Hacker News Reader

I like that your focus is on people being comfortable enough to ask their own questions. That's a clear, concrete goal that gets right to the heart of the issue you describe, in the library setting.

One simple strategy is to close any bit of teaching you do with the phrase, "What questions do you have?" This is a subtle but important change from "Does anyone have any questions?" The first phrasing assumes people will have questions, and implies that you are looking for and welcoming questions.

When people do ask questions, you can ask how many other people had the same question. If you have more than just a handful of students, it's quite likely that if one person asks a question then others will have the same question. This normalizes the mindset of having questions, and not understanding everything as soon as it's presented.

It sounds like you are probably modeling a good atmosphere for asking questions. I think it's important to understand that you can't make everyone immediately comfortable asking questions. If people have been ignored or made to feel stupid when they've asked questions, it will take a while for them to trust you and the overall environment enough to start asking their own questions.

I taught high school math and science for 25 years, and always heavily emphasized that all questions are welcome. It took new students a while to understand that this was sincere; many of them had been told long ago to stop asking so many questions, or been publicly embarrassed for asking questions. Same goes for making mistakes; it's beyond infuriating that some teachers still intentionally embarrass students for not knowing things, or not getting things right on the teacher's schedule. Those practices are intellectually traumatizing to many people.

> "What questions do you have?"

Wow. Asking that instead of “do you have any questions” is so powerful.

You sound like a teacher who genuinely cares, thank you.

"The first phrasing assumes people will have questions, and implies that you are looking for and welcoming questions."

I wish I could hug you.

There must be a zillion useful "language hacks", if we only knew.

I learned "All negatives can be stated a positive" in the early 90s. Been trying to use it ever since.

For example, instead of "Don't run!", maybe say "Please walk." Completely changed my relationship to my kid.

One helpful bit in that particular "life skills" seminar was the practice and role playing.

I would never know to use your "Does anyone have any questions?" technique unless someone showed me.

And I still struggle to imagine how to apply these kind of life lessons in my every day.

It'd be fun, helpful to having a recording of all my interactions, and have professionals review the tape with me. I took some public speaking training where we actually did this. Illuminating.

FWIW, one of the best programmers I know strongly advocates acting lessons.

>Completely changed my relationship to my kid.

Had the same experience when I figured out to make offerings as A/B choices (and non-choices).

Instead of "Do you want broccoli?" It's: "Would you rather broccoli or cauliflower?"

Or the non-choice: "Do you want to eat your broccoli at the kitchen table or on the porch?"

How did you start the coding bootcamp at public library? Can you give more details, structure etc

Step 1: Pick a few libraries, find the want you want to plant roots in. Make sure they let you talk and they have wifi. Talk to the librarian about your plans.

Step 2: Pick a curriculum to follow. Many other bootcamps have their curriculum online. I have my own that I built over the past 10 years of teaching and making sure every single student I taught got a job. You can use it too if you want: c0d3.com/book

Step 3: Pick a time. I picked 8am - 12pm to make it hard on students. Students who are willing to get up and show up at 8am are the students who is really committed. Around 10am I go off to my full time job, my students take over.

Step 4: (Best Practice) DO NOT put your students into cohorts. I made that mistake before and I had to spend months fixing it. Students have a tendency to compare themselves with others so they will start memorizing and pretend to understand to keep up. From day one, tell them that everybody will learn at a different pace and take as much time as they need to understand the material. Take time to be creative with what they learned and explore. You award their creativity (when they twist your teaching to do something strange) with your complete attention and they will keep pushing the limits of what they learn.

After students learn, you get free engineers to make your ideas come true! For my students, I simply have them build apps (open-sourced) that I wished existed and have them work together to build them.

I help them write their resume as they build features so the features count as work experience. My students list me as professional reference.

This is what I do, before work and after work.

If you need an example, here's our meetup group: https://www.meetup.com/San-Jose-C0D3/

Here's the core product our students built: https://c0d3.com/

Here's an example of a recent product launch: https://www.notion.so/garagescript/Learnings-from-our-open-s...

The greatest gift I get back from doing this, is while I'm sleeping or busy at my full time job, I have 3-5 student engineers thinking about my side projects and building them.

How young are your students? Or rather, how young are your youngest students?

20. Oldest just turned 75 (sadly, he is homeless)

I think you are trying to reply to the person I was replying to.

Yeah he was. Sorry I wasn’t paying attention when I responded, should have put into a separate thread

I don't have an answer, and I'm curious to hear ideas. I wonder if a "stupidest question" contest could be a good ice breaker? First question of the day earns some privilege for the rest of the class?

What japhyr said above is a small change but very profound. Asking “what question do you have” instead of “do you have any questions” is a big deal.

“Stupidest” or “first question” gamification haven’t given me much success, I suspect is because it comes off a little insincere.

I think the previous commenter is on to something re icebreakers. Also, please check out Carol Dweck’s work on Growth Mindset. Her book shares examples of how researchers and teachers successfully primed underprivileged students to stop thinking of intelligence as a fixed trait. Some interesting mindset “hacks” that eventually helped them outperform students w/better resources.

With a pre-registered, much larger sample size, Growth mindset replicated but the effect size was tiny:

https://psyarxiv.com/md2qa

On a 4-point grade metric (“A” = 4.0, “B” = 3.0, etc.), the average treatment effect was 0.03 grade points

How do I read this? It looks like it has been pulled down for further review/work.

Here's a blog post with some quotes:

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/03/gr...

Thank you! I added it to my reading list.

I would recommend cultivating ignorance as something of an asset. the fun problems don't have clean answers, and it's common that we have to explore areas about which we are not knowledgeable. that process is incredible once you embrace your ignorance as an indication that you can learn something new.

> Throughout my childhood, I always thought Black people seemed so cool and funny. They exude confidence and it intimidated my to make friends with them.

> Now I teach people coding before and after my work as a full time software engineer. A few of my students are black. I had a hard time working with them.

Speaking as black person this is an astute observation which I have observed. In Africa sometimes this is due to English not being someone's first language. In a meeting with people from different races I have noticed my black colleagues are way less vocal than when we are talking in Zulu on our own. They have a different demeanor and come out as more forceful and confident in Zulu. In English meeting they are less forceful.

> Are there any activities to do that can reduce the comfort time to the minimum?

I'm not an educator, but I think the goal is to normalize asking questions. This can be achieved by initially forcing everyone to ask a question (no matter how silly/not related to the topic of the day). You could give them time to write down the questions first, then everyone gets their turn to read it. Later, you can relax it so that questions become voluntary.

I like this, a little hard to enforce, but I don’t see any issues. Only way to find out is to try.

I wonder why a lot of asians have this racial inferiority complex. I (being asian myself) grew up in an affluent asian dominated neighborhood of Cupertino. I had black, white and asian friends growing up and I never thought too much of racial issues. Maybe because in my schools asian americans were largely the majority. Again, I had the same experience going to school at UCLA which was largely populated mostly by asians.

However coming back to the bay area a decade later and making a lot of friends with local asians who grew up in San Francisco I am seeing huge racial inferiority complexes among asian males and females.

It's disgustingly huge. Among asian males racism manifests itself as hatred against white people for their white privilege and they talk openly about being scared of black people because they're all criminals. It's nuts. Note that this attitude mostly manifests itself among the native asian SF crowd who grew up here, not the tech migrants from outside of the city.

The other thing is racism manifests itself differently among asian females in the most pathetic display of inferiority I have ever seen in my life. The majority of single asian females in SF prefer dating white people over their own race. It's not even a superficial taste fetish either, literally a huge amount of asian females view their own race as too inferior and too weak to date. I don't know whether to blame the asian males or asian females for this level of patheticism.

I read posts from asians above and I'm astonished... I'm literally thinking what planet is this guy from? Then I realize that I'm from cupertino, I'm the guy who grew up on a different planet.

You got downvoted, but I upvoted you. Thanks for bringing this up. My mom abused me when I was growing up and I was traumatized. So I grew up thinking I was inferior and then superior because I became successful. Both are bad traits that I had to delete.

Many asian kids are abused, it is disgusting what happens behind closed doors. If you had a better childhood or if you overcame your hardships, it would be really nice of you to show them some love and help them recover!

I think this is important, as a black man. Reclamation is a mechanism for ego defense for marginalized people, sort of the flip side of stereotype threat: recognizing a negative aspect of your racialization, and then flipping it into a positive even as you exemplify it. Nigger becomes nigga; a word used to denigrate becomes something no one else can use in polite company. Nerdiness becomes a point of pride; "I studied and beat you out for the job."

At the heart of it is the hierarchical and competitive nature of race in America, which does not have to be a zero-sum game but is cast as one anyway. As in learning to fight and be aggressive when threatened with violence, reclamation is reasonable, given the circumstances, but altogether unfortunate. We would be better off without the ego-protective behavior AND the racist circumstances that necessitate it.

I found this to be a very American phenomenon, as I see it less from Asians that grew up in most European or South American countries.

I also definitely see a difference in self esteem between Asian Americans that grew up in California compared to the rest of the US.

Strangely, or maybe it makes sense, the Asian Americans that I saw with the highest self esteem were Mormons!

This is one of the reasons my wife and I moved back to Asia after we had kids. Despite other issues here, we felt it would be better for them.

Yeah, I noticed it too. It does pervade the entire US but I've also noticed it's mostly concentrated in California.

Asians dating white people may come less from seeing other Asians as inferior, but from a desire to escape their own cultural trappings. Depending on how conservative (traditional) the family is, many Asian women I know prefer dating non-Asian men because it doesn't come with the same expectations from their family. They can escape the make babies, make money, deal with a mother-in-law pressures, which may be much higher in an Asian household. The micromanaging of any potential children by both sets of parents would be significantly less as well.

In general there may be less pressure to conform and perform, from their partner, and more importantly from the family, when dating a white person.

That comes with some trade-offs.

1. Having a spouse who does not have the cultural knowledge, similar interests, empathy or language skills to communicate with your family is an issue. Her choice to date a white man is in a sense a rejection of her own family.

2. She herself may not have the same experiences, mindsets and interests to be able to really connect with her spouse if the relationship is driven by her attempt to run away from the expectations of her family.

3. A white man and his family/friends have a higher chance of being racist and insensitive to race issues. Weirdly enough, it does not seem like racist beliefs and white supremacy preclude white men from dating Asian women or Asian women from reciprocating interest: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/06/opinion/sunday/alt-right-...

This is not true. First of all if this were true you'd see tons of asian men dating white women to escape the cultural pressure. You don't see this at all, the phenomenon is largely among women.

Second of all, the pressures you describe are a bit exaggerated. The whole mother-in-law, make money and make baby deal is not very common at all. It exists and is more common among asians than westerners but it is still very very rare.

The stereotype on asians that does have credibility in modern times is the academic pressure. The pressures on a kid academically are enormous but after college the parents are just as human as the kid and it largely dies down later in life.

Third. No asian woman will ever admit this stuff to your face. Especially, if you're white. It's such a pathetic trait that they'd have trouble admitting it to themselves. Likely they'd make up some garbage excuse like "culture."

> First of all if this were true you'd see tons of asian men dating white women to escape the cultural pressure.

Before jumping to conclusions, there’s another question to ask: do Asian men not want white women, do white women not want Asian men, or is there another reason entirely?

Australia here. About 20 years ago I asked my Japanese[0] girlfriend why I saw a lot of (i.e. white) Australian guys with Japanese girlfriends, but hardly any Japanese guys with Australian girlfriends. She said with a huge laugh that Japanese guys are really afraid of Australian girls! hehe.

I thought I understood that's because Aussie girls generally would seem loud, opinionated, immodest, over-assertive, disrespectful, compared with the Japanese feminine ideal, or even the masculine ideal. And Japanese males are often..more sensitive, artistic, considerate, reflective etc - not traditional Australian male virtues!

[0] i.e. Born in Japan, here since fairly young.

It's a bit of both. But mostly white women do not want Asian men.

Look you grew up in america, I grew up in america. We're not that different in what we want, and it's the same with asian women and white women.

If the difference is mostly white women not wanting Asian men, then your whole

> First of all if this were true you'd see tons of asian men dating white women to escape the cultural pressure. You don't see this at all, the phenomenon is largely among women.

argument is invalid. What's more there's no reason for you to be distinguishing between wants of asian men and women.

Your conclusion imo should just be that women of all races find asian men too weak to date. Men either don't find asian women weak, don't care, or care but in a positive way.

>Your conclusion imo should just be that women of all races find asian men too weak to date.

Who says this wasn't my conclusion? All women want to date up in terms of class. They also don't want to date black people. Black men and Asian men currently occupy the bottom of the dating ladder.

Guess who sits on top? White people. The problem is none of this is real. White people aren't the best, it's only this pathetic view point of racial inferiority that causes women to see the world like this.

Also I'm only emphasizing on asians because it's disproportionally pathetic. The inferiority complex is off the charts, I can't think of any other race that literally avoids dating their own race to the scale of asian women.

>If the difference is mostly white women not wanting Asian men, then your whole argument is invalid. What's more there's no reason for you to be distinguishing between wants of asian men and women.

Wrong. Not invalid at all. And I never ever made your claim above.

My claim in this context is that asian women dating white men is not the result of asian women trying to run away from strict asian culture. The whole point was to counter an argument made by another poster.

Asian Men wanting to date white women does not mean they don't want to date asian women. They do want to date white women but the ratio isn't as disproportionate as asian women women worshiping white males.

Also why can't I distinguish something? It's not me distinguishing anything. It's reality that is making a distinction.

It's an urban myth problem i.e "All Asian men have small dicks". For 50% this will be the truth and hence escalates to a self esteem issue. Watching porn reinforces this inferiority complex. White women don't want to date a small dick guy and avoid guys that are known to have a micropenis. African-Americans and white guys don't have this problem.

Women have far more pressures than men, especially Asian cultures in comparison to modern western cultures.

This has largely been eliminated in modern Asian cultures. Even among women.

Again I would say there's more of this type of stuff still happening among asians but it's a very small minority.

I've never understood this argument regarding dating outside of one's ethnic group. The effects of actual racism is one ethnic group benefits at the expense of one or more other groups. What you're describing is something else entirely.

Who's getting harmed when Asian women have a preference for white men when dating? Who cares? To each their own, no? Are you implying there's some maximum percentage of women that can prefer another ethnic group when dating, and anything above that is problematic?

Edit: I should've specified that I'm talking explicitly about their commentary on asian women's dating patterns, not anything else in their comment.

I'm not Asian or Asian-American (I'm an African-American male), but there have been studies that shown that in the United States men and women of certain ethnic groups have different levels of success when it comes to dating. Many studies have shown that black women have it the hardest among women of various ethnicities in American online dating sites, and these studies have also shown that men of Asian descent have it the hardest among men. When black women are unfairly stereotyped as having unfeminine characteristics, and when Asian men are unfairly stereotyped as being nerdy, then it hurts them when competing in a dating marketplace where many people across racial and ethnic groups unfortunately hold stereotypical views, sometimes even about their own ethnicities. I deal with this myself as an African-American male who doesn't conform to the stereotypes; unfortunately I find myself "between a rock and a hard place," where I feel ignored by women within my ethnic group because I'm a "cornball brother," yet I also feel ignored by women outside my ethnic group because I'm black. Now, not all women are guided by stereotypes (and not all men are, either), but we have to work harder to find partners who are not guided by stereotypes and are genuinely interested in wanting to know each other more as individuals and not as representatives of our gender and our ethnicity.

It depends on the reason for the preference. If it's status or racial inferiority based (with the potential, unpleasant addition of fetishism and white superiority complex from her partner's side), Asian women and their partners suffer. All that weirdness would make a healthy relationship difficult.

Asian women suffer from 3 main problems.

1. If other Asian women are desperate to white men because of racial inferiority, many white men will develop the idea that Asian women are desperate, think that they are superior for being white and treat Asian women poorly. Asian women would also have lower boundaries and would tolerate more misbehavior from white men that other women would not due to the inferiority.

2. People in general seek commonality in relationships. Some Asian women who are severely affected by an inferiority complex may sub-optimally choose unwoke partners that they have little in common with. The lower commonality and inferiority also bias Asian women's partners and the partners' friends and family toward being less accepting of diversity than the average interacial relationship. e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAJAVHzBsAg

3. If she does have an racial inferiority complex, then chasing white men would confirm and strengthen her racial inferiority complex and cause additional suffering.

Having established that some forms of that type of relationship can be harmful, the question to answer then is: how prevalent are racial inferiority and status/acceptance seeking from the Asian women and fetishism and white superiority complex from the white men in these relationships?

>they talk openly about being scared of black people because they're all criminals.

You don't think there isn't anything racist about that? You have a strange definition of racism.

I was specifically replying to their commentary on Asian women's dating preferences. I should've been more clear.

It is problematic to asians as a whole. It's pretty obvious when asians discriminate their own race and view white people as superior. There's really no argument for you here.

Definitely not problematic to white males who are dating asian females though.

Honestly, among white guys it manifests itself as Asian women being "easier" and there's nothing wrong or racist for taking advantage of it, but it definitely won't appear to be a problem from your perspective even though something deeply wrong is happening.

huh? assuming that this preference is true, clearly the argument would be that Asians are harmed. most couples are intra-racial.

We don't need any complicated social or cultural explanations for the dating issue.

Women generally prefer taller men. Asian men tend to be short.

The explanation works the other way too, with men typically preferring shorter women. There are other attributes as well, such as muscle mass and the amount of body hair.

The problem here is that you're wrong. Tons of of tall asian males have this issue.

Also the explanation does not work the other way. Men do not typically prefer shorter women. It is the women making a selection preference here.

Counter example: Latino men tend to be short and date out at a similar rate to Latina women.

>> females view their own race as too inferior and too weak to date

Facepalm. Even a moderately good looking Asian female (and there are lots of them) would not have any problems finding good dates IMO, especially among well-to-do tech types.

Though this is typical: people are afraid of things and they absolve themselves of the potential failure by not even trying, because it's very easy to convince yourself that you're "disadvantaged", even if in reality the opposite is true.

You misread the OP: they're saying that lots of Asian women (in the US) view Asian men as undesirable.