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Learn About The Technology Education And Literacy in Schools Program (Video #2)
Quoting our intro from yesterday's 'Part One' video: 'The Technology Education And Literacy in Schools program (TEALS to its friends), started with one volunteer, a Berkeley CS grad named Kevin Wang who taught high school for a while, then went to Microsoft for a much higher salary than he got from teaching. But before long, he was getting up early and teaching a first period computer science class at a Seattle-area high school that was (sort of) on his way to work.'
TEALS is now in 130 high schools and has 475 volunteers in multiple states but still has a long way to go (and needs to recruit many more volunteers) because, Kevin says, fewer than 1% of American high school students are exposed to computer science, even though "Computer science is now fundamental in these kids' lives." He doesn't expect everyone who takes a TEALS class to become a computer person any more than chemistry teachers expect all their students to become chemists. You might say that learning a little about how computers and networks work is like knowing how to change a car tire and cook a simple meal: skills that make life easier even for people who don't want to become mechanics or cooks.
TEALS is now in 130 high schools and has 475 volunteers in multiple states but still has a long way to go (and needs to recruit many more volunteers) because, Kevin says, fewer than 1% of American high school students are exposed to computer science, even though "Computer science is now fundamental in these kids' lives." He doesn't expect everyone who takes a TEALS class to become a computer person any more than chemistry teachers expect all their students to become chemists. You might say that learning a little about how computers and networks work is like knowing how to change a car tire and cook a simple meal: skills that make life easier even for people who don't want to become mechanics or cooks.
As a middle school computer technology and applications teacher I keep looking for these articles to find ways to engage students in technology. However, the reality is that very few are interested.
Out of about three hundred students this year there were about three or four that were actually interested. Once students realize that there is more involved than just clicking on a couple of well marked boxes and then "something cool happens" they quickly loose interest.
A good quarter of the students come in saying "I want to learn to hack." The movies make it look like instant gratification is the norm and the grind is only for loosers. The moment they find that it is not easy, they are back to google images clicking at random.
What I look for in these articles is for ways to make the "just plain work" part interesting to them.
I teach a digital electronics class (hardware) to high school kids and fortunately it attracts kinda the cream of the crop of kids in the school. If I'm ever out for a day I throw em on App Inventor and let em build apps for their phones. If they can use something easy like drag and click blocks and build an app that does stupid shit they're pretty happy I think if I had more time to throw at it I could get em to build some actual games, there's certainly enough tutorials around. Programming is a difficult thing to teach to anybody, it has a steep learning curve, to a novice it all looks like gibberish, but the icon based IDE and games as a goal seem doable to me. Now if I could get the morons that run the school system to let me teach a programming class I could see if this works. Or I could quit and get a "real job" and be able to put food on the table again (I was an engineer for many years before doing this)
"You might say that learning a little about how computers and networks work is like knowing how to change a car tire and cook a simple meal: skills that make life easier even for people who don't want to become mechanics or cooks."
Neither one of which anyone taught me in school :) Hmmm
Sure you want to use that sales pitch on me?
I mean seriously, do we need more code monkeys? How about we give classes in networking and infosec? We are chronically short of people we need to do what is arguably more important than some silly script kiddies making worthless mobile apps. Computer Science degrees are fucking worthless, and produce worthless people requiring years of other training to be even moderately useful.
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Your PTSD is showing there chief
It'd be much better to have a general class that teaches keyboarding, navigating operating systems, how to install various operating systems, office software, programming, hardware (how to take apart, replace, etc.), networking, etc.
MS is sitting on how many unspent billions of dollars, and a project like this needs volunteers? If this stuff was important, you think MS would put its billions behind it.