Computer coding could count for foreign language credit under bill
mercurynews.com
mercurynews.com
Does making it substitute for foreign language education, and thus effectively, relative to the status quo, discouraging foreign language education make any sense as a way to do that? No, not at all. Not that Michigan is the first place with that boneheaded idea, ISTR it being included in state proposals in a few states, and a version of it even in a federal bill (don’t think any passed) on the last few years.
In retrospect, while the courses have been extremely valuable, I wouldn't recommend programming as a substitute for foreign language studay.
I’m not sure it’s so important to learn a foreign language in high school, I wouldn’t cut any other subjects for it.
Honestly, my exposure to foreign languages has helped me at various points building tech where I may have made a wholly English centric view about encodings, data models, etc.
The other thing about studying foreign language is that it encourages foreign travel and teaches us about other cultures which only stand to make us more well rounded students and people.
Maybe my opinion is the minority, but I feel so positive about the benefits of language study that we try to get our kids in the 1/2 day language immersion program at their elementary each year. Apparently in my area enough people feel the same as we’ve lost out on the lottery the last two years :(
It’s easy to ignore various humanities/social studies when we are interested in learning about such different things like CS and robotics.
At university my engineering classes were in fancy new buildings but a lot of my general studies classes were in old uncomfortable buildings that would always be too hot or too cold- just adding to the misery of studying something I had no interest in.
I’m still glad for every one of those boring classes I took. I wouldn’t have known how much I absolutely loved studying Greek/Roman mythology, basic philosophy, and early North American native archeology.
Why is the reverse OK, requiring foreign language but not other things? Space in the curriculum is competitive.
For most people, studying a foreign language in school for a couple of years is essentially useless. That's not how human language learning works. (For one, it's a fee years too late. For two, it's not immersive.)
Of the two, programming education is probably the more useful. With a small amount of programming education, you can automate simple tasks. I would expect that taking 2 years of a programming class would leave you at least able to use existing libraries to perform basic tasks. You know what I can do with my 2 years of high school Spanish and a year of college Spanish? Nothing. I never had a reason to use it, so it languished. Even when the knowledge was fresh, my vocabulary and general comprehension were too poor to have anything other than scripted conversations. I can order food in Spanish, but God forbid they respond with anything other than "si" because it's going to go right over my head.
I'm not alone in that. Every single one of my friends took a second language in high school, and only 2 of them can actually converse and read their other language. And both of them learned at home from their parents, not in high school.
Being bilingual would be great for students, but that's not what we're getting out of second languages in high school. We're getting people that know how to ask where the library is, and can't understand the response. It's a waste of time. We either need to double down and start the language learning process much earlier and invest more time in making students fluent, or admit that the classes are mostly a novelty and allow other more useful things to take their place.
Doing this way makes them seem either clueless (programming and foreign languages serve different educational goals) or disingenuous.
>Instead of learning a foreign language, Michigan students could take computer coding classes to replace the high school graduation requirement, under a bill that passed the state House Tuesday.
>Currently, the Michigan Merit Curriculum, which dictates the state’s academic standards for graduation, requires students to take two world language credits to receive a high school diploma.
Under their criteria, ASL (American Sign Language) qualified as a foreign language. The reasoning being that a distinct culture was taught along with the language and Deaf culture qualified. I've never needed it, and could converse using it, but it has stuck with me. Unfortunately, my school dropped it and I ended up taking two years of Spanish that didn't have anywhere near as much impact. Even more than the Pascal/C++ class even though one is a language I've used professionally.
Sign languages are not like writing systems, they are distinct languages with their own grammar etc, it's very cool!
If you want to make a sensible argument, please argue why learning a foreign language is different from learning math, history or whatever else.