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Comment by revelation | Hacker News Reader

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.

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My Programming I class was taught by a math teacher (who was an excellent algebra instructor). Unfortunately he was only a chapter ahead of the class in computer programming. But that wasn't the worst part. For guidance, he turned to his brother-in-law, who was a manager of developers at Motorola. He stated as much the first day of class, boasting "You're going to have the rare treat of learning how programming is done in the real world!"

All the joy of programming was quickly sucked out as we had to meticulously document our code. Sub routines needed 2-3 paragraph plain-English explanations of what they were doing. Each variable's purpose needed to be stated. And before you could write a single line of code, you first had to write it out in a form of "pseudo code" which had its own syntax rules that we had to follow. Lots of emphasis was placed on the process of what we should be doing instead of the how and why. Students struggled.

I understand what he was trying to do: having us write everything out gave him a window into how our minds were breaking down the problem. But in the process, he turned what should have been a fun, exploratory class into a grind.

The notion that programming could be a fun activity, and not just mindless, process-driven office work was completely foreign to him, and I suspect the same is true for many teachers who are stuck teaching Programming classes in both public and private schools.

Edit: And on the issue of gender, my class had 25 students, 11 of whom were girls. I remember being amazed at how a programming class could have a 50/50 ratio. I didn't notice anyone being bullied or teased. I imagine once women reach "critical mass" women won't be singled-out to the same degree. A few bad apples or even a sexist teacher can't "single out" 44% of their class. Why were there so girls enrolled? I don't know, but the class did have a reputation for being an easy A, so perhaps it was viewed as less intimidating.

How does he get through the course certification? Shouldn't he has to demonstrate he has the qualification to teach CS class? Is this a high school from a small town? I'd imagine in NYC this could mean firing the school's principal if New York Daily finds out.

Why? On paper I can describe those lecture in glowing terms, if necessary. Just rewriting spamizbad's comment with the right buzzwords, and leaving out the student dissatisfaction.

Well same is true for any class right? haha. the question is, why would we want someone no experience with programming to teach programming class to our kids?

Because it's that, or nothing? It's not like high schools are rolling in money. Even if they could afford to hire an extra teacher just to teach programming, what programmer would want to teach for $20k when he can make (at least according to HN) $120k in the industry?

$20k? There is no full-time public school teacher making that. In Jersey City, teachers averaged in 2012 $67,412 with a contractually-limited 183 work days per year, that includes inservice/training days and excludes up to 8 personal days and additional sick days; with each day lasting a maximum of about 7 hours, including about a 40 minute lunch period. If a programmer gets 3 paid weeks of vacation per year, they work approximately 219 days per year. At an average salary of say $100,000 that's about $456 per work day. And often that includes no pension/retirement benefits. A teacher makes about $368 per day, however a teacher in New Jersey with 20 years service gets about 36% of the average of their three highest salary years as retirement income -- for life.

I'm not crying over teacher pay. That they don't get paid enough is propaganda from the teachers unions. Yes I realize that teachers work after hours grading papers, etc. However programmers often work late into the night as well without extra money too. Programmers often spend their own money (along with teachers) on extra software, tools and other things to help them do their job better without necessarily getting a reimbursement.

I'd rather be crying over administrators that continually make unenlughtened decisions about curriculum, methodology and creativity.

My starting pay as a high school teacher was $30k. I lived in a one room apartment, didn't have cable, had a cheap used car and a $30 a month "dumb" cell phone. I didn't go to the bars or buy new fancy gadgets. And I still had 6 months before I had to start repaying my student loan.

Including grading papers and planning lessons I was putting in 10 hours a day.

Add I had a second job at the mall movie theater to make up the difference between by income and my bills, so I worked 8+ hours on Saturday and Sunday as well.

You know what I did on my school vacations and personal days? I worked extra hours at the movie theater (the extra money almost always went to fixing my broken used car)

I make more money now than I would have made teaching with 20 years experience and a PhD (which I would have had to pay for myself) and my job now is far less difficult that the easiest day of teaching. And I can pay my bills without working on the weekends.

> with each day lasting a maximum of about 7 hours, including about a 40 minute lunch period.

HAHAHA

My girlfriend is a second year high school teacher. You are technically right that she is required to be on campus for the required 7 or 8 hours. But, there is nowhere near enough time to grade, plan, prepare, work individually with kids (makeup work mostly), etc, in that time. She puts in 12+ hour days. Everyday. Including weekends.

And over the summer, you are right that it is mostly free, except for several weeks you give up to do professional development, AP course training, and any schoolwork to move up the salary schedule a bit.

Her salary schedules are here [1]. With a masters degree, she would top out at $58k/year after 20 years on the job (assuming the masters track). Starting salaries are in the $35k range.

Meanwhile, I am a computer programmer, working a legit 8 hour a day job, making much more than she is now.

What annoys me more than just teacher pay though is the other spending in the school. She was pulled in to teach english this year. When the english department met to work out the plan, they had to blow their whole budget for the year on a single class-set of a paperback. (30ish copies). That's it. No more books, no miscellaneous DVDs / Documentaries purchased. That's it. Well, except for when she just goes and pays for it. Which she did last year to the tune of $350ish.

[1] http://thompsonschools.org/cms/lib07/CO01900772/Centricity/D...

Does NYC/NYS have certifications for programming/CS? It appears the only NYS certification for technology is a content specific one called "technology education" which I doubt has much of a focus on programming and probably more of a general "how to use computers" focus.

Although I am from NYC I have very little idea on how their certification works. What I do know is all my CS teachers back in HS are "qualified" (however you want to put it). They either have a degree in CS (one of them does), or have taken classes and passed some exams to demonstrate their ability prior to taking the job. I was really surprised to see our math teacher did a CS undergraduate.

I assume you went to either a private HS or Stuy? I know at my high school in PA, the programming teacher had an EE undergrad but was a math teacher who happened to be the most computer literate of the faculty. Our Cisco teacher was an accounting teacher, who I don't think had any sort of technical undergrad but was the most computer literate person they could find.

No. I went to Francis Lewis HS.

This was not part of the AP curriculum, but it was billed (by the school) as a pre-req for AP Computer Science.

It also wasn't really a CS class. It was more like a clumsy introduction to computer programming. The class never intended to cover data structures or algorithms.

My high school programming course, in 1977---IBM 1130 FORTRAN 'IV'---was taught by a coach. Who, without referring to notes, nor was it in the book, one day taught us 2s compliment representation on the blackboard (and boy was it useful to get a peek under the hood!).

I suspect, like in the real world, programming ability still sometimes counts more than credentials. Pity that unlike my teacher he wasn't so good at the teaching part of it.

Heh, Louden's book? Still got it here somewhere. For an hour of nostalgic fun and an excuse to burn a Bass Ale while your wife watches DWTS, take a look at the 1130 emulator at http://ibm1130.org/sim

Wow, you really managed to do that in a thread pertaining to sexism in tech.

I thought the most hilarious thing about the HN comments was the 100% sexism oriented response WRT general HN culture, and nothing about hetronormativity or whatever its called, I currently work with a great tech, who happens to be female, and she also happens to have a wife, and I've worked with other women with the same family life as that in the past, so I was LOL the whole way about the HN "belief system" that apparently in 1950's HN world, only men can have wives.

Another epic HN failure was confusing an obviously single word substitution issue like using the word wife instead of spouse as if it changes anything in the discussion other than the political correctness level, with actual intentional hate speech. You have to prioritize your problems and this is like "cut yourself shaving and also have a broken leg" one should be prioritized above the other.

Something never discussed about sexism in tech, at least on HN, is its an almost purely coastie "brogrammer" phenomena. I am not part of the apparently locally dominant dirtbag coastie culture, so I literally do not understand how it perpetuates itself. To explain myself, locally, behavior that is rewarded tends to be repeated and behavior that is punished tends to be suppressed, and simultaneously a highly effective way for a guy to make sure all females will never be in contact with any of his precious bodily fluids is to go all "make me a sandwich" on any other female. Even a false accusation is fairly effective at enforcing celibacy. So I'm fairly mystified why this problem perpetuates. Like are all men on the coasts 40 year old virgins or gay, so they don't care about lack of "fun time" with women, or perhaps the women on the coasts refuse to stand up for each other and this is the inevitable result, or maybe secretly most women really love that kind of treatment and its only a small vocal minority who complain (although I find this last theory unlikely)

The only real problem seems to be the lack of tech jobs in the midwest. Tech women, if you want to be treated with respect as human beings by professional gentlemen, move to where the gentlemen are if you want things to change. I'm off the market, but speaking for the local single gentlemen, I'm sure they'd greatly enjoy your presence here, unless you really secretly like how the brogrammers are treating you...

Wow, you could be very right. I grew up and retired to SW Missouri (Joplin), which is actually part of the cultural South, although with plenty of Midwestern and Western influences since they're so very close. At least in my time way back when such degradation of women (not at all to be confused with the "mating game" or whatever you want to call it) was just not tolerated, including by the sub-group social leaders I was around (which included me in some groups). We were a little past the era of standing up when a woman enter a room (never taught to me by my parents), but e.g. holding the door open for a women was expected (or anyone with their hands full), and getting castigated for that unthinkable.

And, yeah, the concept of a gentleman was, and I think still is, very much in play. However much feminists complain about it, it sure seems to result in women getting treated a whole lot better. And at least where I came from, there was enough Midwestern and Western pragmatism that female ability in things you might typically think as male was not such a big thing, or threatening. E.g by some distance the best shot on my high school rifle team was a girl, an old friend from kindergarten. The rest of us were boys, and her example (not to mention help) pushed us to strive harder vs. tear her down. Maybe it was in part the genre (yeah, right, harasses the school's best shot???), but I read all this high school harassment stuff of the demean the woman type and wonder if it swept the nation later, or is in part a regional phenomena.

Your comment about threatening was interesting, and I had not considered it. For example, some guys are pretty tough on tall women although most don't care, and from a lifetime of locker room observation, those with the worst attitude toward the tall ladies statistically tend to be correspondingly unusually short in one particular physical attribute.

Given that, I would not be entirely surprised if the root cause of some anti-woman brogrammer behavior could be statistically highly correlated with one anatomical part being unusually small. Aka if the girls are going to laugh at him anyway, may as well pre-emptively strike against them first, not much to lose. Although why this behavior is seen more on the coasts than the midwest and the other civilized areas, is still unclear under this theory. We may simply grow 'em larger here thus less root cause for the anti-social behavior. I do not have enough observational data, and frankly I've gathered it all inadvertently rather than intentionally. A suitably geo-located chatroulette image analysis program might help. Although a theory that seems to "explain it all" is highly appealing, it none the less may or may not be proven out by actual statistical research. I would assume some sociologist with a ruler could probably figure it out for us, along with a questionnaire about brogrammers opinions about their physical self image (in other words they may not actually be shrunken mutants, but inaccurately think they are...). I don't think population migration necessarily disproves this theory; consider if hormone contamination in the water causes shrinkage or perhaps some other environmental toxins; the coasts certainly have plenty of environmental toxins compared to other areas.

I actually considered the hetronormativity thing when I wrote my response (my response was "the hga is female" one).

Initially my response was much longer and included a discussion about female-female partnerships. In the end I cut it right back, because as far as I know "wife" is always a term used for a spouse who identifies as female.

while your wife watches DWTS

You're part of the problem.

I guess it would be politically incorrect to point out the actual ratings demographics of DWTS are about 2/3 women?

So much wrong with this comment.

First of all, you need to go do some remedial math. The percentage of DWTS watchers who are women is no predictor of what women do. This fallacy is called confusion of the inverse, and it's a probabilistic variant of the better-known converse error.

Second, even if 99% of women were to be DWTS fans, it has no bearing on anigbrowl's comment. The reason that "while your wife watches DWTS" is part of the problem (as anigbrowl identified) is that it implies that (watching DWTS) is to women as (checking out 1130 sims) is to men. It implies that in situations where men do interesting tech things, women watch TV (I assume "DWTS" is some kind of TV?). It's basically a put-down against women collectively. Note that if someone were to be putting down humanity collectively, I wouldn't complain.

Third, "politically correct" is a label principally used by reactionary dullards to dismiss arguments or objections that they see as excessively leftist. It's equivalent to calling someone a commie. Mind you, some people are communists, some people are knee-jerk excessive leftists, etc... but if that's true in a particular situation, you can just explain why it's true. Calling it "political correctness" is just a lowbrow dismissal.

That's a lot of incorrectness for one 20-word sentence.

First, Dancing with the Stars is one of the highest rated shows on TV; the fact that it has a 2/3 women audience indicates that very many women will make the time to watch it.

Second, setting aside households with two TV's, only one spouse can enjoy passive entertainment at a time. Presumably while we watch football, women can do something fascinating and productive.

Third, political correctness is a phenomenon of white liberal prigs who go out of their way to take offense because they have nothing useful or productive to contribute to the public discourse. Of course they would react unkindly to being called out on it but I would advise you not to take their defensive lashing out at face value.

To the first, IF as you say it's 2/3 women, and IF as one short Google search suggested to me it has around 13M viewers, and IF we agree that those are all in the US and the US has around, what, 100M adult women?... then that's 8% of those adult women watching it. If those 13M include people outside the US, then it's lower than 8%. Apparently 92% of women do not watch DWTS.

In response to the second, I don't understand your point at all. Help me out here?

As to the third, I agree that there certainly exist some fools, most of them white and liberal (and maybe prigs?), who have a mental pattern wherein they make knee-jerk complaints about certain behaviour being offensive, without having a well-considered ethical system that justifies this complaint, instead using these complaints to signal their belonging to a certain social clique. If that's what you mean by political correctness, I agree that it exists, and is odious. Whether or not such fools object to your remarks should be entirely beneath you, however. So raising the potential political incorrectness of your remark appears, to me, to be saying "I'm going to use this straw-man argument to attack those who disagree with me". And this is why I brought up the fact that it's a lowbrow dismissal, and suggested that on those rare occasions when the label does fit, you can instead construct an independent explanation of what's wrong with the political correctness.

I don't want to defend a sexist comment, but I think the point the opposing comment was making was that of the viewership of DWTS, 2/3 are women - so, 2/3 of 13M, not that 2/3 of the US population watch DWTS. I think that thread of your comment is looking for a fight where one probably doesn't exist. It's also not sexist to identify a specific TV show with a female demographic.

Second point was pretty easy to understand - if a household has 2 adults and 1 TV, only one Adult at a time can watch their preferred TV shows. If there is a second TV, possibly more, the Adults stand a fair chance that they will be able to watch their shows.

> I don't want to defend a sexist comment

Okay, fair enough, understood, and I'll direct my response to my disagreement about the math of it.

Why would it matter that 2/3 of DWTS viewers are female? Suppose that I publish a fanzine called "jh's dumb stuff", for which 100% of the readers are female (that's right, my mom is the only reader). Would it make sense to say "you can look at this awesome thing while your wife reads 'jh's dumb stuff'"? No.

The relevance, here, is that original oafish-seeming comment was "while your wife watches DWTS", which appears to imply that it's typical for wives to do that. And, based on the stats I could find, it is NOT typical for wives to do that. Over 90% of American women do not watch the show, right?

Mathematically, the fact that 2/3 of DWTS viewers are female is just not relevant.

A specific event doesn't have to have >50% probability to work as an evocative example. For Christ's sake, you're missing the forest for a quarter square inch of bark on one particular tree.

Likewise, you can probably construct a more sophisticated argument than calling people "reactionary dullards", but you curiously choose not to. Somehow that isn't a lowbrow dismissal.

Actually, I did construct a more sophisticated argument, at least in brief. That's what that whole paragraph was about.

Also, I didn't call you a reactionary dullard. I see that your literacy is as poor as your numeracy. What I said was that such was the principle use of referencing political correctness, and advised that you could do better yourself. If I was sure, at that time, that you were a dullard, I wouldn't have bothered getting into it.

So it wasn't, at that time, a lowbrow dismissal. By now, you're getting a dismissal. I guess that the collective audience can judge for themselves whether it's lowbrow or not.

> Also, I didn't call you a reactionary dullard.

I didn't say that you did.

> Third, political correctness is a phenomenon of white liberal prigs who go out of their way to take offense because they have nothing useful or productive to contribute to the public discourse.

If you've defined it that way, of course that'll be how you see it and nobody will shake your conviction. This makes conversations with you on the topic as dull as someone who doesn't grasp enough statistics to understand trivial errors, but so be it.

The rest of the world has a more nuanced take on it, which begins with the idea that being rude to people who lack relative power in a given situation is still morally wrong and tactically quite stupid.

> Second, setting aside households with two TV's, only one spouse can enjoy passive entertainment at a time. Presumably while we watch football, women can do something fascinating and productive.

I happen to enjoy watching the same shows and movies my wife watches on TV, and I somehow assumed it was true of the majority of couples.

Do neither of you ever watch anything the other doesn't care for, or do you just choose to put up with stuff you wouldn't otherwise watch for the sake of spending time together? With my wife I have maybe an 80-90% overlap in what we like to watch but the other 10-20% we can each generally do our own thing while the other one watches something.

First, Dancing with the Stars is one of the highest rated shows on TV; the fact that it has a 2/3 women audience indicates that very many women will make the time to watch it.

Indeed so, but it doesn't follow that they are watching it instead of writing code, which implication was what I objected to in the first place; although it wasn't malicious, it was a lazy piece of stereotyping that I didn't feel was appropriate in the context of a discussion about sexist stereotyping.

Second, setting aside households with two TV's, only one spouse can enjoy passive entertainment at a time.

???

Third, political correctness is a phenomenon of white liberal prigs who go out of their way to take offense because they have nothing useful or productive to contribute to the public discourse.

Oh noes, you have outed me! I shrivel up in the face of your freethinking ways. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_correctness

Well most TV shows air at a particular time of day, so if you watched it you presumably wouldn't be coding at that particular time of day, either. Women code while their husbands watch football.

I regretted that as soon as I hit the "reply" button... but really, that's the way it is in my house and I meant it innocently. Bernice was literally watching that show a couple of years ago while I installed the Hercules S/370 emulator and the MVT 21.8F Turnkey system on my Nokia N900. Mainframe on a handheld! I was laughing like a maniac while she wondered what in the world I was doing in my office.

Well, no harm done. but I'd point out that my wife watches talent shows at the same time as doing stuff in Code Academy. I can't figure this out but she grew up in a household where television was almost always on and likes having some background noise (or likes having it focused through the TV, or something).

hga is female.

(Actually I don't know hga's gender, but wow - I have never seen an example of gender stereotyping as explicit as that on HN, and in a discussion about sexism in programming too. I'm really hoping your comment was supposed to be ironic)

>I have never seen an example of gender stereotyping as explicit as that on HN

does gender stereotyping manifests an intellectual failure on the part of the one expressing the stereotypes? If yes, does such intellectual failure is localized, say to the area of percepting and understanding gender relations in the industry, or is it a system-wide failure of the intellect of the stereotyping (i.e. something like a habit/instinct of using stereotypes)?

These are actually good questions.

Harold Gerard Ancell is very much male, thank you.

I can't remember if there were any women in that high school class, but there were in the summer programs I took after it, and as far as I can remember they didn't get treated any differently than the men. Of course, back then, computers, especially serious ones, were scarce and getting lots of time on them wasn't trivial. I also wasn't the sort of person who would put up with harassment or bullying in my presence, nor were the instructors, but as I recall it was never a problem (all the local stuff was in the cultural South...).

Long before the zero-tolerance bullshit, so my entirely serious threats of disproportionate including sometimes lethal force were taken as "don't do that crazy thing" vs. I was the problem for objecting. E.g. after the incident that went the furthest, to my drawing live steel in college, a counselor did pull me aside to make sure I wasn't the type to do that except when needed to prevent a felony. I gather a very different time, no cell phones and therefore no helicopter parenting, unsupervised play outdoors with a very few rules, the high school rifle teams used .22LR firearms instead of air guns, etc. etc. etc.

This was all new, neat stuff and perhaps we were having too much fun exploring and learning it, and helping each other (I did a lot of the latter, including joining the college computer "club" for which that was our mission). There was no doubt serious self-selection, including it being long before to the "do this for lots of money" concept and the pathologies that brings. And it sure sounds like my college bound peers and I were a lot more polite that the sort of things I'm hearing from more recently (I don't think "make me a sandwich" was even in the lexicon, one source I just found dates it from nearly two decades later). It was certainly a while before serious pushback to feminism inevitably developed in the communities I was in, the ethos was "women are good", not yet "and men are bad".

My high school CS class was taught by the softball coach (who also taught AP Calc), so yeah, credentials aren't everything, even though he probably had them. The only gripe I had was that spring semester suffered since his passion was definitely softball, and not so much the math or programming. Somewhere deep in the back of my head are the remnants of C++ thanks to him.

From what I understand (gf just finished her education degree, michigan secondary ed), there isn't really a teachers certification for computer programming/CS classes in secondary. It is generally taught by someone who shows interest in teaching it AND if there is an opening for the class in the schedule AND if there is a budget to allow that elective AND it doesn't get in the way of whatever the school's administration deems to be important. The state of it is quite sad really...I know at the high school I graduated from, there was a programming course that was taught by the typing teacher, at one point (was no longer available by the time I would have been able to take it).

Its not just a prep issue (and yes, there are only a handful of CS Education programs in the US) but a state certification and curriculum issue. Education in the US is a State/local funded and regulated (only like 10% of public school funding is from the Federal Government). Teaching requirements for CS vary wildly from state to state, but in most places CS courses actually fall in the Business dept.

The course most likely used VB because that is what the district mandated.

My programming teacher was a math teacher who'd never programmed before. This doesn't seem to be unusual.

This is like having a French instructor who only speaks English.

I had a similar high school teacher, minus the brother-in-law, teaching a high school Pascal class 1-2 years out of college, being barely a chapter ahead. She would often state things like "you should always/never xxx". I happened to have been very comfortable with pascal at the time, and raised points with exceptions to the rule, and was told its "always/never". This lasted till next week when she would read the next chapter.

She also demanded that every line be commented, however would only take a small percentage away (I think 5 or so), if one or all comments were missing. As I couldn't bring myself to comment everything, I would just use inline asm, which pascal supported at the time, with absolutely no comments. Since the rest of the grade relied on the program functioning, I did well. I thought it was cool at the time. Now I realize I didn't make her life easy, and probably should have.

There are two topics here, and the more important one is getting neglected.

Almost by definition of being on this website, all of us are well advanced of our pre-college computer science teachers. My first was actually a chemistry teacher. My second was biology. One had me doing tech support in junior high. It wasn't until the AP class that I found one who could teach me. But teachers using outdated technology isn't the issue.

The real issue of the article (and complaining about Visual Basic detracts from it) is a teacher who sets up an environment that tolerates harassment and bullying. It doesn't matter the discipline, the teacher failed all the students. The teacher failed the girl who dropped out of programming, and the teacher failed the bullies, by not pointing out that this behavior is wrong.

Although I agree completely, that's a very high expectation of teachers (pre-college) for the amount they get paid.

That's a really sad comment. Teaching may not pay well, but the tenured teacher has significantly higher job security and potential for other incomes. Yes, it's not a typical programmer pay, but if you are taking it upon yourself to teach children, you take on far more responsibility than any pay can justify and you should act like it.

That's easy to say but the world isn't so easy. being a teacher is hard and not paying well means you don't always attract the best people to do it.

programmers also have job security of knowing they are basically always employable right now unless completely hopeless. and programmers have ethical responsibilities which are frequently ignored too.

That's the path to mediocrity and failure...

Yup. The world is full of mediocrity and failure, though :(.

Exactly, that's why personal decisions and attitudes matter. It's a lot easier to not do the right thing if no one expects you to.

That's a very high expectation of teachers, full stop. What are they supposed to do? They only have influence over these people for an hour a day, which is the time they are supposed to be teaching the subject.

> The real issue of the article (and complaining about Visual Basic detracts from it) is a teacher who sets up an environment that tolerates harassment and bullying.

You are being unfair. Children while growing up can be cruel. Bullying and harassment isn't a new phenomenon. May be the teacher could have done more, but "who sets up an environment that tolerates harassment" is a bit far fetched.

That's pretty much exactly the same as the programming classes I took in high school (New Zealand). After that I mainly kept to programming on the side as a hobby rather than for work, I'd be lying if I said my school experience didn't have some influence over it.

If students are being harassed and driven away from a subject by their peers I don't think the out of date curriculum is the most significant problem in that classroom.

This is a high-school, so pubescent boys making disparaging remarks and teachers unable to control class are both expected and completely mundane. Certainly they wouldn't make it into a USENIX blog post, and I don't think anybody would infer from these events that "tech is sexist".

So the curriculum was the best reason I could figure why this is on USENIX.

(I certainly don't want to excuse the shortcomings of this particular teacher, and there are many, but I think the system is setup for failure)

A little off tangent but this year I started volunteering for an organization called TEALS (http://tealsk12.org/) that's trying to address this by having developers teach into and AP computer science in high school. I'm currently teaching AP CS remotely to a school in Kentucky - it's extremely challenging and a huge time commitment but being able to get students excited about computer science and seeing them succeed in their programs is worth it.

I suggest everyone to check it out - if you're near a local school you can actually teach a class in person.

Also - if you have any questions feel free to email me - username @ gmail

I don't think that's off-topic at all. Getting kids enthusiastic about computer science at a critical age, in an inclusive learning environment, with knowledgeable passionate mentors, is highly commendable and relevant.

Good on you.

Thanks! Just trying to get more people on HN involved in the program.

Our high school programming teacher was a math teacher who knew to keep the kids in the back -- the ones who finished reading the textbook in the first hour or so of class -- completely alone. We didn't cause trouble, and we were quite helpful to the other students in the labs.

At one point we were asked, politely, to stop crashing the county's mainframe (which was the platform we were using). So we stopped.

Girls? I don't recall girls. They must have been there; I don't think we noticed. We certainly didn't harass them, and we probably tried to help them. We were geeks and tools and had no idea how to interact with 'em, for the most part.

The OP's story saddens me.

That's not the problem described in the article though - it's an entirely non-technical issue about harassment, sexism, and general acceptable classroom behaviour. It's not about the level of computing knowledge at all.

I think you're missing the point of the parent comment. All teachers have to go through a degree/certificate program that would train them on how to deal with high school kids and what to do about harassment, etc. The guy teaching this class is probably just an IT guy at the school whom they recruited into 'teaching' this class.

That's how it was at my high school. It was the network/IT guy that taught the class. He was really cool and a pretty damn good teacher, but I don't know if he'd be able to spot harassment like this or do anything about it. We didn't have any girls in our class anyway, so I guess my anecdote can't add anything to that.

Edit: Actually reading the other comments by the parent shows me that you interpreted it correctly. Still I think what I said has some merit to it.

Here's the thing - I would love to teach computer science to young people, but in order to do so, I would have to pay for more education and certification for the privilege of participating in a much tougher job market for significantly lower wages. I just can't see any way that it makes sense, and that's a real shame.

When I took my first programming class in Junior High they chose the teacher because she was the typing instructor, and you know, how different can a computer be from a typewriter? After all, they both have keyboards.

Thankfully I had already taught myself one programming language so I was able to pick up another without much difficulty.

In this economy, someone with any worthwhile amount of knowledge and interest in programming has better opportunities than being a schoolteacher. And that's on top of the mediocrity-enforcing effects of the unionized teaching profession.

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