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Kentucky: Programming Language = Foreign Language
jackb_guppy writes with word that "Legislation that would let students use computer programming courses to satisfy foreign-language requirements in public schools moved forward in the Kentucky Senate on Thursday." From the article: "Kentucky students must earn 22 credits to graduate high school, but 15 of those credits represent requirements for math, science, social studies and English — and college prerequisites call on students to have two credits of foreign language, [state senator David] Givens said.
Meanwhile, Givens pointed to national statistics showing that less than 2.4 percent of college students graduate with a degree in computer science despite a high demand in the market and jobs that start with $60,000 salaries."
Kentucky: English Language = Foreign Language
I want to mock kentucky, because it's the right thing to do, but this actually kind of makes some sense.
Good to know if I ever need a federal government job...
Sheesh.
This is either someone trying to beat the system, or perhaps the system beating itself to some degree. Why is the plain meaning of "foreign language" in an English-speaking country even up for debate?
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Only 2.4% percent, well yeah ... it's only CS people. Since when did technology development only depend on CS graduates? Last I checked, there are more and more focus/applied degrees every year which would probably take care of a good number of those positions. Not every job needs a theoretical background, and all of those job postings for "App Developers" probably don't require a hardcore degree a this point ...
My highschool required 3 years of a foreign language to graduate, 0 of which I had any interest in, and only 1 (the first) had any real-life applicability (spending a week in Mexico City).
Effectively, for me, two of those courses were a completely forced waste of time.
Taking more classes on programming/software development would have been much more useful.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
I sucked at Spanish in high school, harder than calculus. I got around language requirements in college via some comparative religion courses (which worked out great as one teacher turned me onto Hermann Hesse, changed my life).
The only problem I see with this change is called it a Foreign Language. If it was Alternative Language I wouldn't see anything wrong with it.
I see learning a programming language, which I assume mean learning some programming, as highly valuable to anyone. If taught properly (I've never seen this), it can provide a solid logic base (and, or, not) and a deeper understanding of decision making (conditionals).
My wife had a total of 8 years of French and spent a semester in Paris. She hasn't used it yet and is no longer very fluent. As for applied knowledge, her spreadsheet skills are good, but she trips up on logic and conditionals.
Why is there a foreign language requirement anyway?
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In Ontario we used to have this thing called OAC(Grade 13) which gave you equivalent degrees or partial credits towards university. So in a sense, they can be valuable. When they killed and gutted grade 13 here, the quality of students entering university dropped through the floor.
Om, nomnomnom...
This move makes absolutely perfect sense. Soon, everyone graduating from Kentucky high schools will have above average academic qualifications. Also, the senator is a genius and extremely good looking.
Considering what Texas has been doing to the schoolbooks recently, books from 1950 might be considered an improvement.
Matter of fact (though this is high school, not grade school) the 1950 is when they still used variations of Euclid's geometry to teach geometry with rather than set theory. I'm not a real fan of the way modern education has been changing.
Mind you, I can imagine many ways in which an underfunded school system is bad. (I live in an area with one.) But not being able to follow the latest fad in school books doesn't impress me as one of them.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
It really depends. I took Latin for 4 years. Though it is of no real applicable use to me at this time, it was a really great base for learning Italian, French, Spanish and Portuguese. Those languages came really easy to me because of the Latin. The backlash I have with this is, the law should be that kids need 2 credits in programming AND 2 credit in a foreign language instead of this malarky.
Not sure what the deal is with all the hate here in the thread. Isn't the Slashdot groupthink supposed to say that anything that exposes people to computers and programming is a good thing? Even when it's that nonsense of trying to teach primary grade-schoolers to code?
People are a lot less likely to take a computer programming language than they are a foreign language class in high school, but I'd say the computer programming course is more valuable to them. If they take the semester or two of foreign language, they will likely have forgotten it in a couple years from non-practice and even if they did want to study further will be having to start at year one anyway in college. If they never travel to a country where they speak the language what they do learn will be limited usefulness in life. It's another one of those subjects people study to be a more rounded person. But exposure to programming means learning more about computers in general and how to operate them, that means less idiots in offices hitting "reply all" when unnecessary or looking for the "any" key. And even those who decide programming isn't for them will come away with a better understanding (and possibly respect) for those that do go into programming.
Which entirely misses the point of a broad education.
Taking programming courses is every bit as broadening as taking a language course. Just in different dimensions.
Indeed I would hazard to say you would retain more overall from a programming course than one or two semesters of a language course.
In no way are we dumbing down people allowing them to study computers more in depth over language.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Depends on where you are in Kentucky. Oh, everyone loves the narrative that Kentucky is filled with barefoot overall-wearing good ol' boys with a mason jar of moonshine on the creaky porch with a sprig of wheat coming out of the corner of their mouth, but everyone seems to forget that if you cross a river in Northern Kentucky, you are in the Central Business District of Cincinnati, Ohio; a fairly large city with significant history and home to several Fortune-100 headquarters.
Yes, $300k will go farther than Puget Sound, the Bay Area, LA or New York; but not as far as you would think.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
good luck next time you're in a foreign country trying to buy food using for loops and if statements
Actually, anyone can do just that these days.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Seriously, there had be a "Y'all" joke somewhere.
Or moonshine. Or bluegrass.
Three Squirrels
So what exactly is the problem with Kentucky?
That's a good question. After all, not only does the best Bourbon Whiskey come from there, they produce a wonderful jelly.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
This sounds a lot like the "Pizza is a vegetable" nonsense I remember reading about a few years ago.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
1950s textbooks would work great for math and pretty good for literature, but perhaps less well for science or history.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
HS language courses are the biggest waste of time. Do you actually learn anything in a HS language class? Just enough to recognize the language you are reading, maybe make fun of the weird shit they do in other countries, but definitely not well enough to be able to converse.
Actually, I took (four years of) Spanish in high school, then tested into the advanced Spanish classes in college, which were mostly composition and literature, and I only had to take them because I had a Spanish minor (or I would have tested out otherwise). I also studied in Mexico during this time and was obviously able to converse, but I learned the majority of that during high school and would have been perfectly fine then, too. Some people are just not quite as good at learning foreign languages as others, and certainly the quality of education varies (I went to a really small school, by the way, but I think we had good teachers, including one native speaker), but it's absolutely false to claim that you won't learn anything in an HS language class.
A computer programming language, however, is completely different. While I think it's useful to learn both, this proposal seems to lump them under the same skill, and I don't think that's accurate or a good way to do it. (I have a BA in CS and an MA in linguistics, including applied/SLA, so I do have experience with both, by the way.)
R.Mo
Granted, Kentucky is not representative of the whole US, but a perfect example of how we repetitively embarrass ourselves internationally.
Most of the world is multilingual. Learning another language provides skills unrelated to coding. In addition to the obvious benefit of communication, it provides the student with a wider vocabulary and the ability to basically know the meaning of many, many new words they may hear while studying, without the use of a dictionary.
How many Europeans know only one language? How many Indians or Chineese? Virtually none that have education.
We've carried the big stick for too long, if you can't see that you need to have the ability to play internationally, you'll be stuck with a Kentucky education and sadly ignorant .
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B - D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
If you're not learning calculus from Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica in the original Latin, you're just taking shortcuts. Begone with you.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
If you live in a state with abbreviation KY, you deserve to get shafted.
However, anything that promotes the use of computer science and technology to students who are crap at languages (like I was) cannot be that bad.
langs = [
{
"name":"C",
"popularity": 49
},
{
"name":"Java",
"popularity": 53
},
{
"name":"JavaScript",
"popularity":82,
},
{
"name":"Perl",
"popularity": 3
},
{
"name":"PHP",
"popularity":64
},
{
"name":"Python",
"popularity":57
}
];
langs.sort(function(a,b) {
if (a.popularity < b.popularity) { return 1; }
if (a.popularity > b.popularity) { return -1; }
return 0;
});
if (langs[0].name == 'javascript') {
console.log("Tell me about it, seems whenever I go out drinking everyone is speaking in Javascript these days.");
} else {
console.log("Dude, I don't even know what you are saying");
}
I know it is popular to mock the Southern US, but lame values of living are relative. I live in rural Southern Alabama, which is probably not much different than rural Kentucky. I have a nice 2 story home overlooking a pond. My morning commute to work is around 20 minutes if you count dropping the kids off at school. I might pass 10 cars during rush hour. I know most of my neighbors for a mile in both directions. When I want to go on a walk in the park, my backyard has 130 acres of pine trees planted. Sure the pay scale is not as much as a similar job in other areas, but neither is the cost of living. What would $70,000/year get you in Chicago?
While the AC's account of foreign languages in high school is likely reasonably accurate for a large number of people, I think that the increasing denigration of language skills (including English) is yet another trend that needs to be reversed in American schools. The problem for Mr. AC is that he probably took 1 year of Spanish and got little out of it. An hour a day for one year doesn't get you very far. I took three years of Russian, came out reasonably fluent and took another two years in college. No, it's not terribly 'useful' unless I decide to change to a life of cybercrime, but I think it's important to be able to think in another language, look at another culture carefully and come up with a less parochial world view. The latter being the most important part these days.
Too many Americans don't understand the world past the 5:00 news. That is a truly scary thought.
But, back on topic, computer languages and foreign languages are nothing alike academically and socially - but if something gets kids to think in high school, it can't be all bad.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I have a completely opposite opinion. I think the foreign language requirement is BS. Maybe under the conditions that people who made the requirement were thinking of provided a good enough reason to make that a requirement; however, today that is NOT the case.
At least with programming they will be exposed to logic and having to think differently in a way that is not naturally human. Yes, it's unlikely they'll get proper programming experience to have the desired impact on them, but that already is the case for foreign language education. Thinking in programming code is going to impact them if they get to that skill level; just as a foreign language would. I also think people are too biased into thinking that people can only think in a spoken language - if you could get people to NOT think in a spoken language that would probably do the most.
English education is poor quality. People who used to learn Latin ended up way better off but that was killed in favor of living language -- many of the popular ones are so similar to English that it can't be providing much benefit other than perhaps the way they teach it exposing grammar - which is not really taught. Teaching proper English grammar again with the Latin based-concepts etc would be far more beneficial. They no longer taught grammar when I was in school (it was passive at that point, the teacher would have to correct it for you to even know of a rule... perhaps this approach would work if they made us read a whole lot more; that that didn't happen either.)
Cultures, geography, etc. should be taught (does social studies even exist anymore?) about multiple areas not just the one who's language you are learning (in my case, we learned almost nothing other than stuff we already knew from pop culture on Span or Mexico and I bet you half the students couldn't find Spain on a map and 1/5 wouldn't realize if you renamed Canada Mexico on a map.)
If you REALLY want or need to learn a language -- GO THERE. Everybody admits it is the best way to learn. Americans do not get 1 month vacation per year to travel around Europe; perhaps if they did... they'd at least learn some Spanish or French going short distances. If you want people to think differently by language exposure, pick something DIFFERENT-- like Chinese, not some popular European language.
Ethnocentrism is extremely high in the USA.
I would cover the basics strongly before adding lots of extras - we don't have good English, Math, or Science skills nationally. No, all those studies that cite mixed language exposure helping out leave out the fact that English can be taught in a way that has those benefits without all the wasted time. (It IS a waste when the main purpose is to lean better English-- it's like going across the street by going around the planet... sure you get a nice trip but it takes a long time even if you'd learn some geography...something Americans suck at.)
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Shhhhhh! I am OK with people not knowing how beautiful most of the southern US is. If they find out, they will ruin it.
Mhhh... can someone confirm that the Beta is nothing but some form of punishment for the Anonymous Cowards....
Wasn't it George Gilder who said that the only languages that anyone needed to know to be successful today are English and C++?
So what that Kentucky uses a programming language like BASIC to satisfy their foreign language 'requirement'? It's not like anyone speaks a foreign language in Kentucky. Except Spanish, and the Mexicans aren't going to know the difference between Kentuckians speaking KY_BASIC and KY_Spanish anyway.
10 ? "I'm smart, educated, trained, and ready for world-class productivity employment"
20 Goto 10
Was it Bill Gates who invented using the question mark as the PRINT token? If I recall correctly, he personally brought back to life the BASIC language by writing assembly language interpreters for every microprocessor available in the 1970s. Does he speak any foreign language?
My girlfriend clued me in that those stories they tell about screwing sheep are strictly for the benefit of credulous city boys.
The ability to speak multiple languages, to some degree at least, is commonplace around the world. Monolingualism seems particularly severe in Anglosphere countries (including my own).
In Australia there's been a move away from teaching European languages in favour of the languages of Asia from the trade perspective. It's also a shorter duration to fly to Japan (whose language my brother's kids are learning) than the 20 or so hours to fly from Melbourne to Vienna or Paris.
Sorry, but I've seen rural Alabama and rural Kentucky. From my experience, Kentucky's doing significantly better.
Then you wasted your years in college.
"Romance languages". Not "Latinate languages"[sic].
Learning Latin because you want to learn one Romance language is counter-productive, but if you want to learn a bunch of them, basic Latin is really helpful. It helps you to understand the languages' quirks better - and to predict them. Simple examples: /k/) or an S (always /s/) in that position.
*Italian: words like uovo-uova that change gender when plural: check for Latin 2nd declension neuter words.
*French: it's far easier to put circumflexes if you remember which words had an S in Latin, as hôpitalhospital or maîtremagister.
*Portuguese: wondering if you should use Ç or S? Check if Latin had a hard C (always
Portuguese won't help you with Italian plurals, Italian won't help you to put French circumflexes and French will barely give you orthographic clues for Portuguese. And, even without being a Romance language, it also helps a lot with English, due to the amount of borrowings the language did from Latin and Norman [itself a Romance language].
It's also worth mentioning that Classical Latin (the non-church one) has a HUGE literature, and translations in general usually suck.
TL;DR: "Latin should be left to the priests" my ass.
[Even because they can't pronounce Latin for shit. "ky-loom", not "cheh-lo", paedicatores stulti.]
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Romani ite domum
Someone will keep his balls...
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Being in Chicago, for one. ;)
Different strokes, but right now I'm in the middle of nowhere and it's fine if you have little interest in people, or entertainment, or restaurants, or a good variety of groceries, or having walking be a realistic daily mode of daily transport, or many other things. And of course the politics are more conservative, even though most of the people would at least be better off financially under liberals. The only reason I'm not going bonkers from this lifestyle is that I'm caught up in working (and it's work I enjoy), I still get out to do exercise several times a week, and I plan on leaving eventually.
Advanced Placement classes give you credit at most colleges. You could spend your senior (12) year getting English, calc, physics, foreign language, and maybe a few others. The tests are relatively cheap, but since we are talking about Ky here, the governor's scholars program covers the cost for 3 if you pass. 12 credits, plus mote if you take pre tests like comp sci.
You can get at least one semester out of the way for a few hundred dollars.
The most important thing (IMO) missing from history would indeed be the civil rights movement.
Science, however, would be missing several (again, IMO) important things: plate tectonics and DNA's role in heredity.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
My sheep clued me in that those stories they tell on Slashdot about girlfriends are strictly for the benefit of credulous basement-dwellers.
No left turn unstoned.
No one is saying that Latin would not be useful in learning other romance languages, but I do not see how understanding various quirks of etymology (ex. forêt used to have an S, just like English forest still does) is sufficiently valuable to merit learning an entirely separate language, even if it is the ancestral language, as opposed to simply learning those various things that it would help you with. Learning Latin as an aid, unless you are learning the languages to study linguistics, while interesting from an intellectual standpoint sounds very inefficient from a practical one. I'd much rather use other useful languages as my guide. Even if we make the assumption that the cross language benefits are substantially less, I fail to see how the usefulness in terms of communication applications would not compensate for whatever is lost in terms of learning guidance.
A programming language is technically not a "language" at all. The word "language" is used as a sort of nickname for what programming really is. That's like giving physical education credits for "web surfing" just because it has the word "surfing" in it, or biology/entomology credit for debugging just because it has the word "bug" in it.