I was just drafting another blog post for CERM Academy, which manages streams of thought pieces going out to subscribers, then warehoused in a WordPress site. [1]
As a former high school math teacher, my question is about the likely fate of that profession, in the light of two messages coming loud and strong from the adult world: 1) the US President, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and many others, including hip hop stars, say "learning to code" is a great door opener, a ticket to the 21st Century and 2) in order to respond to this demand, we're going to need a new army of CS teachers, very much in short supply at the moment. Scientific American has another article on that theme in this August's issue. [2] What's being said, then, is: 3) whatever this "learning to code" thing is, it cannot be math, as we presently do have a lot of math teachers, eager to innovate, but only a few "coding teachers" ergo "CS is not Math". That's quite a devastating message to be broadcasting. Math already has a relevance problem, with books like 'The Math Myth' chipping away at its lifeblood, its required status. "So what if we swapped out math for CS?" is the question that inevitably arises, once we tell the world they're really different. What if the school can't produce? "Stay home and learn"? Who gets to do that? That's an interesting question. Before we go too far down this road however, it may pay to look ahead. Won't those hypothetical new coding classes include stuff about vectors and spatial geometry? Luciano's OSCON talk was a lot about writing a vector class in fluent Python. Isn't that what CAD is all about? Look at Pi3D. Algorithms for finding primes.... Understanding RSA entails learning about Euler's Theorem, a generalization of Fermat's Little, and so on. Is 'The Art of Computer Programming' not-mathematical simply by virtue of being only semi-numerical? In saying all these actually relevant topics belong to this new discipline, and that math teachers are not qualified to teach it, is stripping away their last shred of credibility. The real weak link in this chain is not the math teachers, but the fact that they're ball and chained to computer illiterate textbooks. In the US, they're commanded to toe the line and teach to the tests. But the tests have no use for hexadecimals (Common Core is base 10 only). Finally, right when functions become "top level citizens", (hooray) it turns out math teachers no longer get to teach exactly what that means, as the examples are all in JavaScript or other "not math" languages. The real message we're sending to is that mathematics involves calculation, because in math class we use calculators and don't code, whereas computer science involves computation. Math is for calculator people. Computer science is for computer people. It's TI versus Pi. We seem prepared to move ahead on such thin ice, akin to saying data science is not really math, not statistics, because there's coding involved. Somehow the mere act of coding marks a mythical boundary, around which we're happy to design our civilization? Anyway, subscribers here are already veterans of such discussions. I ruminate more in this recent blog post: http://worldgame.blogspot.com/2016/08/accelerated-learning.html Kirby [1] http://cermacademy.com/ [2] https://flic.kr/p/KCTvvU
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