On Mon, Dec 5, 2016 at 12:40 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull <[email protected]> wrote: > That's not exactly what he said. High school teachers are likely to > be the product of education schools, and may be highly skilled in > building PowerPoint presentations, and have some experience in > programming, but not as a professional. So I can easily imagine a > teacher responsible for several classes of 40 students for 2 hour-long > sessions a week per class, and not being able to "interpret at a > glance" many error messages produced by the Python interpreter. This > is basically the "aim for 90%" approach you describe, and he admits > that's the best we can do.
Okay, then I misinterpreted. Seems we are indeed in agreement. Sounds good! > > IMO the right way to teach computer programming is for it to be the > > day job for people who do all their programming in open source and/or > > personal projects. There are plenty of people competent enough to > > teach programming and would benefit from a day job. > > I don't know where you live, but in both of my countries there is a > teacher's union to ensure that nobody without an Ed degree gets near a > classroom. More precisely, volunteers under the supervision of > somebody with professional teaching credentials, yes, day job, not in > this century. And "teaching credentials" == degree from a state- > certified 4-year Ed program, not something you can get at a community > college in an adult ed program. Sadly, that's probably true here in Australia too, but I don't know for sure. I have no specific qualifications, but I teach online; it's high time the unions got broken IMO... but that's outside the scope of this. If it takes a credentialed teacher to get a job in a school, so be it - but at least make sure it's someone who knows how to interpret the error messages, so that any student who runs into trouble can ask the prof. ChrisA _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list [email protected] https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
