[3] A widespread bias I see in education is viewing every subject as a technical one with a straightforward dependency tree. Take my subject: English. The delusion held by seemingly all district-level curriculum czars is that, if Johnny’s reading scores are deficient, there must be one or two very specific dependencies he lacks. They will often look to a single wrong answer on a diagnostic test and say, “Ah! There it is. ‘Deducing the meaning of a word from context.’ Teacher, give them lessons on that until they master it.”
Sorry. It doesn’t work that way. Johnny, like most humans, intuitively understands how to derive meaning from context. But in this case, he didn’t understand the context, because it’s one of the millions of things he’s naive about. He’s young and hasn’t read very many books. If we want to get reductive, I will concede the hypothetical possibility of making a shaggy graph of the millions of micro-dependencies that underpin an individual’s reading skill. But maybe we should just try to find Johnny some books he might like.
In many ways, technical subjects are not like this. I know of no way to actually teach mathematical maturity to someone besides saying “pick some rigorous math and bang your head against it for long enough until it becomes clear that you have the basic general rigorous math skill now, and rejoice about how every other part of the basic rigorous math canon will be much easier” (example: I have yet to read a book I found as difficult as Rudin’s infamous Principles of Mathematical Analysis, in great part because after that book I had the thing).
It looks to me like programming classes, much like writing classes, do not know how to teach their students the fundamental skill and so have to default to just having them do it a bunch and hoping some of them get it; though programming classes do at least have specific knowledge they can teach, I really don’t think “what’s a for loop?” is actually the thing that distinguishes the student that can code from the one that can’t.
(not a teacher—all these are from talking to grade-peers at various grades)
[3] A widespread bias I see in education is viewing every subject as a technical one with a straightforward dependency tree. Take my subject: English. The delusion held by seemingly all district-level curriculum czars is that, if Johnny’s reading scores are deficient, there must be one or two very specific dependencies he lacks. They will often look to a single wrong answer on a diagnostic test and say, “Ah! There it is. ‘Deducing the meaning of a word from context.’ Teacher, give them lessons on that until they master it.”
Sorry. It doesn’t work that way. Johnny, like most humans, intuitively understands how to derive meaning from context. But in this case, he didn’t understand the context, because it’s one of the millions of things he’s naive about. He’s young and hasn’t read very many books. If we want to get reductive, I will concede the hypothetical possibility of making a shaggy graph of the millions of micro-dependencies that underpin an individual’s reading skill. But maybe we should just try to find Johnny some books he might like.
In many ways, technical subjects are not like this. I know of no way to actually teach mathematical maturity to someone besides saying “pick some rigorous math and bang your head against it for long enough until it becomes clear that you have the basic general rigorous math skill now, and rejoice about how every other part of the basic rigorous math canon will be much easier” (example: I have yet to read a book I found as difficult as Rudin’s infamous Principles of Mathematical Analysis, in great part because after that book I had the thing).
It looks to me like programming classes, much like writing classes, do not know how to teach their students the fundamental skill and so have to default to just having them do it a bunch and hoping some of them get it; though programming classes do at least have specific knowledge they can teach, I really don’t think “what’s a for loop?” is actually the thing that distinguishes the student that can code from the one that can’t.
(not a teacher—all these are from talking to grade-peers at various grades)