Unlike Arthur, I never swore to stay off this list, so here I am, on best behavior, as Minister of Education, government in exile.
So what's up in Kirbyland as Pam calls it? Well, some of you who've been tracking my career know me as adjunct faculty with Portland State University, under the auspices of Saturday Academy, a 23-years-young school funded by Silicon Forest executives who want local Oregonians to have alternative experiences optionally leading to high tech careers by a process of smooth transition (and not waking up screaming, suddenly hip to the fact that your schooling has not well served you, in terms of getting that dream job our neck of the woods).[1] What is the Silicon Forest? Check Wikipedia. We stretch from Redmond (IronPython) to Ashland (Shakespeare Festival). Our symbolic Silicon Pine Needle (not really silicon) dominates the Seattle sky line, right next to Paul Allen's Science Fiction Museum, where Neal Stephenson's pen-written stack of sheepskins or whatever (the Baroque Cycle in draft) sits humming behind glass. Maybe it's just paper... Well, my class his filled again, so for a 3rd term I'll be diving head first into Pythonic Mathematics, a wonderful subject that makes Mathematics come alive. We get to generators right after functions, cutting teeth on Pascal's Triangle and the Fibonacci Numbers for starters. Guido's easy GCD function gives us a handle on Totients and Euler's Theorem. Before ya know it, we're talking RSA, even with middle schoolers (most are from high schools, but some like to leap ahead). We also import visual. Why government in exile? Well, that's how it feels, with Texas controlling everything with its stupid Instruments. No Python in math class, because kids are forced to punch calculators, squint at tiny screens. At every OSCON, I raise the battle cry, asking all Open Source Language Communities to unite against this tyranny and oppression. I don't care if its Ruby, Python, Perl or Haskell that you champion, let's recognize that Jill and Jane aren't getting their tax dollar money's worth, as Everyday Math shares approximately zero Geek Culture. We're deliberately shoved off the radar, sidelined, while fuddydud professor teacher trainers spout chalkboard truisms in bastardized ancient greek, never giving us the time of day (it's really quite late, past twilight). When the NCTM (a math teacher think tank) talks about "technology in the classroom" do you think they mean our Gorgeous Snake? No way. They mean TIs, calculators, little black boxes that can't serve a web page worth beans. For all they care, kids won't learn any math through programming until the cows come home (around the same time hell freezes). One of the first heros to lead the charge in favor of using self-executing math languages in the classroom, was Harvard's Kenneth Iverson. APL, and later J, was everything one could want in a math language. It ate hyperdimensional arrays for breakfast, controlled graphics, served as a shorthand for IBM's inner sanctum. Best of all, like Python, like PLT Scheme, it was interactive. Enter a line, get a line back. Neal's 'In the Beginning...' recounts what a boost that experience gave him (a true command line experience). People usually never look back at that point, thinking "this is for me." Seymour Papert's team at MIT then gave us Logo, in complement to Dartmouth's BASIC, and for a few glorious years, it looked like computer programming for everyone and $100 laptops (kid-friendly tablet PCs) were just around the corner. This was the 1980s. Peace Dividend just around the corner, relative utopia. So what happened next? That's a history that still needs a lot of documentary treatment. Salon published a breakthrough article a few weeks ago, about "Why Johnny Can't Code". But that's just the tip of the iceberg. A lot more went on behind the scenes, to dumb it all down, to assert continued moron control. It hasn't been pretty (as if you needed *me* to tell you that). I'll turn you over to my blog at this point, dear reader, just in case you want to track more of my military-industrial campaign: http://mybizmo.blogspot.com/2006/09/chatting-with-mom.html And yes, I still think I'm winning. Kirby [1] more re Saturday Academy: http://controlroom.blogspot.com/2006/10/new-wings.html --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "edupython" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/edupython -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
