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Comment by Torwald | Hacker News Reader

Students should be more like jocks: giving a dam.

Eh. Sure, students can be disinterested. But, in my personal experience, in advanced high school courses (where the students were highly engaged) at a top-notch public school, the math teachers were, by and large, far less enthusiastic than the teachers of all the other subjects.

I had many excellent, engaging, exciting history teachers. My Latin teacher was quirky and annoying, but loved the subject and it rubbed off on us. My biology teacher made me think I wanted to go into hard sciences.

I barely remember my math teachers. And I was good at math.

I don't believe my experience is unique.

That probably has a lot to do with it. It's hard to maintain enthusiasm over the years if it isn't being returned. I think the lack of passion from the students is more about the voluntary nature of the football team than anything inherent to the jocks.

The rewards are different, too. There is no level of mathematical achievement that will get the kind of broad (but typically local) social status and public approval of being a starting high school quarterback. Math just doesn't tap into anything near as easy and primal.

That's true, but I've seen years where an enthusiastic professor gets a packed room for a normally undersubscribed elective course like computational complexity theory or advanced algorithms.

True, but there's a heavy selection going on there. A packed complexity class might mean 50? enthusiastic undergrads out of several hundred math/cs students at a university.

A dedicated and charismatic professor might be instrumental in turning an interested computer science student into a raging algorithmist (indeed, I actually think a lot of computer science grad students study what they study because somebody appropriately passionate introduced it to them), but converting a just-here-for-the-requirement high schooler is a different story.

The football team also has a heavy selection bias.

Personally, I got into CS because there was a required intro class at my undergrad. A dedicated and charismatic professor noticed my aptitude and encouraged me to take the next course and consider a CS major. This could easily have happened in high school if my high school had a required CS course.

Pretty much. The kids that did the best in my highschool were the ones that did things due to competitive drive.

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