To my daughter's high school programming teacher

I feel for the daughter who (like many women before her) had a crappy experience in the male-dominated programming world. I feel for the parent who sees her daughter possibly reject a very fulfilling career path after a bad initial experience, when the future could be so much better. But as a former high school teacher, I also feel for the teacher. Giving them some benefit of the doubt, I just want to point out a couple things:

1. As many others have mentioned, if this is a public school, it's quite unlikely that this teacher is college educated as a programmer, let alone has ever been a professional developer. I'm sure they're teaching VB simply because that's what they have experience with, probably making them the most experienced programmer on staff at the school.

2. High school bullies are typically quite good at restricting their bullying to times when they're unlikely to be spotted by an authority figure. As a teacher, you try hard to maintain awareness of the entire room as much as possible, but there are always tons of gaps. You might be writing something on the board, helping a student 1-on-1, addressing some other kid's behavior, or doing any of dozens of other tasks.

3. Most teachers try to keep tabs on their students on a personal level, especially when they behavior or attitude noticeably changes, but not all students open up. It takes a lot of effort to maintain an authentic connection. Parents have trouble connecting authentically with their children--imagine doing it with scores of students per semester. And when it comes to bullying, most teenagers downplay to avoid being though of as a snitch. Some are self-conscious to be bailed out even when they haven't "snitched".

4. For many of the author's suggestions, the teacher may be doing these things (recruiting, cross-promoting, etc.), to the extent that they have time. But these are outside the job of teaching. These are things the author could be doing at the school too, but presumably she's too busy. I'm sure the teacher can relate.

Teaching high school was by far the most grueling and emotionally taxing job I've ever had. My work career also includes being a custodian at a health club, a baseball umpire, a senior software engineer, and and a startup founder. None of those jobs is anywhere near as demanding.

So, was this article about the student's experience or the mother's? Because it reads like it's about the mother. The guys in class suggested that their peer go make a sandwich. That's the only accusation actually made against the class and the teacher. While I don't endorse such teasing, it's certainly in no way specific to computer programming, and it's not anything like the intensity one would expect when trolls find an article.

Minority entities will be teased practically any time they exist, regardless of sector or age, and they need to be taught to handle it well. We can continue to attempt to stop the teasing altogether, but in the meantime we have to live in the Real World, and if this child quit programming because a few guys made a kitchen joke, the mother is really misdirecting her efforts by writing a letter to the teacher.

It's hard to imagine that any rape joke would be allowed to fly in our classrooms where students can hardly wield pencils anymore, and if you read carefully, you'll see that it doesn't appear to have occurred. It appears to me that the author is attempting to use some clever wording to create an impression that the "harassment" was much more intense than it actually was by subtly crossing over into her personal experience with online trolls.

The entitled and largely unconscious male privilege in most of these HN comments is pretty hard to stomach against the large and steadily-accumulating picture of just how very different this industry presents itself to men and to women. Just because you don't directly experience or see it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Just because you haven't been (consciously) chauvinistic to a woman doesn't mean women don't experience deep and pervasive chauvinism.

It's not a fucking "free choice" that women are making when they steer away from programming in the face of the grotesque pastiche of misogyny and bullying that underlies our vocation, in which most of the people who aren't actually bullying women are falling over themselves to deny its existence or make excuses for it.

Male programmers need to stop congratulating ourselves on how "libertarian" and "meritocratic" we are and start taking responsibility for how profoundly hostile and off-putting we have allowed this field to remain for most women.

I cringe reading this.

Since when it is alright to tell teachers how to do their job in bullet pointed letters?

* Be an adult and talk about any issues, complements or concerns during the class.

* Talk with them in person or on the phone.

* If you wish, post to your blog after the issues have been resolved. To put a global context on the situation should be supported with evidence as it pertains to life as a women in the IT industry. (See what I'm doing here with the bullet points?)

Parents theses days...

--edit-- As I'm reading some of the responses to my post, I have to ask, what pillow soft existence did many of you grow up with? Kids (and people) say terrible things. This isn't the sign of a bad teacher, it's an opportunity for this blogger to prepare her kids (Not just the girls) for the real full-contact brutal reality known is the the real working world. Life gets waaaay harder than this.

If CS education in the USA is anything like here, the teacher of this class will be the unlucky fellow assigned with maintaining the school networks and other random "computer stuff". His qualification will be that of an interested layman, augmented by several one day seminars on random topics from Office to Java.

There is simply no curriculum, there are no standards and no requirements, and if we are honest, the level of computing in most schools and even businesses are a very far cry from the high-tech filter bubble we surround ourselves in.

Maybe it's an age thing, but is it just me or is this phenomenon really new? When I was a kid, geeks were inclusive. Weird and horny and therefore prone to awkward creepiness, but not hostile.

Was it always like this and I just need to "check my privilege" as a dude or has the 4chanification of geek culture invaded real life?

And as for the VB, VB.Net is actually an okay language if you expose them to modern features. I mean, the boolean algebra syntax is weird, as are the array sizing, and the "Dim" keyword is just dumb... but other than those legacy issues the rest of the language is just "C# with words and a smaller community". Not great, but not that bad - there's modern closures/lambdas and full OOP and generics and all that great stuff.

I think the key point is having a zero harassment policy. It should not matter if the victim/subject of the harassment appears to be tolerating it (or even enjoying the attention). Chances are he/she is just being a good sport and is socially intimidated.

The worst thing about harassment culture (even when it's largely good-natured) is that it creates and reinforces a power dynamic and subtle "law of the jungle" status hierarchy where the most inappropriate, brazen harasser becomes the dominant figure.

In my opinion, this is particularly dangerous in the way that it obstructs critical thought and group problem solving. Not necessarily relevant to high school but highly important if a team of coworkers evolve toward such a culture.

I spent a year as a high school computer science teacher back when the AP exam was in C++ and I had one young woman in my classroom. The OP's comments are reasonable as a parent, but like many she doesn't properly comprehend the difficulties encountered by a modern day teacher.

When I was teaching class, I had to contend with numerous learning obstacles and then had to leave after class for my other full-time programming job. The idea that I could preempt kids from saying a comment is something only a parent could believe. In the minds of high school students, policies were made to be tested.

The OP further wants to make young women into white elephants by reminding them how rare they are on the first day of class. I had a far more interesting and engaging introduction to algorithms on the first day of my class using paper airplane folding instructions as an example of how literally computers interpreted your instructions. The students loved it.

The one salient point of the piece was the fact the teacher did not respond properly after the harassment occurred. We can all agree on that.

According to the author she did nothing about the problem at the time ie did not talk to the teacher, but is now more than happy to create drama by the track.

The author's qualifications in teaching appears to be zero, and her qualifications in programming seem to be that she is a tech journalist and author of a work of fiction. Why should the teacher have any notice of her?

The extent of the problem is that some people said things like "go make me a sammich" etc to her daughter. I would suggest that this is actually not a huge problem. I recall my days in high school, when I was beaten up on a regular basis for the sin of being good at Math and Science. I mean hard punches to the head and body, possessions destroyed, etc. I spite of my complaints to parents and teachers alike, nothing was done until I managed to create some bad publicity for the school. But it seems it only hatters if it happens to a girl (TM).

Bear in mind also that the salary of the teacher is probably around 60% of the salary that a production programmer can earn. So unless the teacher is a very idealistic soul, it is likely the teacher is struggling and knows little about programming. Which makes the teacher's job all the more difficult.

Finally, there is no proof any of this actually happened. Given past feminist false claims, it is quite on the cards that it didn't happen or is exaggerated... particularly given the acknowledgement that she did nothing about the problem when it counted.

Ugh...I saw the title and had positive expectations because usually, it seems, letters to high school teachers are positive, as in: "My teenage child was depressed but your class made her love school again, etc. etc."

A couple of takeaways:

1. The fact that the OP's daughter signed up for programming class because she wanted to impress her parent is truly a parenting win. Not just for programming, but anything, at that age.

2. I consider myself pretty open minded about gender diversity...but as I was reading the OP's post, I completely assumed it was written by a programmer-father, until I got to the part where the OP describes being harassed. Still, the mental stereotype was so strong that when writing this comment, I kept having to not refer to the OP as the father of the daughter. The trolling that the OP describes is troubling. But it's easy to be angry at the trolling, and raise awareness about it. Unfortunately, I think women in tech still have the much more difficult task of fighting pervasive, subconscious stereotyping and assumptions in the industry.

edit: 3. The OP treats the use of Visual Basic as an ancillary problem...and it is, compared to what her daughter had to put up. But yeah, VB, seriously? I respect people who do VB -- and do it well, because they have to maintain legacy software at a big company...but if you're a programming teacher, you should have a passion to make your subject as relevant to your students and their contemporary lives when possible...nevermind that using VB, in this day and age, has some considerable barriers to just "dive into" compared to, say, Javascript. It'd be like a physics teacher who didn't make a single reference to CERN, Elon Musk, or physics as it applies to modern athletic competitions.

Is Visual Basic really any worse than what you'd be exposed to at a Drupal conference? I think you'd be hard-pressed to explain why you chose anything beyond a 4th generation scripting language if you were starting a new class with an unlimited budget.

Schools are often behind with this sort of technology, so depending on the development environment available, isn't one language as good as the next to explain concepts like assignment, boolean operations and program flow? (My high school computer classes were BASIC on a Burroughs B3300 mainframe and my first COMP SCI class at college was Fortran on an IBM s360 mainframe, so maybe I haven't got a clue!)

Didn't everyone grow up facing some kind of regular harassment in high school? I expected things to take a serious turn for the worse in this story and it actually doesn't seem all that bad. A mother is upset that her daughter was slightly harassed. In one class. In her entire high school experience. Obviously it doesn't make it okay just because many people have faced worse, but dragging the teacher through the mud for it seems unreasonable.

" Sadly, you only get one chance to make a first impression, and you, sir, created a horrible one for girls in computer programming. "

No, he didn't. Not by any reasonable definition of "horrible". Nor is it his responsibility to create any particular impression for any particular race, gender, or religion. Your own pet issue is not his concern.

While on the topic of things horrible, that seven point list is horribly patronizing. Complete with little insulting gems like this: "Good grief, man — how were you even able to make programming boring?".

So glad I'm not a teacher. Must be excruciating at times dealing with the entitled, self obsessed parents, let alone the students.

This seems to be a vast overreaction. The only actual "harassment" is about making a sandwich, which is pretty low on the scale of insults.

In fact, the teacher was probably right to not intervene. For two reasons: 1) Regardless of your gender, being the person who caused adult intervention isn't likely to win you respect in high school. If he had intervened, she would likely have been further ostracized. 2) Growing up is about learning to interact with people. A big part of this is categorizing what matters and what does. If I made a fuss every time someone made a slightly off-color joke about my religion (I'm Jewish) I'd have both no friends and no job.

I experienced this kind of bullying not in school, but at work. I used to be very cheerful and helpful until in a particular work situation, I finally realized guys were randomly pinging me or stopping by to disturb me with how to write a quick unix command to do X or how to make some regex, just to see how cute I look when I'm stressed and how fast I can give them an answer. And I'm pretty good, and they joke with each other about it and keep doing it like you play with a dog. Its also the power thing, some people like demanding an answer from across the room. I totally relate to "quickly finish assignments and bury her nose in her book". Now I work in a less difficult environment, but this is basically how I deal with work now -- efficiently, then get out of there, offer nothing personal. I went to college that had a pretty good gender balance and was self-taught before that so I never experienced it before work. So in conclusion, this may be good preparation for your daughter good preparation for technical work in certain environments. There are many good workplaces but you can't be guaranteed that all your life, so dealing with this kind of thing is important to learn. You should tell her that this is a career that pays well. You may have to be smarter and a more hardworking than your peers to make up for the lack of networking, but actually the extra self-reliance that you need to exercise will make you a better and more confident programmer. Also as a woman, you need to be careful of accepting mentorship, especially male mentorship. Sometimes there's no reason for it other than the mentor wants to spend some time with a young woman.

Background: Currently teaching Intro to Programming using VB (not even 2012... cause our lead instructor's textbook is for 2010). I created a stir when I suggested we move to C, which we are next semester.

Many of people have already commented on this, but from my understanding, this parent did NOTHING and it going a passive-aggressive route to complain. Going into the article, I was excited to read it initially because I was going to use it in a discussion piece in the class. When I got to the end... not so much.

Does IT attract socially inept male students who resort to real-life trolling? Yes. Quite honestly, it is my opinion THIS is the reason why we have so few women in the industry. Tons of guys get interested via video games, well what happens when a female gamer 'slips up' and reveals she's not a male? Creepy PMs and sexism.

People want to dance around the issue and say its from few role models and the like; no, spend 5 minutes acting like a female online (however you'd do it), you'll see it immediately. My Steam tag is an old MacHall webcomic joke ('Susan'). If I don't have my mic on and just do basic banter in chat, yes I get the occasional guy getting too friendly.

Getting back to the article, not to defend the instructor, but they saw the female was (at one point) positively responding to the jokes. Should something have been done? Depends on the class dynamic, in my opinion. I can't accurately tell how the class ran based on this blog (as it is a biased one side to the story).

Without getting into anymore of a rant, VB isn't bad, per say... it teaches variables, loops, and conditionals, the basics of any intro class. I'd only have a problem with this if it was a high-level college course.

I got a feeling that the OP was ranting due to her own hurt feelings rather than her daughter's. I failed to see anything out of the extraordinary that made the teacher deserve such harsh criticism. Yes she was harassed by some boys, I agree that sucks and the teacher should do something about it.

I have a baby daughter my self and can imagine the feelings if I heard she got harassed by her schoolmates, but then I would write a letter that focuses on THAT problem and not criticizing irrelevant points like the teacher's choice of programming language and overall teaching methods.

Also, if the girl truly has an interest in programming than years of encouragement is not even necessary, she will naturally be attracted by it and there is no parent who can stop her from it.

My favorite comment...a tad subtle:

> During the first semester of my daughter's junior/senior year, she took her first programming class. She knew I'd be thrilled, but she did it anyway.

Edit: before anyone harangues me, I don't mean to take away from the shitty circumstances surrounding the core message in the post, just got a chuckle out of the subtle dad/daughter humor inserted.

I am sorry to say that I assumed the author was her father for most of the letter. Her arguments made much more sense to me after rereading it with that information, but I guess it's a statement in itself that with the discussion of her technical background and her strong assertive tone, I assumed her a man. Reality: checked.

I am wondering why author is not offering to volunteer to teach or help the teacher recruit students and do other things she is recommending. I guess it is easier to criticize than do something to make a difference.

When I was in college and a class that I wanted to take kept getting cancelled due to low enrollment, I went out recruited students for the class.

Did daughter report the bullying? Did the author report the bullying? Teachers and school admins are not mind readers and not tagging along with all students all the time.

The whole article displays nothing but the arrogance and superior ego of the author. If you have a problem, get off your butt and do something instead of whining.

These situations are always regrettable and awful. High school strikes me as the place to expect immaturity and shittiness the most, and because of that, I would expect teachers to be all the more committed to fighting that shitty, dumb sexism.

By not stopping the shitty, dumb sexism dead in its tracks, the teacher also did a huge disservice to the boys in the class. They've now had a chance to learn that treating women in CS this way is okay. I hope that in the <5 years it takes them to get to the professional world, they have realized how damaging they were. More importantly, I hope the author's daughter finds the personal strength to pursue CS.

As the father of daughters, one of which has an engineer's mind like her Daddy, this kills me inside. I really want my daughter to be able to express her meticulous deconstructing brilliant mind through software. I pray that her first experience with computer programming outside the home isn't like this.

This is a bit ridiculous. The problem here is not "male-dominated" class room but more likely the ordinary bully problem.

I had a friend who was bullied due to his clothing. He reported the bullies and they got suspended. Later they comeback to the school in an attempt for revenge. Fortunately a teacher witnessed the assault and they were later charged for their crimes.

Also, you can't expect high school teachers to know any other languages than BASIC. It's high school, you don't become a programmer there anyway. Either you are self-taught or you seek higher education. I got many friends who have taken programming classes in high school and in all cases the teacher wasn’t even a programmer but solely followed a book written for high schools.

>> Instead, they pull away, get depressed, or drop out completely, just like they do in IT careers.

Maybe it is just me, but this part came off as particularly sexist. Is the author claiming that women respond worse to negative social pressure then men?

EDIT

Seems like people generally are agreeing with my interpretation. I am rewriting my comment.

First, it seems to me that she simply told her daughters what she could do. When her daughter said no the mother just left it to her daughter to deal with. After the semester is over, she's publicly denouncing the teacher.

So this is a little bit wrong because she could correct the issue by letting the teacher know the problem when it first occurred.

Let's not really speculating whether the teacher is old, simply doesn't care, sexist or what not. The daughter still got A. According to the mother, she assumed this was due to her daughter's long-term involvement with technology. I am sure she is a bright girl too. '

So can we just say there are two possibilities:

(1) the girl had hidden her sad face when she was in her classroom and since she did her homework and continued to excel on her quizzes and exams, the teacher didn't notice much

(2) the girl did show her sad face but the teacher failed to acknowledge that sign

If #1 were to be true, then we should say the mother has a bigger responsibility here than the teacher. First of all, she did not take action. Kids are weak but they wanted to play strong so they often hide their true feelings. I think any parent should step up to help solving bully issue right away. Not in a public way to name a few kids, but work with the teacher in a very constructive way (such as bringing in more women to talk about tech industry. That's better than bringing a man in.... if you want to show women can do the job too).

We don't know much about how the kid actually behaved in the classroom so we really shouldn't blame the teacher too much at the moment. What we need to realize is poor communication among the kid, the mother and the teacher. It's tough because half of the parents don't use email or they don't have time to talk to the kids or speak with the teacher reguarly. PTA is usually dead with a couple parents from time to time.

So the mother should learn her mistake, help reconstruct her daughter's confident and stop making her rants public now. It's not helping. It is sort of one-side if I had to be really harsh (you can downvote me if you want), but that's how I feel as I read through the post again and again.

Also, please, please, be careful when your daughter adds people she is still not very familiar with to her FB.

I'm confused by the general scenario here - the daughter graduated high school last year, probably at age 16 - and is now repeating high school in India? The letter is to an Indian teacher in India? Is she going to a public school for Indian students there? It's the students in India asking her to make sandwiches? Is this some sort of student exchange program?

The author's main point is well-stated and deplorable.

As for the ancillary issue of the class material itself being crap: yeah, duh. And it's not just computer programming. You only notice how bad that class is because you have relevant expertise.

It's a safe bet that the other courses are similarly terrible. Send a biologist or physicist or mathematician or historian to observe a randomly selected high school class and they will find that their subjects too are being taught by people without the slightest appreciation or aptitude.

You can't be different than other kids and visibly better than them without becoming a target of harassment. I've been better than other kids in anything computer, math, physics or chemistry related and I remember I had to tread very carefully even while I was helping them. Same way as when you give a good ideas to your boss, your concern should be not only about him accepting your idea but also about him not hating you for it afterwards.

And I don't even have any discerning features that could be used as a trigger. Being only fat, short, tall, ginger, 4-eyed, girl can get you seriously in trouble if you don't pay attention to social dynamics.

The thing is such targeting should be noticed and properly countered by the teacher and almost no teacher knows how to do that. I have no idea what's the proper response to usual lord of the flies school environment.

I'm feeling sorry for the daughter.

The poster is hard to take seriously, one mention of the harassment ("sandwiches"), at least three times he mentions "Visual Basic? Seriously??". He seems more concerned about language wars actually.

So many people confusing programming and programming languages - the act and the medium.

On top the "(violence and rape references)" that had nothing to do with the incident of the headline "To my daughter's high school programming teacher".

This is a disservice to all people who work on more gender equality in tech.

[Edit: As pointed out, it's a she. Thanks for pointing this out. Sorry for over reading this, I usually don't care about the gender of a person. Yes I've read the article very fast as it is 90% not about the headline]

> I'm no teacher, so forgive me if you think I'm out of place when it comes to telling you how to do your job.

And yet, here we are.

> But I am a mother, and I've spent years encouraging girls and women in IT, so perhaps my perspective will help you.

Being a parent does not qualify you to discuss anything other than being a parent. It's no different than saying "As a mother, I feel that we need to bomb Syria." It's just patently ridiculous.

> Here are seven suggestions for teaching high school computer programming:

I'm not a teacher either, but at least I know enough not to pretend that I can rattle off ways to "fix" the teaching of high school computer programming.

It's too bad the teacher was too weak to protect your daughter's honor, and ensure decency in the classroom. High school can be a cruel place. I hope she realizes those hurtful comments didn't represent her at all. It was just scared boys searching for some semblance of masculinity they may never find.

I also had a teacher in HS that taught Visual Basic in a computer programming class. Not VB.Net, but VB6, and this was 4 years ago.

And they removed AP Computer Science that same year, when I was about to take it, that's why I had to settle with the class that taught VB. The state of HS education in this country makes me sad.

my theory is that there are not a lot of women in tech jobs because the men in tech jobs generally don't know how to interact with women. any woman that shows an interest in tech is not disuaded by the material, but rather by the inability of her male coworkers to treat her normally.

I would not want to work or study in an environment surrounded by social akwardness and harassment either.

the problem lies with the men.

My experience in the professional world is that its full of assertive, aggressive individuals men and women included. There are only so many slots at the top and the ones not occupied by the CEO's nephew belong to thick skinned individuals who have endured a careers worth of mental/emotional abuse. How many times have your heard someone utter the words "My boss/colleague/lead is an idiot." Is it a disservice to create these mushy teeball environments where everyone gets to be an astronaut?

I think this has bugger all to do with women in IT and everything to do with abhorrent high schoolers and a lack of discipline. This kind of harassment should be strictly punished and for some reason the article only discusses the culture and not why it wasn't dealt with.

At university my computer science classes are about 1/4 females and I've never seen anything close to disrespect over gender. This is just a bunch of high school guys picking on the only girl.

Wow. Feeling pretty good about my HS Pascal class (yeah, I'm old, so what) now. I was only ignored and dismissed, not harassed and told to make sandwiches (!).

The OP's daughter sounds awesome. The OP's daughter's teacher sounds like a real idiot.

Was this letter really written with the intention of giving the high school teacher a message? Or was this just a way to showcase her daughter's (as well as her own) accomplishments?

What was the purpose of writing this as an "open letter".

Passive aggressive preaching. If she REALLY wants to change things, offer to assist the computer department with digging up funding for a C based curriculum. It costs a lot of money for public schools to shift curriculum's.

If a kid being bullied/harassed doesn't speak up and it doesn't happen right in front of the teacher, how is the teacher supposed to know what's happening? Kids lose interest and get depressed all the time, it could be bullying, they could be having problems at home. Teachers are not therapists. They are not trained to recognize warning signs of anything. That's why schools have guidance counselors and principals for kids to talk to. Yes, there could be some preemptive measures taken at the beginning of the class but that often gives the little bastards doing the bullying more ideas. If the OP had been more involved (not just interested in bragging about, but really involved) in her child's life and recognized the warnings signs (that she easily picked up on months later) then she could have done her job as a parent an intervened. It's your job as a parent to watch out for your children. You should know them better than anyone. If you didn't see the signs, how could a teacher who barely knows your child pick up on them?

I would of posted this in her comment section, but the requirements for signing up are beyond the pale of acceptable.

  "Thanks to my career, my daughter's Facebook friends list
   includes Linux conference organizers, an ARM developer 
   and Linux kernel contributor, open source advocates, and 
   other tech journalists."

I, am so jealous right now.

  "but I was unprepared for the harassment to start in 
   high school, in her programming class."

but her mother seems to have an interesting idea of what High School actually is.

  "Did you not see her enthusiasm turn into a dark cloud
   during the semester? Did you not notice when she quit 
   laughing with and helping her classmates, and instead 
   quickly finished her assignments and buried her nose in 
   a book? What exactly were you doing when you were 
   supposed to be supervising the class and teaching our 
   future programmers? "

That's hard to notice for a specific student when that's happening to 30% of the class, don't you think? That your god child should be spared, because she's female? I wasn't spared, why should yours be? She didn't get subjected to anything that I haven't gone through. At least from your description.

  "I'm no teacher, so forgive me if you think I'm out of 
   place when it comes to telling you how to do your job. 
   But I am a mother, and I've spent years encouraging 
   girls and women in IT"

and he will have to forgive you, up to him though.

  "Recruit students to take your class. Why was my 
   daughter the only girl in your class? According to her, 
   she only took the class because I encouraged it."

Because women are free to do what they want, and they're choosing not to. This discrepancy manifests everywhere. More deeply in countries with a focus on personal liberty. There are few male orderlies in hospitals.

  "My daughter said she [didn't know] about the programming 
   class ... Have you considered hanging up signs ... asked 
   the school counselors to reach out ... spoken to other 
   classes, clubs, or fellow teachers ... asked the 
   journalism students to write a feature ... asked current 
   students to spread the word"

It was a full class. Wasn't it?

  "Set the tone. On the first day of class, talk about the 
   low numbers of women and lack of diversity in IT"

You do not understand teenagers. Evidenced by that the teacher should single someone out to lessen harassment.

  "Don't be boring and out-of-date. Visual Basic? 
   Seriously??"

You also might not understand schools. I can tell you four things that have a high probability of being true:

1. The professor doesn't have a choice.

2. The professor doesn't care.

3. This is all the professor knows.

4. There is no one to replace him.

  "Check In ... Follow Up" 

How many students? ~30? In one class? In the ~5 classes he teaches every day?

  "my daughter learned why there are so few women in IT"

They choose not to be, and because they are so few, the ones that remain are singled out. There are few male orderlies in hospitals too, despite the fact that there's an "objective" demand for them (I was furious when I was confronted for the reason. It's to help lift patients, and help deal with patients experiencing an episode.

I've been a programmer/analyst for 17 years, and I have never experienced anything like what's being discussed by these women. I am older than they are (I'm a Gen-Xer), but still.

I've worked in web development shops, and I currently work for a regional grocery store chain, but most of my time was spent working for companies that own an internet backbone doing statistical reporting for the web. I can assure you, those places were heavily male and heavily geeky. No one ever suggests that I should be getting them coffee, much less making them a sandwich.

If anything, the younger, nerdier guys find me a little intimidating.

I wonder if some of the women in question are simply getting their ass handed to them in a code review and they think it's sexism. It's the opposite, actually. That's equal treatment!

I had a pretty bad experience in highschool (and elementary school) because of a small deformity on my face that I was born with. That didn't make me hate programming because I was getting bullied on programming classes. In fact it made me love it more because it doesn't have to be a stupid social activity. It did make me hate school up to the point that I got "expelled" from college for skipping classes. If the author is so concerned with her daughter being pulled away from a profession that she claims to like then work harder at home. Or you know, not assume that her daughter is an impressionable idiot and let her choose whatever she wants.

That's absolutely, absolutely, absolutely true!!!

When I was in the first semester I knew that we had lots of women in there 20 in 200. What I also knew was that some damn idiots, (who I'd punch up, if I knew) would cause them to quit. Honestly just 6-8 girls stayed, the other girls left CompSci to study something "better". Those who stayed stopped having contact with anyone in class. They told me that the people are weird, which is mostly true, but they also got treated badly and excluded from anything which would help to make them look stupid.

A year later or so, I wanted to redo a course from the first semester that I didn't pass back then. To my surprise there were even more girls and admittedly hotter ones, like a gf that I knew from before univerity and some of her gf's. However I tell you, all of them, with only a few exceptions left CompSci after the first semester again!

I still have a good relationship with them, but it annoys me that some idiots managed to make almost all girls leave this time. They had so much potential. If you ask me, that's nothing else, but pure mobbing. Hey don't think that only the students were at fault!! The Profs made such ugly and shocking jokes about women (and gays), that I wondered if they ever had sex with a women in their life...

Things like: If the last man on earth would be gay, it would still be better than a women, but also not be a (hu)man. (Only a handful people boo'ed, that's courage huh?)

I see a lot of posts here simply making excuses for the teacher, proclaiming why it wasn't really his fault or responsibility. So what? The situation presented is unacceptable, and we're kidding ourselves if we think that whether the details of this particular instance are sufficiently condemning or not makes a difference as to the fact this this kind of thing goes on all the time in our high schools. It's not okay. This woman at least made an effort to do something about it.

The start of this article started off very similar to my experiences with programming class, we also used vb6. Going into the course I already had several years of programming various languages including vb6 so I wasn't really learning anything new.

Just like her, I only took the class to make my parents happy and maybe, just maybe get something out of it. I didn't.

Just like her, when I finished my assignments I would go around and help struggling kids with their stuff. I wouldn't ever do their work for them, more like guide them into the right direction, helping them figure it out on their own but with a little nudge from me.

Just like her I was bullied, except I wasn't bullied by other students. I was bullied by our teacher, a female.

The teacher was the only female in our class. I would venture to say she was pretty intelligent. I mean she could write the day's lesson on the board in backwards cursive.

I nearly failed the class because she insisted I was cheating. There was no way I could know what I knew at that age. I had to prove to the principal that I wasn't cheating in order to get an entire semester of zero's reversed.

I'm pretty sure that was about the time I went from wanting to be a professional programmer when I grew up to never taking a paying programming job. Here I am, 30 years old, doing IT support instead of what I really enjoyed doing.

ITT: overprotective mother tries to shield daughter from the cruelty of high school. Link is posted on a site where a large percentage of the audience were nerds in high school when computers and an interest in science was considered uncool and grounds for getting dragged through shit.

I'm all for gender equality in IT and the like, but again, high school. Put a girl in a classroom full of hormone-ridden teenage boys that probably don't see much of that kind very often, see what happens.

The setting is irrelevant to the situation IMO. It could have been any environment that was heavily teen male with a teen female outclassing them, the animosity is sexist in nature. The tragedy is someone that had a passion seemingly lost it because of bullying. As a society what we can and should do is teach that this behavior is wrong and harmful. This has a lot less to do with the tech industry and a lot more to do with high school and lack of maturity.

From an individualist perspective we can only encourage her not to give up on her interests because of the cruelty of others, and that she may receive this treatment often because she is above average. This is an unfortunately common scenario anywhere for anyone.

If this was a white girl in a black history class or a guy in a women's studies class the tone to this thread may be a little more compassionate I would imagine. It just so happens that the anecdote of female encountering sexism in tech is so often repeated and posted here, it's made a number of us callous to it.

As for the author: If she has a problem with 'get back in the kitchen' I suppose I can legitimately raise a concern with her characterization of all the boys in that class as brogrammers... which is just as sexist. Takes one to know one I suppose.

I think VB is a good choice for high school programming. As well as being closer to spoken English than most languages, it has excellent GUI development tools and also the by useful IDE features like Intellisense and auto formatting. But the best thing about it IMO is that it's the only programming language that most people might find useful later in their careers - via Excel's VBA. That shouldn't be underestimated.

From a purely utilitarian, game theoretic pov, harassing and chasing girls out of your personal and professional social circles and networks is a very poor reproductive strategy. I would have thought programmers would be more logical, even if initially unthinking about it. If you love sausage fests, by all means, continue. Otherwise, think twice before disparaging girls and women, even jokingly (it's never a joke).

Parents telling teachers how and what to teach from only their childs perspective and thinking that's 100% ok.

This is what's wrong with education today.

It's fantastic that this article has stayed on the front page so long. Regardless of your thoughts on the author's claims, I don't think anyone can deny that this was a thoughtful, reasoned take on sexism in tech. We need more of these if anyone wants to take the discussion back from the Gawker's/Valleywag's of the world. There is an intelligent discussion to be had here. Personally, I lean towards advising women to take the Booker T. Washington approach of focusing on becoming as competent as you possibly can, but also working to change the culture as much as possible. I know it sounds like a contradiction, but I just think that teaching girls and women to learn to love programming over encouraging them to fight a culture war will bring more women into tech than the opposite, which will bring more into activism (not a bad thing, but I am approaching this with a goal bringing women into tech). I found this author's approach to be one of the best attempts at what I described I've ever seen.

"Deal with it," is about the worst advice I've ever heard.

I've never had to deal with sexism. When I was bullied in high school my car was vandalized, I had to take time off from exams because my face was a wreck and I was being monitored for brain injuries. I skipped class because I didn't want to hear, "fag," for the thousandth time. I didn't want to deal with the food being thrown at me in the cafeteria or the snickers as a I walked past the gossiping kids in class. I've never had to deal with being discriminated against because of my gender but I cannot imagine that it hurts any less.

I was lucky. A friend of mine was beaten into a coma. The bullies showed up to his benefit concert to throw pennies and harass the attendees. He has been living the rest of his life with the effects of severe neurological trauma. Yeah, kids are mean.

It has been more than a decade since I escaped that hell-hole. I've since read articles about other unlucky kids who've died being stabbed to death by a mob. I've read about girls who have committed suicide because they couldn't deal with the slut shaming. Sure these cases are beyond the norm but I wonder if they are not indicators that things are just getting worse for kids these days.

It doesn't have to be this way. We can single people out who make sexist jokes and correct them, loudly and publicly, and try to help them understand that they're not funny, clever, or cool. I agree with the author that teachers can be a part of the solution. But I don't think that is the final word (and it never is when trying to change prevailing attitudes and norms): parents need to tell their kids to stick up for people who are being bullied, that it's not funny, and that it's dangerous to not say anything when they hear someone spout off something hateful.

"how were you even able to make programming boring?"

Puts into words the question I've been trying to ask some of my teachers for so long, but haven't been able to.

I know programming isn't intrinsically interesting to everyone, but I think there is still magic to be found in seeing your instructions (in VB, Pascal, C, Logo, whatever) translated to something on the screen.

Only girls have a bad time at schools. For boys it is just fun and games all the time. They also never target jokes at each other. Imagine if there hadn't been a girl in that class. Who would those boys have directed jokes at? It would have been a very dreary affair.

Can you imagine a boy losing interest in a subject because school is so awful? I can't.

> discussed illegal gender discrimination in tech

Can't we just call it "bullying"? Illegal bullying.

I experienced an awful lot of similar things when at school, in 50-50 gender split English classes and others. Sure, the wording was different, not mentioning my gender, but the effect was the same. I remember a particular group of girls picking on me consistently because I was so quiet and shy. Physical as well as verbal harassment. The bullies will choose anything that is different about a person: be the lone female, and they obviously choose gender.

I really see the problem in all "discrimination" type cases, whether gender, race, sexuality, being: unpleasant people. Cure these people of gender discrimination, and they'll just be bullying the quiet kid instead. Or the poor kid with the cheap clothes.

We need to be teaching kids to simply be nice and to accept everyone else for who they are. But like that's gonna work.

> And then the threats of violence started: "The author of this article is a whiny bitch and needs a good beating to be put in her place." Ten minutes later, the rape threats began, and I shut down our comments site-wide. And then the emails started...

Seriously? I am thinking a little exaggeration. I don't think trolls would send e-mails, what is the point if noone reads your trolling.

And what is the fault of the teacher (other than visual basic). "Guys, please don't harass this girl", yeah tell that to a bunch of boys and see how that works. I don't think students would just openly harass her. He might be a bad teacher but harassments is not his fault.

If there is one to blame, I would blame the parents. Didn't he researched the school before applying her daughter? Doesn't her daughter already above high school programming?

When I read articles like these I often get the impression that we don't have the full story.

How do we go from "After she finished, she'd help classmates who were behind or struggling in class" to "my daughter emailed to tell me that the boys in her class were harassing her"? Those two statements are one sentence apart.

I was in a technical cursus in high school, there was exactly one (1) girl in the class. And not for a single course, for all the classes. I don't remember her being harassed, but I can't speak for her obviously.

I'm not saying that "she asked for it" or anything equally terrible, I'm just curious to know how things degraded seemingly very quickly? It seems important to understand what's the core issue here.

I'm obviously not very familiar with US education, maybe the culture is just different over here.

It is completely unclear from this rant what the daughter knew before entering the class. I don't care if she had used Linux, that doesn't mean she knew jack squat about programming.

I taught an intro to computer programming course at a local community college for a semester. The curriculum was set, so I couldn't really venture off to my own thing. What I learned is that what we have to teach simply is boring. Sorry, but you have to learn about loops, conditionals, variables, and all those other mundane things before you can move on to more interesting things. And let's get real, how interesting are things ever going to be in a class? Not very. It gets exciting when you know enough to create a project on your own. An intro to computer course is not that course - I wish it were.

Shame is really hard to assign and even more difficult to self apply. So while society (let alone our small, sometimes dark programming/tech back lot) is a long way from where we should be, each of us does have a responsibility to more than our own self-entertainment. Trolls are not unique to HN and blogs, they exist in real life too - they're called bullies. And with regards to this story, there's not really a 'both sides' here. There are females and males. And of the males, there are men and boys. Deep down and up close in your own personal mirror, you know which one you are. Instead, why not be awesome and redirect negative, petty energy and do something productive. Change the World, it's clearly needed

When I first read that, my blood boiled. Regardless of the tech nature of the class, it's that kind of blatant negligence that really underscores the problems of many an education system. The myriad of excuses made for the incompetent teacher are even more maddening.

If you do not hold people to a higher standard, but instead make excuses for them, their conduct will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

An educator was once one of the most revered professions. Whether or not they earned a comfortable living, educators of all walks of life were respected and took pride in their teachings. Today... not so much and by making constant excuses, we make it worse.

I would hope the school board would be interested in why such clear harassment went unpunished/corrected.

Do any men have any experience in classes where they were the only man amongst many women?

>Talk to your students in private to see how class is going for them

This shows that the author doesn't really know anything about modern teaching. Talking to students in private is probably a breach of the school's child protection framework.

I would pay to know if that teacher read it and what his answer would have been.

Common, seriously? Blaming teacher (and even tell him how he should do HIS work) just because other kid said something to your daughter? That's just hilarious and wrong in so many ways.. Kids are rude and cruel - always have been and will be - it has nothing to do with programming or teachers or schools. If you really want to make a difference, go to that school and teach them yourself (if you are such a talent, I'm sure school board will gladly accept). Then you can even choose the programming language to teach!

P.S. Haven't read such bullshit for a long time..

Ok harassing is out of line and as a teacher he should have intervened. WE all agree on that.

Pointing out that the reason the other students were saying that is because of envy that she is so far ahead of them should have been enough.

But talking about the low numbers of women and lack of diversity in IT is like saying we should treat women special because there's not many in our field.

We should treat the like a fellow human being and colleague but stop making us idolize women, that rubs me the wrong way.

Bottom line the teacher had no passion for programming and shouldn't have been teaching in the first place.

I can speak for this, my daughter has already shunned programming in any capacity. While my wife and I have spent our time encouraging our children to excel at math and sciences, where my two older boys sailed through, my daughter (who used to love math) feels so isolated that half-way through high-school she now is talking about how she sees no value in the knowledge because of the social repercussions of showing math aptitude as a young woman.

This seriously pisses me off.

This is less a "women in tech" issue than it is a standard bullying issue. You think the "go back to the kitchen" comment is limited to just programming class?

So this mom never brings this up with the teacher, presumes if she does it won't help, and then writes a letter at the end of the year detailing all the problems? Mother of the year, right here.

Also, "VB? Seriously??" got funnier every time I read it too. Jokes never get old.

I really wish the mother would have contacted the teacher, even if her daughter had decided "to plow through."

I'd like to give the teacher the benefit of the doubt and assume that he didn't knowingly let a student endure a semester of harassment. He probably didn't see or recognize the issue.

Open communication from the mother could have helped the teacher recognize the problem and deal with it.

My girl friend and some of her friends had some bad experiences with their CS teacher too. Leading up to the point that one of her friends didn't dare to work with computers throughout her studies. She would even go so far to dictate texts and had her boyfriend type them for her when needed.

It's hard to understate the impact a bad teacher can have on a persons life.

> I suggested that she talk to you. I offered to talk to you. I offered to come talk to the class. I offered to send one of my male friends, perhaps a well-known local programmer, to go talk to the class. Finally, my daughter decided to plow through, finish the class, and avoid all her classmates.

Why oh why did they not bring it up with the school?

I find this very weird. I wasn't even aware of such a situation until I started reading about it online. Back here in India, Computer Engineering is one of the branches of engineering with a high amount of female students. Thanks to that, I wasn't even aware until some point that there was a scarcity of women in tech.

What's really sad: most of the comments here either say “Teachers don't need to be good, that's OK, we should never change it or complain about it or even worry about it” or “We need more vivid descriptions of bullying until we can agree there's some problem”.

I went to school in a third-world country. We had girls in our CS classes - because CS was mandatory in high school. No one made fun of the girls. Most girls weren't interested in CS, but the few that were, kicked so much butt at coding, no one would dare make fun of them.

Hey author or daughter, if you're reading this, try a hackerspace! Far more convivial environments for intelligent experimentation and learning than a classroom. Mother: Seriously? It was your fault to clinging to out of date notions of formalistic teaching.

I think that programming in highschool should be left to R.O.P (Regional Occupational Program) courses. The people who teach them are usually much more modern than the teachers who teach english / math in the H.S. courses.

This shit has got to stop. Seriously.

As MEN in our industry we need to take a stand against this sort of behaviour which is truly endemic and all pervasive in our industry.

This is not a women in tech issue, it's a problem with MEN.

After reading this, I will make sure and constantly remind myself that I will respect everyone.

Doing any more will make one more of an activist than before,

doing any less will make one less of a decent human being.

This article is very sexist. What happens is that there is someone 'bullying' and you assume that it is just because they have a penis and your daughter doesn't.

I definitely see why he chose Visual Basic - you get to drag and drop windows and little buttons around and can take periodic breaks in btw churning out code to play with UI.

Sad.

Her suggestions to her daughter's teacher seem reasonable and useful for other teachers.

I hope sending her daughter to India (of all places!) for her final year of high school wasn't a mistake.

this is depressing ... but i can't help but wonder if this analysis isn't sexist itself.

if the sexes were reversed i think it would be a case of saying "well son, women are just like that - you'll have to learn to live with it" and be on your way.

is that sexist?

i'm pretty sure there are natural and cultural tendendcies for men and women to behave certain ways. the behaviour described is not unique to programming, when there is one girl in a group or even school... its just people.

You are absolutely right!

Turbo Pascal or Cobol AND Coding on Paper are the right places to start and learn programming.

If students know the basics, they were able to learn other languages.

Thats a shame. Some of the best developers i've worked with and worked for are women

not sure why your criticizing Visual Basic, it is a good language for Intro HS courses

I've got a couple of problems with the tone and where the finger is pointed in this article, though I sympathize with her plight.

1) I feel like attacking the teacher is unfair. There is a much more significant root cause that should be addressed, and the teacher's inability to detect her bullying is merely a symptom of that root cause.

Bullying is terrible - I experienced that myself for alternative reasons in Middle/High School - and indeed, inexcusable. Little kids can be assholes, and I do hope that teachers get better at recognizing when kids are getting picked on... but it's a lot to ask when they're strained with multiple classrooms of students that they have to teach. With classroom sizes getting larger, it becomes a laughable proposal to tell them to "pay attention" or "check in" with individual students. These teachers are dealing with potentially hundreds of students every day.

If you want to attack the real problem, attack the fact that teaching is considered and compensated as a "second class career," and thus causes the best and brightest to avoid it. Attack the low pay that teachers receive, the low respect in their community, and in particular the low budgets for public schools brought about by the continual demand for lower taxes. If schools got the budgets to hire good teachers and (most importantly) give them significantly smaller classroom sizes, they could do the kind of one-on-one mentoring proposed: and that would diminish the core problem significantly.

Let's kill the root of the problem rather than blaming the already stressed out teacher at the tail end of said problem. This is a problem we can FIX as a society, if we can recognize that it's worth putting money into our community to solve the problem. This is a solvable problem, made difficult only by the fact that we refuse to give public school systems the funding that they need to sufficiently address it.

2) Far less important in the grand scheme of things, but I feel like people (including this author) belittle Visual Basic unfairly.

It's a great teaching language, and the simplicity of its syntax is helpful for situations like high school where the majority of students don't even want to be there, much less programming. The author's daughter is enthusiastic, and that's great - I'd be willing to bet that the vast majority of that class had absolutely no interest in being there. It's unfortunate, but true - and teaching a straightforward language can at least make the barrier to entry and the remote chance of getting through to some of these students just a bit less remote.

Yeah, it's not going to be something that she'll likely run into in the real world - well, maybe, depending on the industry - but teaching programming in high school is about attempting to break through the oversized wall that is general student apathy. You want to teach an apathetic kid Objective-C so that they can make iPhone apps? Nope. You need something simple - something that will hopefully be simple enough that they won't feel like they're struggling against it. Is it sad that kids are so apathetic? Sure, but wishing they weren't isn't going to make it better. So you give them a softball intro, and hope they feel empowered enough with it to start actually caring about it. Or for that matter, about something, anything.

This teacher also may have been teaching it because it's all they know. High Schools seldom (ever in the public system in America?) have the budget to hire a Computer Science teacher. This person was probably recruited as the only teacher in a related department who happened to know some kind of programming offhand.

Lastly in the defense of Visual Basic, it provides a vast wealth of easy-to-use, easy-to-install, well-documented libraries that perform what (to lay people) seem to be magic. Not only is it easy to learn, but these libraries can be leveraged to very quickly make programs that feel like they're doing something interesting with minimal resistance or struggling against the tools. Learning how to struggle against tools without giving up IS an important skill - but when you're just trying to start by teaching kids to care AT ALL, it's more important that they feel like they're winning. They can learn how to properly struggle once they've learned that it's worth the effort. When they can throw the use of some advanced libraries together and come up with something fun in a single classroom session, they're more likely to also view programming as fun - and thus hopefully just a LITTLE more likely to actually care about it.

In short, Visual Basic is a gateway drug - and a pretty effective one at that.

Anyways, that's my two cents.

Wonder what the response from the teacher was...

>learns linux >wants a macbook pro

trigger alert: Linux user at 11 asks for MacBook Pro at 16

High school kids can be mean. Film at eleven.

Parts of this article I can relate to. When I was growing up I had a mother that was constantly involved in what I was supposed to be taught at school: What are they teaching you? Why are they behind? Why are you behind? Why is the teacher so incompetent? This led to me changing schools quite often and each time that happened I lost friends.

It didn't matter that the classes were beginning easy for the sake of revision, the classes were never good enough for her and I had to switch school. Note: not good enough for her, not me. I lost friends and only managed to learn to handle people in my 20's. Her destruction of my childhood ensures that I will never forgive her.

The article does bring up several other things that I dislike: the child being herded into an elite echelon of society by a bossy mother, being surrounded by successful people, the high expectations of the mother upon the young child, the child's [forced] willingness to please the bossy parent, probably also a feeling of helplessness of not being able to say "no, I'm not interested in that extra course".

But wait, there's more...

I see the whole article as a bossy, sexist, entitled mother wanting to raise an entitled child: "my DAUGHTER deserves a better teacher", "my ANGELIC DAUGHTER should not have to face adversity", "my LIGHT OF MY LIFE DAUGHTER is so perfect, just like I want her to be, and is better than the rest of the class combined".

The kid here is innocent. The mother needs to be put in her place. I will try and do so with a bullet list.

* Fuck you and your snobby, antisocial attitude.

* Fuck you and your criticism of teachers. If you think you can do a better job you're welcome to try.

* Fuck you and your feminist entitlement. Your daughter is going to face far, far harder shit in her life than a couple of people making sandwich jokes. In Sweden we call your kind "curling parents". You're fucking up your kid for the sake of your own insecurity.

* Fuck you and your "journalism". I see you ain't much of a programmer yourself, but you'll criticize others? Oh wait, that's what "tech journalism" is: complaining about other people's work and not having a public git repo yourself.

* Fuck you and your egotistical "tech" blog. If you wanted some hits you could have just asked.

You know what happens to people who are good in tech? They get hired because they're good at what they do. You don't have to be a white, american male to show well-written code to people. You know what happens to people who are mediocre in tech but are noisy as fuck because they want to be pampered and be treated all special? They write blog posts and hope thier kids are hired because mom's public shaming of everyone the kid comes into contact with intimidates people into not being able to say "no" when interviewing.

When was the last time you asked your kid if she wanted to just go outside and fucking play with the other kids? Just ride a non-feminist bike with non-feminist neighborhood kids or sit on the non-feminist curb and talk non-feminist shit like normal people? You're too busy signing your kid up for extra-curricular activities and having her influences by successful WOMEN (not people mind you, because people includes men and I suspect that's a gender you're not quite hip with) that you aren't noticing that her childhood is passing by without her having the time to enjoy it.

This whole situation is such a huge WTF to me. I've been in the programming industry for more than a decade, and I have never seen this happen. It's the lack of women that always sucked, and most of my dev coworkers agreed.

Any time we had a girl interview for a programmer position, it was like a breath of fresh air.

I'm not saying it didn't happen or doesn't happen in general, I believe this story. I just find it strange. We live in 2013, it's unbelievable this shit still happens.