Teaching python (programming) to children

[Laura Creighton]

I think we are speaking mostly at cross purposes, but I want to correct
one misunderstanding.  It is not that I have a low opinion of teachers,
as that I have a really, really, high opinion of the difficulty of
teaching.  I think that it is more difficult to be an excellent teacher
than it is to be an excellent physicist, or an excellent psychiatrist,
or an excellent playwright.  I am not sure that I think there is 
_anything_ it is harder to be than an excellent teacher.

This produces an unsurrmountable structural problem.  We need lots
of teachers, so we have to accept those that we wouldn't if there
was an infinite supply of excellent teachers we could draw upon.

This means that an educational policy has to be crafted so that
the bottom members of the profession can use it effectively to
educate.  I'd prefer to certify teachers every few years, in the same
way you certify commercial pilots, and other professions, but I
want other teachers, not random administrators and some education
minister with some very odd ideas doing the certifying.  I don't
think that it is realistic to expect this any time soon, however.
We might have better luck just seeing that teachers get continuing
education.  But then we have just moved the problem.  Who decides
what we should educate the teachers with?

In the meantime, I think that letting teachers cut and paste whatever
academic educational theories and texts they like reduces teaching
to a hobby, and diminishes it as a profession.  Many people appear to
want this.  They speak of the 'vocation' of teaching, and the 
'calling'.  

David Ritchie and I both teach programming, as a hobby, and we
have independently come up with the principle that it works better
if you have the students code adventure stories.  So we do this.
If it turns out we are misguided idiots, are students can always
leave and do something else.  It is quite possible that we have
only demonstrated that you should teach students that have joined
a club where you code adventure stories, by teaching them to
code adventure stories.  This is a problem with a self selected set.
David Ritchie was teaching people to program in Perl.  I don't 
approve of that, and am pleased that he is now using python.  But
I think that it was an _unfortunate_ choice.  But if David Ritchie
was a professional middle school teacher, I would have a much 
stronger choice of words to describe what I think of the acceptability
of Perl as a first programming language.

I expect more from you and every professional teacher of programming
to high school students.  (Which perhaps you aren't doing any more.)
But unless I misremember, you said that you were teaching C++ as a
first programming language.  And I think that this is worse than
foolish, this is evil.  You should not have been allowed to do this,
even if you wanted to, a responsible educational policy should have a
list of acceptable first programming languages, and C++ should not be
on the list.  But I don't think that you actually _wanted_ to teach
C++ as a first programming language to high school students, but it
was part of the the educational policy that you were given.  So it is
not a matter of a lack of policy, which would be bad enough, but a
greater evil.  The _policy_ itself is evil.  What other evils do you
have, and how do you get them, and why can't responsible teachers such
as yourself get rid of evil damaging policies?  If that is not worth
getting angry about, I don't know what is.

Laura Creighton
lac at strakt.com (in Sweden)