Hacker News Reader

Comment by misingnoglic | Hacker News Reader

I had a math teacher at my high school who used python and SAGE to teach us pre-calculus as well as programming, computational thinking and some mathematical logic. He was an absolute genius and I wouldn't be where I was if it wasn't for him - unfortunately the school saw him as a threat to the standard model of teaching and drove him insane before he just quit. I hope he's doing ok.

View on HN

You should try to find him and say hello.

I'll have to email him - I was planning on doing so once I finish my senior honors thesis in CS education (which I'm dedicating to him).

I had a teacher that changed me for the better, unfortunately I never got the chance to thank him as he passed away unexpectedly :/

If I were you I would send an email right away. You never know what happens.

I had a similar experience with my AP calculus teacher in high school. Luckily, he's dramatically overqualified for the teaching position and his classes consistently do exceptionally on standardized tests, so the administration basically gives him a wide berth.

I've had thoughts like this, using sci-py to teach kids how to hack math. Our education system is kind of sad face.

Have you heard this Wolfram TED talk about the subject:

http://blog.wolfram.com/2010/11/23/conrad-wolframs-ted-talk-...

It was definitely cool - he had us writing python functions to estimate the area under a curve (and then visualize it), and other things I don't quite remember at this moment. Once he made us define math functions just based on there being a 0, and a successor function, which happens to be what I'm doing in a graduate Math Logic course at my university.

That's really incredible.

It's sad to see educators like this get pushed out of their field. I had some incredible teachers as well, but also some awful ones. There needs to be greater competitive components added to the education system, such as statistically significant pupil success in education and career outcomes.

> People laughed at Seymour Papert in the 1960s, more than half a century ago, when he vividly talked about children using computers as instruments for learning and for enhancing creativity, innovation, and "concretizing" computational thinking.[1]

[1] http://papert.org/

Did anyone else, other students, find his methods effective?

For sure - I can think of several other students who took his class and are now doing extremely well in Computer Science careers. Of course I don't have statistics on that or anything, but there's a large group of graduates from my school who were extremely upset when they found out what the school did to him.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com