[Edu-sig] False alarms?

[kirby urner]

Hi Sergio --

Per this article, with so many states and no national curriculum (I don't
advocate for one), it's tough to generalize about US schools:

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/07/americas-schools/564413/

Now, to generalize :-D

The mathematics classroom was rarely also a computer lab.  If the school
has a computer lab, that's usually a separate facility and they learn
business applications and typing, rarely much programming, until rather
recently.

Today, schools likely have Chromebooks in large charging cabinets on
rollers.  Fewer schools give out Chromebooks to each student but that's the
trend, perhaps from 6th or 7th grade up.

The mathematics curriculum has never integrated any programming as there's
still that sense that programming takes years to learn and would be a huge
detour.  Those of us more familiar with the state of the art don't see it
that way.

You're right that Mathematica paved the way for a small subculture and
I-Python, Sage, Jupyter Notebooks, SymPy do feature in some US schools, but
very few.

Rather than integrate mathematics and learning to code, the strong belief
is we need to keep math and computer science separated, which means
teaching a lot of things twice, given the Venn Diagram shows large overlap.

Your book, which I've been reading, takes the more integrated approach that
I favor.

Math teachers are in a tough position I think, as a lot of the mathy
content that students find most attractive is being placed in another
subject area.

I have my opinions about all this, as a former high school math teacher
turned applications programmer and teacher-trainer.

https://medium.com/@kirbyurner/the-plight-of-high-school-math-teachers-c0faf0a6efe6

Finding a lot of computer science teachers in a hurry is the name of the
game right now, and lots of educators are selling on ramp teacher training
programs.  That's becoming a big business.

I expect many with a math teaching background are currently migrating to
computer science, so in some sense my desire for better integration is
being fulfilled.  Some of this on ramp programs teach a language called
Pyret, which we're told is the better way to go.

Kirby




On Tue, Jul 10, 2018 at 5:13 AM, Sergio Rojas <sergio_r at mail.com> wrote:

>
> >  here's a blog post raising the alarm
> > that Python (among others) is "completely incompatible with mathematics".
> >
> >
> > https://blogs.ams.org/matheducation/2017/01/09/
> integrating-computer-science-in-math-the-potential-is-
> great-but-so-are-the-risks/
>
>
>
> I get lost reading the referred blog post. I was
> under the impression that the ideas presented in the
> post were already fully discussed back in the 90's,
> when Mathematica was getting its way into the
> classroom at US schools. That things like "x = x + x"
> were already familiar to teachers.
>
> In fact, I was thinking of an open source alternative to Mathematica
> when writing the book on Prealgebra via Python Programming
> (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325473565), with the
> advantage that Python can be used for intensive computing task as
> well as for symbolic (algebraic) computations (like mathematica)
> via SymPy.
>
> I was under the idea that the Mathematica team has already shaped and
> polished the road. I can see that I was wrong. It is still very, very
> rough (much more than the first draft of my book).
>
> Sergio
>
>
>
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