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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.
Which entirely misses the point of a broad education. If you look at it that way we'd do basic courses in the first 6 grades then farm everyone not going to college to a trade school. I believe there is a certain amount of general knowledge everyone should have so that a society can function. The problem in the last few decades is we've allowed too much dumbing down and now we're reaping what we've sowed.
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.
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
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 call bs on your little anecdote. If someone was told to ship something to a place they weren't familiar with, they wouldn't ask "where in the US is that?". They would simply ask "where is that?" because they are already in this country and obviously assumed it was simply a place they didn't know about. Further I have never met anyone, no matter how uneducated, who did not know what Europe was.
Better known as 318230.
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!
Shhhhhh! I am OK with people not knowing how beautiful most of the southern US is. If they find out, they will ruin it.
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.
"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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