Posts by BenWilson
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Dorothy,
I wonder how many of your the commentors who have been disparaging about teacher technical competencies have to be highly skilled in such disparate arenas in their business lives?
I sure don't. I admire teachers greatly for doing an important job that is really hard, and not particularly well paid. The breadth of knowledge required is huge, and if that leads to a lack of depth in most areas, how else could it be anyway? There's only so much time in a day and so many kids to teach.
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Doh, now I feel stink, I thought Leo was some arcane language! What does he have to say about Flash?
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OTOH, Flash -- that's fun, not too hard to learn, and any browser runs it.
Gosh yes, forgot that one, probably because I can't stand what people do with it.
The idea that you can past some code into a text box and run it on your browser would be excellent for a learning tool.
Sounds like a job for...Javascript!
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Mikaere, nice one. It's a pretty tricky choice now, of course. Back when I was a kid, to even use a high-level language at all was pretty new. Now it's all visual and drag-and-drop if you want.
There's no best advice on what language to teach. Actually, they're all the same at heart anyway, and switching is pretty easy - I'm up to at least my 15th computer language. If I had to guess, I'd say that we'll still have 'Algol-like' languages, such as C++, Pascal, VB, Java etc, as core competences for programmers for a few decades more. Lower level is only relevant for a small subsection of engineers. But even now there are people who program extensively who wouldn't know what a nested loop is. In one job I did, supporting Excel users internal to the company, a small subset of them, about 15 or so, had basically learned programming entirely from Excel, then recording Excel macros (which are VB), then modifying the macros. Some of the programs were extremely complex, and this was from people who had picked it all up entirely from reading help files. I employed one programmer once who made Access database apps, and was shocked to find out she had not the faintest idea how many bits there were in a byte. Seriously. No idea, and yet she'd written applications used by dozens of people that did extremely complex queries and reporting which they loved. She was actually one of my star performers, and had no friggin idea about any of the fundamentals of computing. Didn't matter.
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On the same topic, my 19 month old has already learned to eat shit, and why you don't want to. That lesson is a keeper.
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In that case Ben, I would of course nominate toilet training.
Yes, it's important to learn when to give a shit! Although learning to get others to clean your shit up works too....double edged sword, that one.
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Rich, true. It would be virtually undetectable from outside of a few hundred meters (& therefore of little use in the bush). But anyone listening in would be able to capture the digital data and if they thought you were a terrorist then decrypting it might almost be justifiable. Ask the US to do it, they'd love it. Or charge for it, and love that too.
They might as well just send SMS messages, but encrypt those. Then they don't have to pay for the network, it might work in the bush, and it will definitely work everywhere else. The encryption could be 100% secure for such short messages, if these guys put half as much thought into security as they put into buying grenade launchers. Mind you, encrypted text messages would probably set off alarm bells. But when you're into discussing killing the white man, you've already set them off, I'd say.
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I learned the violin by the Suzuki method.
Heh, I guess it's arbitrary which skills to choose as the most important. In the first few weeks of my life I learned to coordinate my eyeballs, and to smile. These skills have been amongst the most valuable throughout my whole life. Eating solids goes down as quite a milestone too.
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Neil, teach her Visual Basic. Much as I hate to say it, it's a good learning tool for programming.
Bart, That's what teachers contribute. Much more than general knowledge.
And from what you've said Ben, that's what you learned to do.
Sure is, and I fully acknowledge the role of teachers in imparting that skill. Indeed, learning WordStar was more useful to me just in alerting me to the very presence of such a program. I'd never have known or cared before. It might have been a useful thing for my typing teacher to also have known about.
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Sadly for me older kids taught me squat at school
Likewise, except in sport, where they taught me practically everything. At uni, however, tutors were very useful cats.
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