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Comment by kleiba | Hacker News Reader

A while ago, I taught CS for a year in a local high school. I can very much relate to the notion of "astonishing facts were presented without astonishment": as a teacher, you don't have the freedom to teach whatever you want (of course), but you're very tightly bound to a curriculum that's developed by the state government. And for CS, this curriculum was so uninteresting and uninspiring (what a surprise: 13 year old kids don't care about the history of computers), that I couldn't blame any of my students not to show much interest in my classes.

As a matter of fact, I gave up after just one year. It wasn't any fun for anyone, not for the students, not for me.

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I can really relate to your experience, even though mine was from a parent's perspective rather than as a teacher. I found a similar thing when tutoring one of my children in trigonometry. The way the material was being presented in school didn't click with him, but astonishingly, despite having studied it decades ago both at school and university, explaining it to him, it finally made sense to me. The unit circle definition of a tangent is a thing of beauty. I had the time to get my child to appreciate it as well, because of the extra time I had to spend with him, whereas the teacher had to hit curriculum benchmarks.

I also think this is where things like intergenerational math-phobia come from: parents who don't grasp core concepts and are scared off, and can't help their own children, creating an ongoing cycle.

> I also think this is where things like intergenerational math phobia come from: (elementary) teachers who don't grasp core concepts, are scared off, and can't help their own students, creating an ongoing cycle.

I hope you appreciate my addition of the other common path of math phobia.

Absolutely, I do appreciate that addition — I definitely had teachers like that.

It’s probably why, when I got to university and tackled subjects like probability theory, discrete math, and theoretical CS, I did extremely well — they weren’t reliant on the shaky algebra and trig foundation I had from school. Once the focus shifted to logic and conceptual thinking, without the baggage of poorly taught fundamentals, everything clicked

I think the whole teaching the history of computers is a big failure at an attempt to Segway into computer organization and architecture. Nonetheless, I get what is happening. If it’s a pure Computer programming class then the goal maybe to have them understand the “basics”…like what is the hard drive vs RAM (memory allocation) or what is a transistor (Boolean logic) and what is a punch card (mnemonics and abstractions of those mnemonics to what is now just a computer programming language).

> have them understand the “basics”…like what is the hard drive vs RAM (memory allocation) or what is a transistor (Boolean logic)

You must understand these things at least conceptually if you want to really understand how to write efficient programs. Maybe not at the level of how memory can electronically "remember" a 1 or a zero, or how a hard drive can magnetically do it, but at least the relative speeds e.g. register vs. cache vs. RAM vs. disk.

Personally, I struggled a lot in my earlier CS/Informatics education, partly because I never felt like I understood what was actually happening/how we got here, everything was just factoids in a void. When I took a gap semester between my A.S. and B.S., I finally studied/explored a bit of the history and it put a lot finally in perspective.

Well, you need to come up to something like analysis to appreciate something that's seemingly simple like the number line and that's a loot of math if done only in spare time.

(Unless you're riding a motorized vehicle, the word is segue, not Segway)

This is very much a tangent, but I think it's nearly certain that "segway" will end up overtaking "segue" as the predominant spelling for the word that is defined as: "to make a transition without interruption from one activity, topic, scene, or part to another"

The "mistake" happens so often, partially because "segway" is a much more straightforward spelling if one has only heard the word said aloud, that I think it will eventually become the actual way it is spelled!

This is an absurd take. We should not bend language around ignorance. There is a beauty to effort. Please take a second to explore this for yourself.

Actually it's not an absurd take at all. The absurd take is that we "should not bend language around ignorance."

That's precisely how language changes over time. Language is not a strict set of rules. It's based on understanding and consensus, so sometimes things that are "wrong" do end up being accepted.

I suggest this as a great introduction into what languages are and how they evolve over time https://www.amazon.com/Language-Families-of-World-audiobook/...

I am not a native speaker, but the two words do not sound even remotely the same.

How does this mistake happen so often? Can you explain people's thought process a bit? Is it just: "Something something 'seg...' ... ah I know, I will simply use another random word that starts with the same 3 letters and doesn't make sense in this phrase!"?

Also this is the first time I see it.

> the two words do not sound even remotely the same

Pronounced correctly, “segue” sounds just like “Segway” – not like “seg-oo”, as you might have assumed.

TIL, thanks! You are right, that I assumed it would be like "seg-oo".

The two words are pronounced identically.

Why would you opine on the way the words are pronounced if you've never seen them before and clearly did not take the time to look them up at all?

Segue is borrowed from Italian, the "ue" is a diphthong like English "way" or Spanish "güey"

Most mistakes remain mistakes, and do not become part of the language. The idea that mistakes generally get accepted as correct is simply untrue, which is what you are implying.

I am sure people will make the mistake, as they sometimes do today. But it is a mistake, and will likely be recognised as one.

It is likely that the language gets more cemented by automatic spelling and grammatical correction, including using AI. For example, there are a number of grammatical and spelling changes that have been cemented by American spelling/grammar checking programmes ie. by MS Word.

> The idea that mistakes generally get accepted as correct is simply untrue, which is what you are implying.

I did not imply that at all. I said sometimes, so it's not that absurd that it could happen. It does happen though, and a quick google search will give you pages of examples.

Precisely. In English, while mistakes usually get corrected back to common or traditional usage, they are also the fuel for almost every change to English that becomes common usage (and I only add the almost qualifier because I can't decide if categorizing things like "cromulent" as a mistake should count; it was an intentionally made up word in a context where the joke was made up words but may have fallen into common usage because people using it because they were in on the joke were dwarfed by people who didn't know it was a joke and absorbed it as a real word).

With machines looking over our shoulders now and so much of language being typed instead of handwritten, odds are such drift might actually decrease in English... On the other hand, the introduction of AI leaves an interesting avenue for people to begin acting as if something is common usage and have the AI begin confirming that as common if it consumes that action. And then, of course, there's the effect of the machine itself... Most of us have a way to type "résumé", but we don't bother because the machine makes it too much work to do so, So the alternate spelling without accent, which was called out in my high school days as wrong, has fallen into common usage in a generation of people having to submit their resumes online (example: https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/a510363).

Write that in Old English orthography and you'll make a more consistent argument.

Þis is án ungeswutellic andswaru. Wé ne sculon bǣgan spræce ymbe ungewitt. Þǣr is fægernes tō earfeþe. Bidd þé niman án ōþer tid tō smeagan þis sylf.

Tbh, I’m more critical of commonly confused words in English like affect and effect, or discrete and discreet.

In more forgiving of mixing up homophones, even if one of them is a registered trademark (Segway).

Aren't discrete and discreet homophones?

I passed no judgement for or against, merely discussed that it was likely to happen.

I suggest you yourself take a second and explore why you think being smarmy on the internet is a way of getting people to agree with you.

thyself*

It will likely end up like many other more phonetic spellings: an indicator of ignorance, but more acceptable in America than elsewhere.

English is spelled phonetically. Just not Modern English phonetically but Middle English phonetically. And then it froze into ideography because of printing press.

As a non native speaker, given the prevalence of spelling "segway" in corporate, this is how I thought the word was spelled, until now that is!

FWIW, I did a quick search of our local slack and found 2x the the number of instances of "segue" compared to "segway". And most of the instances of "segway" (around 60%) refer to the actual device, with only a handful of mistakes (around 4). So I'm not sure that this spelling is more common in a corporate environment—maybe do a search for yourself and see!

Hrm. I haven't even heard that so far, maybe because I rarely did meetings.

Looking it up in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segue they even warn about that!

What a horrendous crime, to turn a fascinating subject into a boring curriculum to be forced on teachers and children.

I've received great intellectual satisfaction from various well-taught subjects. I would rather chop off a finger than lose them. So curriculum committees that make subjects boring are doing something worse than chopping off millions of children's fingers.

With any kind of history especially, its just rote memorization of facts and not the connections between those facts.I hated history in school because of that, but now I actually find it interesting to learn that x happened because of y that also led to z and such. Or just rote memorization of technical facts, like how many wires does a PATA cable have. Or why must kids memoroze how an ethernet frame is built up? Sure go over it in class and show it as a lesson in how to read how binary protocols are defined. Because either you forget it anyways because its not relevant to your job, or you can look it up and memorize it over time as you use it often enough.

I really wish that teaching of history will get better for current and future kids.

> Children ask: 'why?' So we put them in school, which cures them of this instinct and conquers curiosity through boredom.

- Paul Valéry

its a job, not a mission

This is why most good teachers don’t use the books but find creative ways to still meet the standards. More work though, so fewer do it now with pay being so shit.

For what it's worth, the pay in my case was quite good, and there weren't any books, so that wasn't the issue.

I've loved the history of computers since I was young, although if I was forced to learn about it in school I know it would suck.

Imagine if they taught the history of English to kids before they could read

Since most people throughout history couldn't read, I guess it would be relatable?

How many of those who couldn't read knew the history of their or other languages?

they might just remember it all once they're adults!

imagine that!? an historically informed populace???

you'd need more expensive lies and higher quality fakes... the government would be costlier to run.

ideally, in the long term this would make the national currency's value in the international money market rise up. but why wait for that when one can directly manipulate money through trade fraud and covert military ploys?

That's not the point, the point is the ordering is inverted, not that history shouldn't be learned.

The history of English is taught in English classes. Historical context is important and interesting. You don't really understand a subject without knowing a bit of its history.

My favourite classes were those where we didn't just get taught facts and theorems but we also got taught a bit about who proved the theorem for the first time, who discovered this fact, what this algorithm was first used for, etc. So much easier to remember too.

This is one of the best things about studying law: the very nature of it makes it impossible to teach it without the historical context.

The key part to me is the "before they could read". I think the history of computing is probably far more interesting when you have more context as to where that history got us.

> 13 year old kids don't care about the history of computers

Speaking for myself, and I’m sure many others on hn, I was very interested in the history of computers at 13!

Those curiculums developed by sould-dead gremiums in consensus on the minimum knowledge you goto have are a blight on western civilization. Instead of giving students the ability to discover a topic, or built something they are interested in themselves and then give them a understanding and fascination with the discoverers who have gone before them. Instead they kill the subject..

I must confess, it gives my dry old heart some joy, to see the anti-education masses coming from this, voting and storming the fortresses that produced the paywall around education, that only money with tutors could or accidental intrinsic motivation could overcome and burn & salt those outposts of classists academia.

Yes, definitely, destroying education as we know it without any plans for what the next thing is will definitely work.

Developed countries really need a come to Jesus moment, because the disdain for everything that made them great places is unbelievable. People will understand, after great suffering, that destroying stuff is much easier than building it.

We're in the destroying phase right now. Unless you live in China - I hear they're mostly doing well. Or middle of nowhere Africa, where there's nothing to destroy because there's nothing there.

But systems can rot from within too, or just decay naturally, and don't need to be destroyed. What if the core ideas that built our current civilization were ideas of the past, that we don't have any more, and we don't know what to do when The Machine Stops? Doesn't have to be a literal machine - it's a good metaphor for how democracy fell apart.

The do as well as the USSR did. Meaning "excellent" till the last day!

I can't parse this comment, but yes, in some respects, we're in a similar stage now to the USSR's final stage.

> People will understand, after great suffering, that destroying stuff is much easier than building it.

"It is easier to destroy than to create" doesn't tell you when something should be torn down.

You can have a house that provided shelter for your family for generations, but if it's water damaged, the floors are rotting and it's full of toxic mold, the person who shows up with a bulldozer isn't necessarily wrong.

Forgetting that it was the anti-education forces that created the curriculums. The war on public education goes back a long time; teachers lost the freedom to teach decades ago. and it has been the same forces behind it all along.

Ok... what would you do differently? Keep in mind you have to educate millions of students across an enormous spectrum of abilities, socioeconomic backgrounds, and interests.

No you don't. There is a narrow range of abilities at each level if students are properly held back when they haven't mastered the material.

Their interests are built by what they are taught. "Socioeconomic background" is a tautology. Their backgrounds are irrelevant.

I would build a "intrinsic motivation" first curriculum, where knowledge is handed as powertools to a already existing passion and the self-thought "expansion" of knowledge is the most important gift to be made.

If the child is fascinated by video games- i would help it make video games, the curriculum be damned. All knowledge holes can be filled later, but the passion to wanting to know, can never be restored unless the want for knowledge remains intact.

I basically found this in college too, I quickly gave up on computer science as a major. I'd rather just go out and learn how to build what I want to build versus hearing a 3-hour lecture about how the jvm works.

The answer is it's magic and no one cares, now let's go build some games

Firstly, and this is worth pointing out, "computer science" is not about programming. It's about science, in this case specifically the science that makes computers work.

At school I thought "computer science" meant "programming" - which it doesn't. So well done for recognizing this before wasting your much time. (Seriously, not sarcastic.) programming can easily be learned outside college.

To other general readers here though I'll say that understanding the science can be really helpful over a career. It's not terribly applicable in getting that first job, but as you progress more and more of those theoretical fundamentals come into play.

Ultimately there are a small fraction of people who need to understand how it all works, all the way down, because those people build the things that programmers use to build everything else.

This is a myth. Computer science absolutely is about programming. The science that makes computers work is called physics.

There are theoretical parts of computer science, but it is fundamentally a practical subject. All of it is in service to programming. Type systems are about typing programs. Algorithms are implemented using programs. Data structures are for use in programs.

The very worst computer science lecturers are those that forget it is a practical subject and try to teach it like abstract mathematics, because they believe (whether they realise they believe it or not) that it is more prestigious to teach abstract concepts than practical concrete things.

It is the same in mathematics, where unfortunately there has developed a tradition since Bourbaki of trying to teach abstract notions as fundamental while concrete problem solving is left to the engineers. The result is that many engineers are much stronger mathematicians than many mathematically-trained students, and those students have to relearn the practical foundations of the subject before they can make progress at the graduate level. If they don't, they get stuck doing what looks like maths, but is actually just abstract roleplaying.

This might be just a semantic argument, but if you mean "programming" as in "configuring a machine to implement one or more algorithms" (which I would assert most people do when they use the term), computer science is emphatically not about programming, although programming is taught for much the same reason that artists learn how to use a pencil. Computing, as a discipline, predates the machine (although the machine justified the existence of a whole discipline for studying it because the force multiplier it represented made it worthwhile to dive deeply on the subject of algorithm development and execution, the nature of algorithms, the nature of computability, formal logics, etc... Before the machine, it was just a subset of mathematics).

This was a point repeatedly driven home in my undergraduate curriculum, and in fact, they made a point of having multiple classes where a computer was completely uninvolved.

Yeah, I'm more in this camp too. We did a lot of practical modules, things like OS development, databases and so on. So yeah, learning programming was the first couple months, then programming becomes the tool to express progress in knowledge depth.

It's probably fair to say that although we learned some history, we had the privilege of learning at a time the field was exploding. That history you learned, I lived and worked through that. It's somewhat surreal to realize that my career is your history class.

As mentioned above though, it'll vary a lot from one school to another.

It depends on where you took computer science. I took a few foundational classes at community college.

It very much felt like a Wikipedia article on the history of computers somehow stretched out over an entire summer.

I have my own issues with the way college is generally setup. Do students really need a massive amusement park when self study along with 3 or 4 exams would provided the same value. Will spending 70k per year in total cost of attendence at said amusement park serve them?

I don't really like boot camps either, personally I'd like companies to be more open to actually training people again. I doubt it'll happen though.

>> It depends on where you took computer science.

Well, yeah. That's true for any field of study. Every college has strengths and weaknesses- its the opposite of a franchise.

>> I took a few foundational classes at community college.

A few foundational classes is somewhat different to classes you take in prep for a major. I did a foundational class in astronomy, designed for students who were just looking for an introduction. It was very different to my comp Sci classes in tone and style.

Yes there was some math involved, but not much in the comp science classes. Math was a pre-requisite though so we got our math in, well, math.

This is one of the only skills you can learn for practically nothing. A cheap laptop is all you need. I taught myself enough to get a middle class job with nothing but free time and 3$ iced coffees.

I just don’t like the idea of gate keeping it behind an expensive degree. The source code for most popular frameworks and tools is free for anyone to read.

It’s not like medicine or something where you need to drop 300k on education.

No, it's certainly not like medicine or law. And you can certainly aquire skills on your own.

Of course, in this field, learning is continuous. You're not going to use just one language (much less one framework) over a decades-long career. It's also likely that your domain will change, your focus area and so on.

A good college course doesn't prepare you for programming in one language, but all of them. (In the sense that once you understand the theory of programming, language is just syntax.)

You get exposure to different types of languages (imperative, functional etc).

I think for me the critical takeaways though were research, critical thinking and communication. The "skills" are easy to learn yourself, but the formality in which you place that learning is harder to do yourself.

Which is not to say a degree is a requirement- it's clearly not. But it's helpful because it builds a strong foundation on which the self-learning can rest.

I think CS is math, not science. Computer engineering is science (using lots of math).

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