies would delegate the heavy lifting to male co-workers as their preferred tool. At least that's what I gathered.
My parser treated it like this: "There is an objective need for more male orderlies (because they can lift heavy patients), but I was furious that [someone] confronted me on this obvious fact".
There is a larger desire for male orderlies, the reason for that desire are for the "obvious fact" that males are stronger, and can be used for heavy lifting, and protection for and from disorderly patients.
It makes me furious that they can so blatantly state these reasons without fear, where as statements to any effect about the female gender would consistently create backlash. I don't disagree with their reasons, what made me furious was the asymmetry.
Minorities(race/color/religion/gender etc) definitely suffer harassment and discrimination of all kinds.
But your point on liberty is spot on.
I have a feeling if you were to get rid of this harassment and discrimination thing overnight. It would make negligible impact to ratio of representation which existed before.
>>Because women are free to do what they want, and they're choosing not to. This discrepancy manifests everywhere. More deeply in countries with a focus on personal liberty.
In countries with personal liberty you will suddenly have new sets of problems. You can't blame anybody or anything for your failures, and that's a bad situation to be in. You are no longer the victim or the under dog and no one sympathizes with you anymore.
I can appreciate that, but I really don't see a way to change human nature, particularly the nature of children. A percentage of people are going to be picked on and singled out.
How do you propose we fix it? Do you think this article was even partially close to a solution?
I am sorry to say that I assumed the author was her father for most of the letter. Her arguments made much more sense to me after rereading it with that information, but I guess it's a statement in itself that with the discussion of her technical background and her strong assertive tone, I assumed her a man. Reality: checked.
I'm in the same boat, but I don't think there's anything wrong with me (or you) for making that assumption. It's a male dominated industry, and it makes sense to make that assumption without extra information, especially when the authors gender isn't really relevant to the story.
I assumed it was written by a man at first as well. Would you take the accusations of sexism stronger if it was coming from a dad? I would.. and there is something wrong with that.
Late reply, but no I don't think I would. I thought the message, a school kid having to tolerate sexism without the support of the school/teacher/class, more than shameful enough.
Willing to agree with you that the gender of the author having a greater impact, either way, is probably wrong.
595 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 527 ms ] threadA couple of takeaways:
1. The fact that the OP's daughter signed up for programming class because she wanted to impress her parent is truly a parenting win. Not just for programming, but anything, at that age.
2. I consider myself pretty open minded about gender diversity...but as I was reading the OP's post, I completely assumed it was written by a programmer-father, until I got to the part where the OP describes being harassed. Still, the mental stereotype was so strong that when writing this comment, I kept having to not refer to the OP as the father of the daughter. The trolling that the OP describes is troubling. But it's easy to be angry at the trolling, and raise awareness about it. Unfortunately, I think women in tech still have the much more difficult task of fighting pervasive, subconscious stereotyping and assumptions in the industry.
edit: 3. The OP treats the use of Visual Basic as an ancillary problem...and it is, compared to what her daughter had to put up. But yeah, VB, seriously? I respect people who do VB -- and do it well, because they have to maintain legacy software at a big company...but if you're a programming teacher, you should have a passion to make your subject as relevant to your students and their contemporary lives when possible...nevermind that using VB, in this day and age, has some considerable barriers to just "dive into" compared to, say, Javascript. It'd be like a physics teacher who didn't make a single reference to CERN, Elon Musk, or physics as it applies to modern athletic competitions.
Is there a modern (or better suited for introductory courses) language that has the kind of curriculums built around it that VB and Java do?
Codecademy and the like are awesome for independent learning and exploration, but it doesn't work for classroom instruction. There don't seem to be many curriculums designed around modern, web-focused languages like Ruby or Javascript that your average teacher can use for high school CS classes.
I never took programming in high school, so maybe I'm setting my sights low...but even with a well developed curriculum, it's hard to imagine that the class gets very far.
Whereas with JavaScript, they can literally start executing code as soon as they open their browsers. I think that makes up, at least a little, of the time lost in not having as mature of a curriculum.
But I think the big win with JS is opportunity. Whatever crappy program they might come up with, they can immediately show it to their classmates and also to any friends or family with a simple link...it's not quite as easy to distribute a VB or other compiled executable. This kind of sharing makes programming...I would think...much more dynamic and lively.
And in addition to that, they get some web development experience...which is handy now and likely to be useful in 5 years. Whereas with VB, and most other programming languages...it's possible to learn them without gaining any hands-on experience with the Web.
The questions/problems that the exam board sets (considering the number of hours the students get to solve them in) are really suited to VB, or another Visual based language. What I'm trying to say is that the language chosen also has to fit the requirements of the exam board, as the students, school and myself are all judged by our results (GCSE grade etc).
Edited: changed wording for clarity
So you teach Visual Basic, because it has less "gotchas" than Javascript, it reads more like english, it has less intimidating symbols, it can be made to be strongly typed so that they'll receive feedback at compile time, it comes with a powerful WYSIWYG tool built into the IDE, and it has a vast, VAST suit of powerful first and third party libraries that can make the kids feel like they're performing magic.
Visual Basic gets shit on a lot by people, and perhaps justifiably in the business world - but in the teaching world (especially when you're teaching people who are ignorant of and generally apathetic to the subject matter), there are few languages that compare to it favorably.
I would not want to work or study in an environment surrounded by social akwardness and harassment either.
the problem lies with the men.
I think the problem is not with men or women in particular, but society in general, as it has a concept that genders are socially different while they're [mostly] not. I strongly suspect, neither men, nor women are prerogative carriers of such stereotypes - although, naturally, as those stereotypes are discriminating to women, they're primarily opposed by them, not men.
Kind of, yes. Programming is a decidedly anti-social job in many ways, and suits the socially inept.
That's not all a negative thing- it's possible to be successful through your skills alone, and few other jobs provide that path.
I'm not saying we can't fix this problem. We can do that by hiring more well rounded people for programming positions. The same type of male techie who would mistreat a woman at the workplace, would mistreat a man too. I don't necessarily think being odd is wrong as long as you're not hurting someone.
Personally it's the tech industries fault in general, which continues to pander to the academic and elitist groupings to foster talent, which is in and of itself unequal. Add to the fact that these groupings contain their own patriarchal problems and the picture becomes even more complex. Personally I don't feel like we need 50% women in the tech industry. I feel like everyone should be given an equal chance at learning as many skills as possible in a fostering learning environment. The fact that schools, parents, etc don't accomplish this can't all be blamed on the industry itself. Many engineering subjects suffer from these larger societal problems that relate with entrenched social roles and patriarchal institutions.
Making the average Joe reading hacker news aware of these problems are important, but laying the blame on all men, or even a subset larger than a choice few who benefit from the systemic patriarchal tendencies in unfair however. The core issue is equality. And society isn't equal. This is more of an effect than a primary problem.
What's more I think the stereotype is harmful in itself. It provides an excuse for some men to act like assholes and it affects the perception of the rest by the outside world.
I have also seen misogyny and incredibly awful behaviour in the workplace. This was invariably carried out by men who thought they were good at what they did but were sadly mistaken.
And in a sense, you can't really blame them much for that. Social clumsiness and normal loneliness and desire aren't exactly crimes.
But what the author describes isn't like that. He described an actively hostile and misogynistic classroom.
Maybe I missed it (and I could've missed it since I'm a dude), but the modern culture of full-out misogyny that's infected young programmers wasn't present when I was a student, and it scares the willies out of me.
It may be misogyny but my experience of groups of youths makes me feel it's "just" verbal abuse. She's not being targeted because she's a girl she's being targeted because [almost] everyone is.
High-schoolers pick on others because those others have traits that make them stand out. There's probably a kid in the same class being picked on because he's short, another because he's stupid, another because he's poor. So, this one is being picked on because she's a girl - that's what stands out most about her against the common traits of the group. Is that really misogyny is it disproportionate because she's a girl.
In some ways that the only thing that they latched on to was her gender is positive - hear me out on this one - that suggests that she's good looking, she's not poor, not fat, not spotty, not known amongst the students for moral deficiency. In fact I feel it's basically a confession that they've got nothing else to pick on her for.
If the worst she got was a well recycled joke it sounds like she was probably having an easier time of it than most kids in the classroom, no.
None of that is to say nothing should be done about someone feeling the environment they're in isn't conducive to education of course. It just strikes me that sexism isn't the root problem - if instead she was picked on for being a swot [that's perhaps UK-ism, a conscientious and attentive student with a hint of toadying] would that have been better somehow?
"Why should I take on the liability of adding a women to my engineering team?"
"I've never had a women answer any hard math questions correctly so we can skip those." It was great when I insisted we walk through them together, he got one completely wrong and couldn't remember the basics.
"I normally delete any resumes from women applying for engineering positions without actually reading them." =recruiter who didn't know I was within earshot. I assume he was forced to bring me in by HR. Which is yet another annoyance. I don't accept token female positions. See below.
"I need a women on the engineering team so the guys don't have to deal with the women in marketing." - actual job offer.
"Do you plan on having children?"
I recently left a job, because I couldn't get my other team members to stop leaving commit messages like "fuck heroku in it's whore ass', 'fucking cunts'. The hilarious part is that my background is in porn, I wasn't offended, I just couldn't figure out what the fuck they were committing. When I asked them to write more descriptive messages they said I was too sensitive. The guy who took over for me constantly emails me and asks if I remember when x was done....
I'm very active in my local tech community and I spend my free time teaching, so I know that 99% of guys in tech are not like this. (at least on purpose) But the attitude is accepted and even defended, which is obvious just reading the comments on any article involving women in tech on HN. But, it doesn't happen to them so how are they to know that I hear the 'hilarious' Tits or GTFO joke hundreds of times. The only reason I've started to become vocal about it is because I hope that it gives someone a little insight into what we have to deal with. I'm not at all a SJW and hate the concept of check your privilege. I think SJW are actually making women in tech look like weak victims.
I was a student assistant. I gave lab courses (lots of different types, cs 101, ai, graphics etc) and there wasn't a single girl that can actually do good. Sure there was some who can memorize a whole textbook and get A in grades thanks to exams but that was it. They were at best average for my case. And In my school, girl ratio is not that bad either. Even when I was a student, there was a single girl that applied and graduated as same year as males, all other females failed and prolonged their schools.
I am sure most of you met exceptional woman programmers, I am not denying that there might be exceptions. But from my personal experience women is not as capable as men in tech. That is pretty much my reasoning why there are so low interest in tech related courses/jobs for women
It's a flawed argument. In a group of male programmers, fully half of them are below average (yes, I'm sure). Should the less accomplished 50% be subject to ridicule as intellectually inferior? No, they should be given equality of opportunity, and let the cards fall there they may.
All women want is the same equality of opportunity that every male programmer gets without question.
> But from my personal experience women is not as capable as men in tech.
I'm sure you've heard of "confirmation bias", but, in case you haven't:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias
Quote: "... a tendency of people to favor information that confirms their beliefs or hypotheses."
I am not trying to ridicule people, It is just some facts I encountered before.
"confirmation bias"
It is not like I can be biased now, because there is no longer a data set for me. There is like 2-3 women (out of ~50) in the department I am working and they are not directly related to my area, weird huh?
There is simply no curriculum, there are no standards and no requirements, and if we are honest, the level of computing in most schools and even businesses are a very far cry from the high-tech filter bubble we surround ourselves in.
All the joy of programming was quickly sucked out as we had to meticulously document our code. Sub routines needed 2-3 paragraph plain-English explanations of what they were doing. Each variable's purpose needed to be stated. And before you could write a single line of code, you first had to write it out in a form of "pseudo code" which had its own syntax rules that we had to follow. Lots of emphasis was placed on the process of what we should be doing instead of the how and why. Students struggled.
I understand what he was trying to do: having us write everything out gave him a window into how our minds were breaking down the problem. But in the process, he turned what should have been a fun, exploratory class into a grind.
The notion that programming could be a fun activity, and not just mindless, process-driven office work was completely foreign to him, and I suspect the same is true for many teachers who are stuck teaching Programming classes in both public and private schools.
Edit: And on the issue of gender, my class had 25 students, 11 of whom were girls. I remember being amazed at how a programming class could have a 50/50 ratio. I didn't notice anyone being bullied or teased. I imagine once women reach "critical mass" women won't be singled-out to the same degree. A few bad apples or even a sexist teacher can't "single out" 44% of their class. Why were there so girls enrolled? I don't know, but the class did have a reputation for being an easy A, so perhaps it was viewed as less intimidating.
I'm not crying over teacher pay. That they don't get paid enough is propaganda from the teachers unions. Yes I realize that teachers work after hours grading papers, etc. However programmers often work late into the night as well without extra money too. Programmers often spend their own money (along with teachers) on extra software, tools and other things to help them do their job better without necessarily getting a reimbursement.
I'd rather be crying over administrators that continually make unenlughtened decisions about curriculum, methodology and creativity.
Including grading papers and planning lessons I was putting in 10 hours a day.
Add I had a second job at the mall movie theater to make up the difference between by income and my bills, so I worked 8+ hours on Saturday and Sunday as well.
You know what I did on my school vacations and personal days? I worked extra hours at the movie theater (the extra money almost always went to fixing my broken used car)
I make more money now than I would have made teaching with 20 years experience and a PhD (which I would have had to pay for myself) and my job now is far less difficult that the easiest day of teaching. And I can pay my bills without working on the weekends.
HAHAHA
My girlfriend is a second year high school teacher. You are technically right that she is required to be on campus for the required 7 or 8 hours. But, there is nowhere near enough time to grade, plan, prepare, work individually with kids (makeup work mostly), etc, in that time. She puts in 12+ hour days. Everyday. Including weekends.
And over the summer, you are right that it is mostly free, except for several weeks you give up to do professional development, AP course training, and any schoolwork to move up the salary schedule a bit.
Her salary schedules are here [1]. With a masters degree, she would top out at $58k/year after 20 years on the job (assuming the masters track). Starting salaries are in the $35k range.
Meanwhile, I am a computer programmer, working a legit 8 hour a day job, making much more than she is now.
What annoys me more than just teacher pay though is the other spending in the school. She was pulled in to teach english this year. When the english department met to work out the plan, they had to blow their whole budget for the year on a single class-set of a paperback. (30ish copies). That's it. No more books, no miscellaneous DVDs / Documentaries purchased. That's it. Well, except for when she just goes and pays for it. Which she did last year to the tune of $350ish.
[1] http://thompsonschools.org/cms/lib07/CO01900772/Centricity/D...
It also wasn't really a CS class. It was more like a clumsy introduction to computer programming. The class never intended to cover data structures or algorithms.
I suspect, like in the real world, programming ability still sometimes counts more than credentials. Pity that unlike my teacher he wasn't so good at the teaching part of it.
Another epic HN failure was confusing an obviously single word substitution issue like using the word wife instead of spouse as if it changes anything in the discussion other than the political correctness level, with actual intentional hate speech. You have to prioritize your problems and this is like "cut yourself shaving and also have a broken leg" one should be prioritized above the other.
Something never discussed about sexism in tech, at least on HN, is its an almost purely coastie "brogrammer" phenomena. I am not part of the apparently locally dominant dirtbag coastie culture, so I literally do not understand how it perpetuates itself. To explain myself, locally, behavior that is rewarded tends to be repeated and behavior that is punished tends to be suppressed, and simultaneously a highly effective way for a guy to make sure all females will never be in contact with any of his precious bodily fluids is to go all "make me a sandwich" on any other female. Even a false accusation is fairly effective at enforcing celibacy. So I'm fairly mystified why this problem perpetuates. Like are all men on the coasts 40 year old virgins or gay, so they don't care about lack of "fun time" with women, or perhaps the women on the coasts refuse to stand up for each other and this is the inevitable result, or maybe secretly most women really love that kind of treatment and its only a small vocal minority who complain (although I find this last theory unlikely)
The only real problem seems to be the lack of tech jobs in the midwest. Tech women, if you want to be treated with respect as human beings by professional gentlemen, move to where the gentlemen are if you want things to change. I'm off the market, but speaking for the local single gentlemen, I'm sure they'd greatly enjoy your presence here, unless you really secretly like how the brogrammers are treating you...
And, yeah, the concept of a gentleman was, and I think still is, very much in play. However much feminists complain about it, it sure seems to result in women getting treated a whole lot better. And at least where I came from, there was enough Midwestern and Western pragmatism that female ability in things you might typically think as male was not such a big thing, or threatening. E.g by some distance the best shot on my high school rifle team was a girl, an old friend from kindergarten. The rest of us were boys, and her example (not to mention help) pushed us to strive harder vs. tear her down. Maybe it was in part the genre (yeah, right, harasses the school's best shot???), but I read all this high school harassment stuff of the demean the woman type and wonder if it swept the nation later, or is in part a regional phenomena.
Given that, I would not be entirely surprised if the root cause of some anti-woman brogrammer behavior could be statistically highly correlated with one anatomical part being unusually small. Aka if the girls are going to laugh at him anyway, may as well pre-emptively strike against them first, not much to lose. Although why this behavior is seen more on the coasts than the midwest and the other civilized areas, is still unclear under this theory. We may simply grow 'em larger here thus less root cause for the anti-social behavior. I do not have enough observational data, and frankly I've gathered it all inadvertently rather than intentionally. A suitably geo-located chatroulette image analysis program might help. Although a theory that seems to "explain it all" is highly appealing, it none the less may or may not be proven out by actual statistical research. I would assume some sociologist with a ruler could probably figure it out for us, along with a questionnaire about brogrammers opinions about their physical self image (in other words they may not actually be shrunken mutants, but inaccurately think they are...). I don't think population migration necessarily disproves this theory; consider if hormone contamination in the water causes shrinkage or perhaps some other environmental toxins; the coasts certainly have plenty of environmental toxins compared to other areas.
Initially my response was much longer and included a discussion about female-female partnerships. In the end I cut it right back, because as far as I know "wife" is always a term used for a spouse who identifies as female.
You're part of the problem.
First of all, you need to go do some remedial math. The percentage of DWTS watchers who are women is no predictor of what women do. This fallacy is called confusion of the inverse, and it's a probabilistic variant of the better-known converse error.
Second, even if 99% of women were to be DWTS fans, it has no bearing on anigbrowl's comment. The reason that "while your wife watches DWTS" is part of the problem (as anigbrowl identified) is that it implies that (watching DWTS) is to women as (checking out 1130 sims) is to men. It implies that in situations where men do interesting tech things, women watch TV (I assume "DWTS" is some kind of TV?). It's basically a put-down against women collectively. Note that if someone were to be putting down humanity collectively, I wouldn't complain.
Third, "politically correct" is a label principally used by reactionary dullards to dismiss arguments or objections that they see as excessively leftist. It's equivalent to calling someone a commie. Mind you, some people are communists, some people are knee-jerk excessive leftists, etc... but if that's true in a particular situation, you can just explain why it's true. Calling it "political correctness" is just a lowbrow dismissal.
That's a lot of incorrectness for one 20-word sentence.
Second, setting aside households with two TV's, only one spouse can enjoy passive entertainment at a time. Presumably while we watch football, women can do something fascinating and productive.
Third, political correctness is a phenomenon of white liberal prigs who go out of their way to take offense because they have nothing useful or productive to contribute to the public discourse. Of course they would react unkindly to being called out on it but I would advise you not to take their defensive lashing out at face value.
In response to the second, I don't understand your point at all. Help me out here?
As to the third, I agree that there certainly exist some fools, most of them white and liberal (and maybe prigs?), who have a mental pattern wherein they make knee-jerk complaints about certain behaviour being offensive, without having a well-considered ethical system that justifies this complaint, instead using these complaints to signal their belonging to a certain social clique. If that's what you mean by political correctness, I agree that it exists, and is odious. Whether or not such fools object to your remarks should be entirely beneath you, however. So raising the potential political incorrectness of your remark appears, to me, to be saying "I'm going to use this straw-man argument to attack those who disagree with me". And this is why I brought up the fact that it's a lowbrow dismissal, and suggested that on those rare occasions when the label does fit, you can instead construct an independent explanation of what's wrong with the political correctness.
Second point was pretty easy to understand - if a household has 2 adults and 1 TV, only one Adult at a time can watch their preferred TV shows. If there is a second TV, possibly more, the Adults stand a fair chance that they will be able to watch their shows.
Okay, fair enough, understood, and I'll direct my response to my disagreement about the math of it.
Why would it matter that 2/3 of DWTS viewers are female? Suppose that I publish a fanzine called "jh's dumb stuff", for which 100% of the readers are female (that's right, my mom is the only reader). Would it make sense to say "you can look at this awesome thing while your wife reads 'jh's dumb stuff'"? No.
The relevance, here, is that original oafish-seeming comment was "while your wife watches DWTS", which appears to imply that it's typical for wives to do that. And, based on the stats I could find, it is NOT typical for wives to do that. Over 90% of American women do not watch the show, right?
Mathematically, the fact that 2/3 of DWTS viewers are female is just not relevant.
Also, I didn't call you a reactionary dullard. I see that your literacy is as poor as your numeracy. What I said was that such was the principle use of referencing political correctness, and advised that you could do better yourself. If I was sure, at that time, that you were a dullard, I wouldn't have bothered getting into it.
So it wasn't, at that time, a lowbrow dismissal. By now, you're getting a dismissal. I guess that the collective audience can judge for themselves whether it's lowbrow or not.
I didn't say that you did.
If you've defined it that way, of course that'll be how you see it and nobody will shake your conviction. This makes conversations with you on the topic as dull as someone who doesn't grasp enough statistics to understand trivial errors, but so be it.
The rest of the world has a more nuanced take on it, which begins with the idea that being rude to people who lack relative power in a given situation is still morally wrong and tactically quite stupid.
I happen to enjoy watching the same shows and movies my wife watches on TV, and I somehow assumed it was true of the majority of couples.
Indeed so, but it doesn't follow that they are watching it instead of writing code, which implication was what I objected to in the first place; although it wasn't malicious, it was a lazy piece of stereotyping that I didn't feel was appropriate in the context of a discussion about sexist stereotyping.
Second, setting aside households with two TV's, only one spouse can enjoy passive entertainment at a time.
???
Third, political correctness is a phenomenon of white liberal prigs who go out of their way to take offense because they have nothing useful or productive to contribute to the public discourse.
Oh noes, you have outed me! I shrivel up in the face of your freethinking ways. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_correctness
(Actually I don't know hga's gender, but wow - I have never seen an example of gender stereotyping as explicit as that on HN, and in a discussion about sexism in programming too. I'm really hoping your comment was supposed to be ironic)
does gender stereotyping manifests an intellectual failure on the part of the one expressing the stereotypes? If yes, does such intellectual failure is localized, say to the area of percepting and understanding gender relations in the industry, or is it a system-wide failure of the intellect of the stereotyping (i.e. something like a habit/instinct of using stereotypes)?
I can't remember if there were any women in that high school class, but there were in the summer programs I took after it, and as far as I can remember they didn't get treated any differently than the men. Of course, back then, computers, especially serious ones, were scarce and getting lots of time on them wasn't trivial. I also wasn't the sort of person who would put up with harassment or bullying in my presence, nor were the instructors, but as I recall it was never a problem (all the local stuff was in the cultural South...).
Long before the zero-tolerance bullshit, so my entirely serious threats of disproportionate including sometimes lethal force were taken as "don't do that crazy thing" vs. I was the problem for objecting. E.g. after the incident that went the furthest, to my drawing live steel in college, a counselor did pull me aside to make sure I wasn't the type to do that except when needed to prevent a felony. I gather a very different time, no cell phones and therefore no helicopter parenting, unsupervised play outdoors with a very few rules, the high school rifle teams used .22LR firearms instead of air guns, etc. etc. etc.
This was all new, neat stuff and perhaps we were having too much fun exploring and learning it, and helping each other (I did a lot of the latter, including joining the college computer "club" for which that was our mission). There was no doubt serious self-selection, including it being long before to the "do this for lots of money" concept and the pathologies that brings. And it sure sounds like my college bound peers and I were a lot more polite that the sort of things I'm hearing from more recently (I don't think "make me a sandwich" was even in the lexicon, one source I just found dates it from nearly two decades later). It was certainly a while before serious pushback to feminism inevitably developed in the communities I was in, the ethos was "women are good", not yet "and men are bad".
The course most likely used VB because that is what the district mandated.
She also demanded that every line be commented, however would only take a small percentage away (I think 5 or so), if one or all comments were missing. As I couldn't bring myself to comment everything, I would just use inline asm, which pascal supported at the time, with absolutely no comments. Since the rest of the grade relied on the program functioning, I did well. I thought it was cool at the time. Now I realize I didn't make her life easy, and probably should have.
Almost by definition of being on this website, all of us are well advanced of our pre-college computer science teachers. My first was actually a chemistry teacher. My second was biology. One had me doing tech support in junior high. It wasn't until the AP class that I found one who could teach me. But teachers using outdated technology isn't the issue.
The real issue of the article (and complaining about Visual Basic detracts from it) is a teacher who sets up an environment that tolerates harassment and bullying. It doesn't matter the discipline, the teacher failed all the students. The teacher failed the girl who dropped out of programming, and the teacher failed the bullies, by not pointing out that this behavior is wrong.
programmers also have job security of knowing they are basically always employable right now unless completely hopeless. and programmers have ethical responsibilities which are frequently ignored too.
You are being unfair. Children while growing up can be cruel. Bullying and harassment isn't a new phenomenon. May be the teacher could have done more, but "who sets up an environment that tolerates harassment" is a bit far fetched.
So the curriculum was the best reason I could figure why this is on USENIX.
(I certainly don't want to excuse the shortcomings of this particular teacher, and there are many, but I think the system is setup for failure)
That's how it was at my high school. It was the network/IT guy that taught the class. He was really cool and a pretty damn good teacher, but I don't know if he'd be able to spot harassment like this or do anything about it. We didn't have any girls in our class anyway, so I guess my anecdote can't add anything to that.
Edit: Actually reading the other comments by the parent shows me that you interpreted it correctly. Still I think what I said has some merit to it.
Thankfully I had already taught myself one programming language so I was able to pick up another without much difficulty.
I suggest everyone to check it out - if you're near a local school you can actually teach a class in person.
Also - if you have any questions feel free to email me - username @ gmail
Good on you.
At one point we were asked, politely, to stop crashing the county's mainframe (which was the platform we were using). So we stopped.
Girls? I don't recall girls. They must have been there; I don't think we noticed. We certainly didn't harass them, and we probably tried to help them. We were geeks and tools and had no idea how to interact with 'em, for the most part.
The OP's story saddens me.
The worst thing about harassment culture (even when it's largely good-natured) is that it creates and reinforces a power dynamic and subtle "law of the jungle" status hierarchy where the most inappropriate, brazen harasser becomes the dominant figure.
In my opinion, this is particularly dangerous in the way that it obstructs critical thought and group problem solving. Not necessarily relevant to high school but highly important if a team of coworkers evolve toward such a culture.
That being said, your general point is good -- absolutist policies like zero-tolerance rarely work well, simply because human behavior is complicated and difficult for the policy maker to predict in advance.
That said, this teaches does need to be reprimanded at very least for laziness and not paying attention to what was going on in his class and possibly for creating the environment where it was allowed as well.
Even if you exerted enough political pressure to suppress _this_ stuff, it would still be a bad and poorly taught class. Fix the quality of the teaching and you fix a lot more besides.
Two, yeah, I went to public school. I've seen all sorts of well meaning "policy announcements" that hack solutions to glaring embarrassments without doing anything about the underlying problems.
And they removed AP Computer Science that same year, when I was about to take it, that's why I had to settle with the class that taught VB. The state of HS education in this country makes me sad.
Back in 10th grade (2007), I had the option of choosing a programming course, but I chose not to. But at least the class was teaching C++ and not VB6.
There's no AB course any more either. It's just one course, the equivalent of the old A.
I taught at a school with a VB 6.0 curriculum at the end of the last decade. The (veteran) teacher just continued using his old materials; he was a math teacher with some CS experience. He kept it because budgets were tight, everything ran snappily, and new computers and textbooks are expensive.
As long as a teacher is teaching programming fundamentals, it really doesn't matter (in the long run, educationally) what a student's first language is. They'll get it. Better to go with something that the teacher's good at and that interests the students.
Any form of VB is still computer programming, and would have been a big step up.
> The state of HS education in this country makes me sad.
Yes, and that is not going to change unless we privatize education.
Because poor people don't really need to learn how to read!
Yeah, go back to the glory days of the Forties. The Eighteen-Forties.
If in 100 years the government provided clothing, and I advocated privatizing clothing, you'd say, "Becuase poor people don't need to wear clothes!"
Where I'm from (in the US), many poor people _don't_ achieve a basically acceptable level of education, because the public schools don't ultimately serve them well for various reasons, and they drop out (or just don't learn but keep getting passed on through the grades). We're talking like high schoolers at a 5th grade reading level, for example.
So it's not like the status quo is a panacea.
It has in the past. Which is my point.
Good for you. The rest of us can look at history with less bias on this subject.
Which makes your claim factually incorrect.
Since you're making unfounded assumptions, maybe you need to check your whole mental model on this topic.
Or start paying higher taxes so that public education is given the funding they need to implement these programs.
Since when it is alright to tell teachers how to do their job in bullet pointed letters?
* Be an adult and talk about any issues, complements or concerns during the class.
* Talk with them in person or on the phone.
* If you wish, post to your blog after the issues have been resolved. To put a global context on the situation should be supported with evidence as it pertains to life as a women in the IT industry. (See what I'm doing here with the bullet points?)
Parents theses days...
--edit-- As I'm reading some of the responses to my post, I have to ask, what pillow soft existence did many of you grow up with? Kids (and people) say terrible things. This isn't the sign of a bad teacher, it's an opportunity for this blogger to prepare her kids (Not just the girls) for the real full-contact brutal reality known is the the real working world. Life gets waaaay harder than this.
1. The OP did reach out to the teacher:
> I suggested that she talk to you. I offered to talk to you. I offered to come talk to the class. I offered to send one of my male friends, perhaps a well-known local programmer, to go talk to the class. Finally, my daughter decided to plow through, finish the class, and avoid all her classmates. I hate to think what less-confident girls would have done in the same situation.
2. Well, the issues were, in one way, "resolved" because the daughter passed the class (with an 'A') despite her apparent unhappiness. If you mean that the parent should wait till the issues are actually fixed before blogging...well, if the teacher doesn't respond, then I guess the parent should not blog at all?
edit: My bad, the sentence in context would indicate that OP offered to go talk to the teacher, but the daughter declined. Whether or not the OP should've gone ahead and met the teacher is a whole other issue.
Because it seems to me one of the primary functions of a parent, right alongside teaching them to make it in the world.
The school has failed because the daughter no longer wishes to put up with the bullying that comes with learning programming (at this particular school).
Seems like a failing of the school that should be addressed.
Even if you think the parent is overstepping their bounds here, I would rather a parent be too concerned as oppose to not being concerned at all. Double so that he is in the tech sector while we are facing the huge gender issue. If the teacher is not doing their job stopping the harassment and thereby enforcing the stereotype, then perhaps is should be spelled out.
Just curious, where's the line on this? Like, what things is she allowed to attempt to draw public attention to, and what things should she just counsel her daughter to learn to live with, and accept as a part of life?
How should a person know what sorts of circumstances belong on which side of that line? Are these written in a book somewhere that I missed?
If, however, you are male and you are feeling belittled or harassed, we're pretty interested in having a serious discussion about your experience. We may not agree with you and we may tell you that we don't think you should feel that way at all, but we won't tell you not to have the discussion.
If you're a woman, though? You're not allowed to have that discussion. Leave it to the menfolk.
Does that clear it up for you?
Sexist remarks are also punished in the workplace.
It is not "preparing kids for the real world" so much as it is "failing to respond to a situation in which a child is bullied."
I can't really speak to efficacy, but a formal accusation of bullying is a big deal these days.
http://www.stopbullying.gov/
If modern society has taught men anything, it is never relevant.
Let's put it this way, I am not Dad yet, but when I am, my daughter or son will not be bullied in school because:
1. They would know how to deal with bullies. 2. And if they ever have problems dealing with it on their own, I am going to help them by doing something more then writing a letter on a tech blog.
And no matter what time of day or night it is, I would make sure that my children know they can CALL me any time they need to.
My only complaint about the article is that it did not name the teacher or the school. Public shaming can work wonders.
As it is, in a world of 30-40 (and climbing) students per classroom and 5+ classes a day, a teacher who tried to one-on-one mentor every student they came across would be fired. They wouldn't have the time to actually teach the curriculum of the class, and would quickly find themselves out of a job.
Let's not blame and shame this teacher - that's the equivalent of blaming a brick that falls off the roof of a shoddily-constructed building for killing a bystander. Instead of blaming the contractors who built the roof, let's put the brick on trial.
Of course, if I had a parent suggest I needed to talk to a student and/or them about a classroom issue (the post was pretty explicit about it), I'd start there instead of waiting until the end of the semester and thereby provoking them into writing a bullet-pointed letter.
After entering, we saw there was just one single open table, so we went and put our jackets down on it and then got into line. After getting our ice cream we went back to the table only to find our jackets gone and some fat people sitting there, eating ice cream with their fat kids.
When I asked where our jackets were, a man, presumably the father of the obese family, told us that there were "some jackets" on the table but that they had the security guard come and clear them. As we went to find our coats, he informed us that "putting your jacket on the table doesn't count" for reserving a table.
In reading your post I am reminded of the certitude with which this large, stupid man asserted the correctness of an arbitrary and stupid set of rules, completely of his own making.
(sorry, pet hate...)
But try and evict bodies from their seats for the sole reason that their ice cream isn't in their hands yet and you would look crazy.
Take a table when you need one in a fast food place, not as you're joining the queue. Reserving tables before you have food makes it less likely that people with food can get a table.
And it's not like I dedicate hours to being annoyed at it, or think it's a really big deal. I'm rarely in fast food joints anyway.
B) But, the reason he gave was that it was against "the rules" -- that's the point: no, it's not. It's rude and inconvenient, maybe. It's not an abrogation of a code that everyone knows. It's an unwritten agreement, at best.
I'm not saying what I did was right or defensible -- in fact in the comment you're replying to I said that I agreed that I was wrong. And in a reply to a sibling comment I apologized for thoughtlessly slamming obese people.
I wrote about a time I was a jerk and put my name next to it. You ran to your throwaway account so you could show that you're effectively illiterate.
It began a discussion so that was a bonus: human interaction. I learned that I was wrong as other people made good counterpoints. So what's the problem? That I wasn't the all-knowing master of the universe at the time I posted?
Of the critics, some simply don't understand the point of the story even though it's spelled out clearly at the end. Some people have taken exception to the fat language, which I understand. I am not particularly sympathetic to them but I do admit that it was insensitive of their feelings and have apologized.
What should I be expecting here? Petals in the street?
Everyone on this site can upvote, but not everyone can downvote, so this is not necessarily true.
Oh, also, you're an ass.
That's not how I see it at all. He informed you that there was not a jacket rule. He did not in fact make up any rules or tell you anything about said rules or in fact acknowledge that there are table-reserving rules. I don't understand where you're coming from.
> When I asked where our jackets were, a man, presumably the father of the obese family, told us that there were "some jackets" on the table but that they had the security guard come and clear them.
Is it just me, or is this comment really absurd, off-topic, and offensive?
First, why would you leave your jackets on a table out of your sight? The whole "put your jacket on a table to reserve it" thing is somewhat socially acceptable (though irritating), but it usually also involves keeping an eye on your jacket. You're lucky it wasn't on the floor or taken by someone other than the security guard when you got back.
But the larger issue I have with your comment is your reference to the size of the people who you're still mad at for taking "your" table. What does their obesity have to do with your story? In response to an article about discrimination, it almost seems like you must be trolling. Seriously, you could just substitute "slanteyes" or "niggers" and the substance of the story would not be at all changed. It read exactly that way to me.
Normally I'd just move on and assume others were offended as well, but this is somehow the highest voted reply...
And this reply is the highest voted reply to the offending reply, including mine.
Just throwing this on the table...
P. S. He was right. No way that shit counts.
It sounds to me that the kind man even let the security personnel know of a possibly lost and found articles of your belongings. I'm not going to bat you further on blatant bullying on the man's physiques, as many other have pointed it already.
Your rules are just as arbitrary and inconsiderate. Let the people who got their first and need to eat their food sit first, there is no point in having an empty table go to waste while you wait in line.
In my experience, life gets much better after the end of high school, because in my experience, adults don't bully adults [1]. And if you are bullied, you can generally leave.
[1] except the TSA, NSA, IRS, CIA, etc., but that's a different issue
In my experience, life does get better but also one's ability to handle bullying gets better which leads to less bullying.
Kids are really good at hiding what they're doing, especially in high school. It's easy enough to not get caught by a distracted teacher that has 20 or 30 other students to assist. If this was happening in the open and the teacher was aware of it then there's an issue, it's very possible that's not the case. Unfortunately I saw the behavior described in this article in a number of classes during my own time in high school and none of them were CS classes. There are people that will be cruel regardless of the context.
Over time, "The World" CAN be improved, and the people who inhabit it can be better to each other than they were before. It'll only change if we get youth to change, though, and teachers allowing the status quo to continue unquestioned is not the way to make sure that things are better in the future.
Seems like people generally are agreeing with my interpretation. I am rewriting my comment.
First, it seems to me that she simply told her daughters what she could do. When her daughter said no the mother just left it to her daughter to deal with. After the semester is over, she's publicly denouncing the teacher.
So this is a little bit wrong because she could correct the issue by letting the teacher know the problem when it first occurred.
Let's not really speculating whether the teacher is old, simply doesn't care, sexist or what not. The daughter still got A. According to the mother, she assumed this was due to her daughter's long-term involvement with technology. I am sure she is a bright girl too. '
So can we just say there are two possibilities:
(1) the girl had hidden her sad face when she was in her classroom and since she did her homework and continued to excel on her quizzes and exams, the teacher didn't notice much
(2) the girl did show her sad face but the teacher failed to acknowledge that sign
If #1 were to be true, then we should say the mother has a bigger responsibility here than the teacher. First of all, she did not take action. Kids are weak but they wanted to play strong so they often hide their true feelings. I think any parent should step up to help solving bully issue right away. Not in a public way to name a few kids, but work with the teacher in a very constructive way (such as bringing in more women to talk about tech industry. That's better than bringing a man in.... if you want to show women can do the job too).
We don't know much about how the kid actually behaved in the classroom so we really shouldn't blame the teacher too much at the moment. What we need to realize is poor communication among the kid, the mother and the teacher. It's tough because half of the parents don't use email or they don't have time to talk to the kids or speak with the teacher reguarly. PTA is usually dead with a couple parents from time to time.
So the mother should learn her mistake, help reconstruct her daughter's confident and stop making her rants public now. It's not helping. It is sort of one-side if I had to be really harsh (you can downvote me if you want), but that's how I feel as I read through the post again and again.
Also, please, please, be careful when your daughter adds people she is still not very familiar with to her FB.
I suggested that she talk to you. I offered to talk to you. I offered to come talk to the class. I offered to send one of my male friends, perhaps a well-known local programmer, to go talk to the class.
edit here: "I consulted with friends — female developers — and talked to my daughter about how to handle the situation in class. I suggested that she talk to you. I offered to talk to you. I offered to come talk to the class. I offered to send one of my male friends, perhaps a well-known local programmer, to go talk to the class. Finally, my daughter decided to plow through, finish the class, and avoid all her classmates. I hate to think what less-confident girls would have done in the same situation. "
The OP's daughter sounds awesome. The OP's daughter's teacher sounds like a real idiot.
Minority entities will be teased practically any time they exist, regardless of sector or age, and they need to be taught to handle it well. We can continue to attempt to stop the teasing altogether, but in the meantime we have to live in the Real World, and if this child quit programming because a few guys made a kitchen joke, the mother is really misdirecting her efforts by writing a letter to the teacher.
It's hard to imagine that any rape joke would be allowed to fly in our classrooms where students can hardly wield pencils anymore, and if you read carefully, you'll see that it doesn't appear to have occurred. It appears to me that the author is attempting to use some clever wording to create an impression that the "harassment" was much more intense than it actually was by subtly crossing over into her personal experience with online trolls.
There is no violence and rape in this story, there's only a mom with an axe to grind and a daughter who might not be interested in programming.
Best wishes, and good luck!
If you are NOT being sarcastic: there are productive ways to talk about these (important) issues, be it gender, race, whatever--but this sort of "privilege" circlejerk is a huge waste of time as well as hugely condescending.
If you have a point to make then make it. Sitting around in a Privilege Circle saying "oh, no, I'm worse, you're white but I'm straight" is slacktivist bullshit at its worst.
You, however, don't get the same consideration, because I strongly suspect you're a pillock.
This use of "privilege" as a targeted weapon to silence specific demographics has to stop.
Women in the western world have always been among the safest, most privileged people on Earth. This entire thread, in fact, has been a shining example of female privilege.
No one cares that women soundly outnumber men in university admission, and university graduation, and even high school graduation. Heck, no one cares that it is men who overwhelmingly make up the bottom of society.
Instead, we're having a collective anxiety attack because a hyper-privileged white woman is upset that her hyper-privileged white daughter might have had her feelings hurt in high school. This is surreal.
Gender equality in America has come a long way. However, there are still many occupations and places in America where equality is not the norm at all.
The best example of an occupation where women are not welcome is the military.
The best example of inequality in the courts is this recent case: http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/09/hacker-faces-more-jail-time...
Inequality is all around us.
I was pointing out how much, much worse stuff happens in schools than just being told to 'make a sandwich' and trust me, I would have been a very happy little boy if only that had happened to my friends and me. To be honest, starting from the author of the article, this entire thread displays just how sheltered of a life many of this community must be living to start an Internet crusade (because this is what it is going to end up when the social justice warriors get wind of it) because of a boring class with an unqualified teacher.
To me the thread illustrates that for a community that gives so much lip service to disruption and progress, a lot of people are really unwilling to put up with the idea that high school shouldn't have to be the pit of misery that is apparently common in American public schools. But über is solving real problems!
I went to a mixed-sex high school, albeit you might choose to take this anecdote with a grain of salt since that was 20 years ago in Germany. There was certainly some bullying, although not on the scale I discovered much later in life was common elsewhere. There was almost no intra-school violence. I feel pretty confident in saying this because these things were taken very seriously by both staff and students alike, and the few cases where there had been confrontations between students quickly became very public and a matter of much water cooler talk afterwards. I can also say with about the same level of confidence as you that there was no rape, or other forms of gender-based violence. And coming back to the article's subject, CS class was mandatory for everyone at first - and even though in later years the course became one of those that could be voluntarily dropped, the gender balance stayed the same after that.
That said, school wasn't ideal for me as I was in it. CS class wasn't exactly great, mostly due to utter disinterest by 90% of the students who took it. At the time I had the feeling the school was a bad choice for individualists like me, though in hindsight I would revise that conclusion a bit (as a humanist-themed middle/high school it was actually much better than any other school I could have gone to).
I think it's important to bring young people up together and not artificially separate them into two groups. Of the many social problems present in my time studying there, gender issues were not one of them. There was no us-versus-them mentality, and informal social groups were almost always mixed. I can't help but wonder if that sort of normalcy is something single-gender schools actively campaign against.
1) Either we need to make school even less like the real world, by separating the sexes as per the above suggestion, or turning the school into the chronological opposite of a work release prison,
or
2) We need to make school more like the real world by banning unnatural things like homeschooling, because obviously no human beings work are home or own their own businesses and self direct themselves. Or no human beings carry a tiny swiss army knife on their keychain, so we need to ban that too, etc etc.
I disagree with that characterization. Bullying, violence, and rape should never be normalized, nor acceptable, regardless of the age of the perpetrators. This is aberrant, immoral behavior and should never be treated as anything else.
> trigger alert
> (violence and rape references)
This is not Slashdot, you're supposed to read the article before commenting ;-)
Zero tolerance tends to create situations in which schools/teachers/administrators do nothing since they don't want to get someone expelled. This creates an environment in which students say/do terrible things with little or consequence. Best case the teachers look the other way but often the teachers will harass students as well (I saw two teachers in my Junior High School sexually harass students). Occasionally the school will overreact and have someone arrested for using the word gun in an essay. The general rule is to expect them to do completely the wrong action, every time in every situation. At least that was my experience.
Yeah? So this high school programming class isn't so much a programming class as a crash course in coping mechanisms for gender-based harassment?
Please. It's the educator's job to create a safe space for, you know, education--for every student in the class, not just the privileged majority. It's their job to track their students' education and interest level, and make adjustments if either starts dropping. It's not their job to facilitate a hostile environment and let minority students flounder in the interests of 'real world training'. It's not their job to decide that since it's hard for women in tech in real life, it should be hard in their class. Education isn't about maintaining the world we already live in, it's about shaping the world our kids will live in.
You want real world training? Show me an HR department in a software company that's fine with comments like "get in the kitchen and make me sandwich". Which real world are you advocating this high school programming class introduce to a 16-year-old girl?
School sucks for nerdy white boys, too. Yes, I'd like to see a safe and healthy learning environment for everyone.
The real world where HR thought police aren't sitting in every room of every company. The real world where even HR people try to "make jokes" and be funny. The real world where HR people generally judge the severity of a harassment complaint by favoritism, which reality a blunt HR person (not employed at my current employer) just relayed to me recently. The real world where real humans, not perfectly politically correct robo-trons, must work, play, and engage.
I don't endorse teasing that harms a person's feelings. But I also think we shouldn't be so thin-skinned that we shrivel up and quit the first time a trite, cliched joke is thrown our way, because that happens all the time to everybody (your peers _will_ find a difference to comment upon no matter how mainstream you think you are), and if you can't handle it, you'll have a lot of difficulty handling more serious emotional situations, like getting passed up for a promotion.
It'd be great if the programming teacher first, was made aware of this problem, and the article never claims he was, and second, was able to stop the problem, but there's no guarantee he could've effectively done so even if he tried (and he may have), just as corporate HR departments can't stop all incidents of "harassment" even though they "try".
I believe the author probably wrote the piece primarily as a hypothetical, but I also believe it was bad taste to do so since this supposedly is traceable back to a real person who may not deserve that type of criticism, and I don't believe her fundamental complaint ("someone said something that made my daughter sad, so you all should feel bad :( ") is very worthy of the community's attention.
http://hoydenabouttown.com/20110218.9512/sexist-joke-bingo/
...almost got bingo... good work, cookiecaper.
And I only see hits in two squares on the "sexist joke bingo", not that it matters.
> But I also think we shouldn't be so thin-skinned that we shrivel up and quit the first time a trite, cliched joke is thrown our way
and I mean that in the worst possible way.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6358263
Why is it that people misreading comments to call them out almost always come off as bigger asses than the people they're replying to?
And unfunny, bad-taste jokes are still jokes. I can talk about the KKK member's standup routine and call his words jokes without saying that I found them funny.
Do you understand the statement above? If not, I'll quit wasting my time.
http://squid314.livejournal.com/329561.html
Will you take the free space kaltai, or can we stop trying to use rhetorical tricks like talking dismissively about(rather than to) and trying to out-meta the other?
I completely agree that people in general, and women in tech specifically, have to be thick-skinned to survive professionally. Nobody's advocating HR thought police--they'd be unnecessary in this case anyway--or politically-correct automatons. We're talking about kids. Kids! Surely it's not totally out of line to suggest that they could learn better behavior than "get in the kitchen and make me a sandwich". Surely there's a better response to the whole situation than "that girl needs to suck it up and learn how the world works".
For what it's worth, I remember the first time those trite cliches were thrown at me, and they felt neither trite nor cliched. They hurt. I thought I was part of a team, among equals, brothers-in-arms, friends, and I wasn't. I was different, I was other, I was less, I was not welcome. It's a paradigm shift that happens in an instant, and it can be pretty shattering--great for killing enthusiasm and developing thick skin in the future, maybe, but not for learning things in a programming class.
Do you understand the statement above? If not, I'll quit wasting my time.
I was in high school a few years ago. Put that many teenagers in a room and of course they're going to fuck with each other.
I've heard sandwich jokes made in liberal arts classes, biology classes, even a badminton class--which also had only one girl in it. The takeaway is not that the badminton industry is misogynistic or that the Phys Ed teacher is failing womankind; the takeaway is that high schoolers are dicks.
High schoolers grow up. When they grow up, do they remain dicks, or do they change? I finally watched 42 the other day. There's this scene where a white dad is screaming at Robinson to get off the field, that they don't want him there, calling him all sorts of names. His son is hesitant at first, but starts following suit. The implication was clear. What you see as acceptable when young can stick with you for a long time until you have a shocking wake-up call. And seriously, who in society has really seen these wake-up calls happen more often than not? Especially given the amount of evidence we see of it not happening.
Sure. But not exclusively [which I know you weren't claiming].
I had some pretty degrading and misandrist remarks made about me in situations with lots of women in; where I've been the only man (mothers, women of an age to marry and more mature women too).
I think these things are a lot about group dynamics.
I think that's right, particularly male group dynamics.
I'd say all guys are bullied, except most of us wouldn't call it such - it's the establishment of hierarchy, and bonding.
Is that right? Is that right when they don't differentiate their bullying towards girls? I'm not even going to wade into that. However, I feel (through personal experience) masculinity is being more and more removed from young men, and at a high cost.
I'm so bored of this sort of thing. Yes, there are man-children who post stupid and hurtful crap on the internet. Yes, there are cretins who make dick jokes on stage at conferences. There are also women who are complete and utter asses to all men because "all men are rapists", which IMHO is a far more misandric view than the kind of offhanded misogyny of "sudo make me a sandwich" shit nerd guys come up with.
People are dicks. People do stupid crap. People hurt each other.
People who use gender as an emblem and weapon are also dicks, because they create a line of demarcation and balkanisation where there IS NONE. We are PEOPLE. Not "Men" and "Women" who are some kind of antagonistic polar-opposite species.
Edit: Rape jokes. Interesting one that. I recall being 12, on a school bus on a trip to some camp in Michigan (am mostly schooled in the UK, spent a year in 7th grade in the US, loathed it), and being astounded at the fact that the gaggle of girls sat behind me were all cracking rape jokes. I actually couldn't parse at first what they were talking about "rip? ripe? rope?", until I clocked the macabre subject of their humour.
It took the (male) bus driver to ask them to all kindly shut the fuck up.
How can a situation where a child enters a classroom full of enthusiasm and leaves a year (term?) later depressed not be an "actual issue"?
I am saying that it IS an issue, but that the issue is not one of gender discrimination, just one of kids, and humans, being dicks - and you can't combat it purely on gender lines as all you're doing is treating a symptom rather than the disease.
Btw, you need to get away from the habit of directly attacking the author and focus instead on attacking the argument.
You're right that by abstracting things away you can just create a philosophical point with no path to resolution, but you can also actively inflict harm by tackling an issue in isolation without evaluating and understanding the root cause.
This is the same philosophy (general problem, specific problem within that general problem that we think we can act on, so act, without looking at the general problem) that lead to rampant mercury poisoning and insanity across the globe in the late 19th c., as a poultice of mercury nicely clears up the sores from syphilis - but does not cure syphilis.
Wrong. You're assuming that all forms of bullying are equally bad. This is patently false. Bullying based on traits that already set you apart can reenforce imposter syndrome. Specifically in the case of programming, a woman in a male-only class will already feel isolated and like she doesn't belong. Being bullied with gender-specific insults is much more harmful to this persons potential as a programmer than being bullied with gender neutral ones. So addressing specifically the sex-based bullying is necessary in addition to bullying in general.
It's not about gender. It's about ostracism. You don't have to be female to be ostracised. You just have to have something, anything, that sets you apart from the crowd.
This is the societal control mechanism we have culturally evolved to ensure conformity and "strength" in groups. It is really, really, really fucking dangerous, and leads to fun shit like Nazism. It's also really powerful, and is the basis of nation states.
Ergo, the problem needs treating at its cause, which is a cultural illness, and is far from simple to treat. You cannot simply resolve one emergent aspect of it and then expect to treat each aspect the same way. You do not cut down a tree by plucking at its leaves.
This is certainly true. What I meant to convey was that in the context of a programming class, being bullied for a trait that is itself already suspect within oneself reenforces it and thus is more damaging. If that girl had been bullied in the programming class because she was fat, it may not have had as much of an impact on her decision to pursue the career. Being bullied because she's a girl on the other hand, had the secondary effect of reenforcing the idea that she doesn't belong in tech.
We as a species have a remarkable proclivity to be very unkind.
The way to deal with it is "Suck it up." i.e. have self-confidence and act you, yourself, personally, better than others. Lead by example, not legislation.
This was a rant about the mother's issues directed at a seemingly innocent teacher.
This article disgusted me.
There are some indications that denser-development, economics, safety-concerns, and the rise of alternative attention-demanding status-objects like mobile phones are now shifting the norms. See for example:
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/technology/2012/08/young-pe...
That said, I've noticed a trend among my son's peers. Many of them delayed driving until they left for college. Not sure why. When I was that age, everybody skipped school on their 16th birthday to go take the driving test.
A large part of the US is not practically walkable and has insufficient public transportation. In order to "go out with friends", sometimes to even see said friends, to hold down a job, to go to the store, transportation in a car may be necessary. Teenagers prefer to not rely on their parents to take them places. Thus, car ownership represents freedom and autonomy to US teenagers.
Schools are often behind with this sort of technology, so depending on the development environment available, isn't one language as good as the next to explain concepts like assignment, boolean operations and program flow? (My high school computer classes were BASIC on a Burroughs B3300 mainframe and my first COMP SCI class at college was Fortran on an IBM s360 mainframe, so maybe I haven't got a clue!)
When I was a youngster, I thought the copy of VB 5 my dad got me was the coolest thing ever, because being able to create "real" computer programs like the ones I used every day was super-awesome-sweet. Today, kids are much more likely to interact with mobile apps and web sites. So teaching them to make those things is more likely to be exciting, the way Windows GUI apps were for me in the 90s.
Why? Well, we don't have to pay to install it, our technicians are happy to install it, the GUI design stuff is easy for students to use, I think it is easy to learn quickly and most importantly it allows our students to get high marks easily. Also I'm the only person in my school who can program - others will have to pick it up as the number of classes increases - again VB is easy for a novice to learn.
The exam board dictates what programing assessment is to be done and the amount of time it is to be done in. As much as I'd be happy to teach another language VB is the best fit in this case.
By not stopping the shitty, dumb sexism dead in its tracks, the teacher also did a huge disservice to the boys in the class. They've now had a chance to learn that treating women in CS this way is okay. I hope that in the <5 years it takes them to get to the professional world, they have realized how damaging they were. More importantly, I hope the author's daughter finds the personal strength to pursue CS.
As for the ancillary issue of the class material itself being crap: yeah, duh. And it's not just computer programming. You only notice how bad that class is because you have relevant expertise.
It's a safe bet that the other courses are similarly terrible. Send a biologist or physicist or mathematician or historian to observe a randomly selected high school class and they will find that their subjects too are being taught by people without the slightest appreciation or aptitude.
I have a baby daughter my self and can imagine the feelings if I heard she got harassed by her schoolmates, but then I would write a letter that focuses on THAT problem and not criticizing irrelevant points like the teacher's choice of programming language and overall teaching methods.
Also, if the girl truly has an interest in programming than years of encouragement is not even necessary, she will naturally be attracted by it and there is no parent who can stop her from it.
The classroom culture is the teacher's responsibility. If a student is being harassed and has a hostile environment in this classroom, the teacher has failed in a serious way. Doubly-so when the harassment is driven by bigotry.
"Visual Basic? Seriously?? Yes, I know I said I'm not writing to complain about your choice of programming languages, even though I'm still scratching my head on this one"
That only moves the focus from the real problem and creates a dispute that is not even relevant and necessary.
These days, school policies generally insist on separating disciplinary and academic issues.
For instance, I had a student (13 yrs old?) in an advanced math class that was all male (I'm female) and he had a habit of starting to blurt out mildly veiled sexual comments to me. I said a few things to him about what was appropriate in class, in a kind way and privately, and I also arranged for a male administrator to chat with him. It stopped. Grades have nothing to do with this -- they're not effective in any way in setting classroom tone, especially as they're feedback far after the semester ends.
I'm sorry for all these Hacker News readers who had shitty high school experiences, but you do need to grow up and realize they were shitty. Turning around to dump the shit downhill -- or indulging in some sort of Stockholm syndrome -- is not going to make the world a better place and it does not make you a better person.
I don't always do things perfectly; I remember one female student who was being aggressively and unwillingly courted by a football player in one of my classes and I wasn't able to prevent all the distraction. But I noticed and did what I could, and commented to them separately about what is and isn't alright in the classroom. Seriously, folks, it's not that hard to have expectations for appropriate behavior and enforce them.
I don't say the teacher should do nothing, but this just don't work.
Is this kind of shit any better?
> During the first semester of my daughter's junior/senior year, she took her first programming class. She knew I'd be thrilled, but she did it anyway.
Edit: before anyone harangues me, I don't mean to take away from the shitty circumstances surrounding the core message in the post, just got a chuckle out of the subtle dad/daughter humor inserted.
Not to be a dick, but you may be guilty of a little benign sexism yourself there... the author is a woman.
Not to be a dick, but doesn't saying Not to be a dick mean you're being a dick but saying it's okay?
[1]: Shlomo Argamon, Moshe Koppel, Jonathan Fine, and Anat Rachel Shimoni: Gender, Genre, and Writing Style in Formal Written Texts
Was it always like this and I just need to "check my privilege" as a dude or has the 4chanification of geek culture invaded real life?
And as for the VB, VB.Net is actually an okay language if you expose them to modern features. I mean, the boolean algebra syntax is weird, as are the array sizing, and the "Dim" keyword is just dumb... but other than those legacy issues the rest of the language is just "C# with words and a smaller community". Not great, but not that bad - there's modern closures/lambdas and full OOP and generics and all that great stuff.
While recognizing it means it seems like a new problem, it actually improves the situation because people will be less likely to engage in such behaviors if they don't think of it as harmless fun.
Puts into words the question I've been trying to ask some of my teachers for so long, but haven't been able to.
I know programming isn't intrinsically interesting to everyone, but I think there is still magic to be found in seeing your instructions (in VB, Pascal, C, Logo, whatever) translated to something on the screen.
Think about Chemistry; the instructor can show all these cool reactions but you eventually have to sit down and mindlessly run through on paper the chemical reaction.
Now think programming-wise; I can show you wireless communication between two Arduinos and some XBee radios, but eventually you have to explain how variables are stored in memory, or how the communication is made, or some other basic.
Intro classes can be boring because there doesn't seem to be an endpoint, but that's why everyone encourages open source communities, they offer that real life feel to everything you learn.
> My experience in the professional world is that its full of assertive, aggressive individuals men and women included.
It's possible to be assertive and aggressive without being abusive.
> There are only so many slots at the top
Not everyone wants to get to the "top".
> Is it a disservice to create these mushy teeball environments
They certainly sound better than environments full of mental/emotional abuse. Why can't we create abuse-free environments in the real world, too?
> Not everyone wants to get to the "top" sure, but how about you let them make that decision rather than taking the liberty of handicapping them in advance.
>They certainly sound better than environments full of mental/emotional abuse. Why can't we create abuse-free environments in the real world, too?
Sure but they will need to compete against the environments filled with vicious, agogi-bred cutthroats who are there by choice.
1. The professor doesn't have a choice.
2. The professor doesn't care.
3. This is all the professor knows.
4. There is no one to replace him.
How many students? ~30? In one class? In the ~5 classes he teaches every day? They choose not to be, and because they are so few, the ones that remain are singled out. There are few male orderlies in hospitals too, despite the fact that there's an "objective" demand for them (I was furious when I was confronted for the reason. It's to help lift patients, and help deal with patients experiencing an episode.I don't know how American schools work, so I can't comment on your question.
Obviously there can't be male domination there, because boys are absent.
Bangalore/Chennai/India, same story throughout.
Not to mention 70% of the teachers.
I took a mandatory class (keyboarding) from a friend of my grandparents', the first year he taught. I saw first hand how much the apathy of the class wore him down. He started the year hoping he could get people at least vaguely interested, but no one cared, and there was no way he could force them to.
He quit after a year.
Can you reword this sentence? I can't figure out what you mean.
There is a larger desire for male orderlies, the reason for that desire are for the "obvious fact" that males are stronger, and can be used for heavy lifting, and protection for and from disorderly patients.
It makes me furious that they can so blatantly state these reasons without fear, where as statements to any effect about the female gender would consistently create backlash. I don't disagree with their reasons, what made me furious was the asymmetry.
But your point on liberty is spot on.
I have a feeling if you were to get rid of this harassment and discrimination thing overnight. It would make negligible impact to ratio of representation which existed before.
>>Because women are free to do what they want, and they're choosing not to. This discrepancy manifests everywhere. More deeply in countries with a focus on personal liberty.
In countries with personal liberty you will suddenly have new sets of problems. You can't blame anybody or anything for your failures, and that's a bad situation to be in. You are no longer the victim or the under dog and no one sympathizes with you anymore.
I stopped reading here. This mentality is pathetic. We can and should expect better than we ourselves had it.
How do you propose we fix it? Do you think this article was even partially close to a solution?
Willing to agree with you that the gender of the author having a greater impact, either way, is probably wrong.