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Comment by punchclockhero | Hacker News Reader

Looks we need more game development in schools, as it's the most math heavy thing close to modern kids' lives.

Definitively, but it's hard to bring teachers up to speed. For one thing they often lack the particular curiosity, which may be associated to choosing the teaching path (unfortunately).

And I suspect it's also dangerous to teach coding to teachers: It's a skill that can land them much more lucrative and less stressful jobs.

Yeah I have a friend who had a math degree, taught CS and math. She got exposure to actual software dev work, realized how much better a job it is and eventually left teaching.

Personally I think I would enjoy teaching kids math (I've done tutoring for grade school students for years), but between the pointless certifications, workplace politics, low pay, standards that force teaching to tests, harmful teacher ranking policies, and a inherit career danger for male teachers there is no way I could make such a career change. So I'll stick to tutoring two to three students a year.

What’s an example of a non-stressful programmer role? Asking for a friend.

The tricky part about teaching is that it's unbounded.

I've never taught, but I remember transitioning from school to a job and it was a huge thing for me that I could keep work at work and I could start focusing on things outside without distraction. For friends that teach there's a lot of work that's expected that's not scheduled work hours (grading, lesson planning, etc). Dealing with parents is one of the largest stressors and that's almost exclusively outside of classroom time.

Depending on the particular school system, teachers can often shut out or minimize out-of-class work, but it takes a tougher attitude than many teachers have.

Also, many teachers don't think "no parent engagement" is more desirable than high parent engagement. Differences in the parents ability to engage the school (available time, money, language skills etc) contributes to social and ethnic disadvantages in many nations' school systems.

I was mostly pointing to the out-of-class work as something people who work other jobs wouldn't expect. I don't think there's a scenario where it doesn't exist and I'm a bit surprised I don't see better guidelines from either school districts or teacher's unions. It's something teacher's need to figure out for themselves. Trying to minimize that time was obvious to me as a student when I had poor teachers. Planning periods and planning days are nowhere near adequate to cover their responsibilities.

> Also, many teachers don't think "no parent engagement" is more desirable than high parent engagement.

I've never heard a teacher argue for no engagement. My point was that parent engagement is inevitable and always outside of scheduled class time. It's also one of the top complaints (along with administration and mandatory testing), so it's doubly unfortunate its unbounded.

My teachers would have shut down any parent without an extremely urgent issue trying to contact them after hours.

And I highly doubt that they got above a 40 hour work week including their lesson preparation.

But I guess expectations and regulations vary and it takes a personal strength that shouldn't be required of teachers. It's doubly sad that school systems are increasingly relying on teachers giving in and carrying more than their contractual burden.

Depends on your employer as always. But with a modicum of respect for work-hours and office climate, most programming jobs should be less stressful than teaching high school.

I'm not totally familiar with US coding/teaching jobs, and it also depends on how you deal with "stress" and the managing styles etc.

But teachers are on the front lines dealing with teenagers who are (at times) unruly, mean, sometimes outright violent, and parents will blame you for all those problems. Maybe 99% of your students are nice or well behaving, but it doesn't take a lot. I've heard quite a few stories of classes driving teachers mad. A lot of fresh teachers even drop out...

Agreed. I don't believe programming should be taught in school until late, but the use of games to bring maths alive, to give maths a relevance, would be fantastic. I, like most people, don't work in the abstract and need a framework to a) interest me in things, and b) to make them relevant. Without that it's so much harder.

I don't believe programming should be taught in school until late

Why do you believe this? Speaking for myself, I learned to program in three programming languages by 11 and I think it was very helpful.

Just IMO, programming is addictively fun and can be shallow. I think the clarity of thought and concept that maths brings is far more important. The ability to plan, to focus, to organise, and more broadly to interact with others and other life skills.

Programming does not teach those, indeed it allows the production of scrappy stuff that seems to work and is great fun. I found it hugely distracting myself in the way that social media is addictive to current kids.

I'm not explaining myself well and perhaps I'm extrapolating too much from my own case, but I hope that gives you an idea of what I'm trying to say - the very thing in programming - the bringing of something to a kind of life - is the very thing that makes it valuable to hang mathematics off, is also the thing that makes it a shiny bauble that kids/younger adults love to dabble with and be distracted by.

But your experience suggests a different POV. I may well be wrong.

I don't think those skills are particularly well developed by math for most students either.

Uh, bad post (of mine).

I agree. Maths is more important than programming IMO. But wider skills (job-related, planning, and social skills) are just as important, probably more so. But programming is an almost magical process of animating a thing. It can be too attractive, addicting, distracting...

Just my POV. I should not have posted originally without some evidence to support my claim.

"The ability to plan, to focus, to organise" is exactly what you need to build programs except for the most trivial hello world ones.

Interacting with people is also often part of it. Perhaps you make something with your friends (eg we made a class website for our school class where we uploaded photo galleries of our events and had forums and chat - all pre-facebook, around 2002-03).

By contrast math is very individual and often taught quite bad without any interaction. You learn each type of calculation task you may get on the test, memorize definitions and proofs...

And it's pretty much impossible to work on a "math project" with your friends in your free time to hone those interaction skills. Perhaps if you went to a special math focused school you could talk about math with them in your free time, in most schools that's not the case, outside perhaps discussing how to solve the test questions.

On the contrary I think a lot of the maths in school could be much better taught if they were taught alongside programming.

I used to do very well at my maths, but lost interest in large part because the maths I learned was largely disconnected from everything else I was doing despite an interest in programming.

It was first when I picked up a book on Prolog that I got symbolic derivation. The reason being that the Prolog book contained it as an example, and it was sufficiently compelling that it made me write an expression parser so that I could implement that symbolic derivation in Pascal, and the process of implementing the parser and implementing the rules applied to the syntax tree to carry out symbolic derivation brought it home in a way my teacher never did.

[Incidentally that expression parser also became the starting point for my first compiler.]

Of course programming can be distracting, because it can also allow you to explore almost any subject in more depth. E.g. what I know of complex numbers, I know because I was experimenting with fractals. What I know of graph theory is almost entirely down to playing around with parsing and compilation. And most of my understanding of trigonometry is down to toying with 3D rendering; certainly not from my maths classes in school that mostly made me loathe the subject.

There are plenty of languages that allows you to bridge a formal approach to maths with programming. But there are also plenty of ways to explore and demonstrate the concepts that will make them easier to grasp that require just very simple visualization. E.g. visualizing fractals as a means to explore topography; visualizing derivation, integration, limits, trig. For many of these presenting it as programs rather than visualization and letting students play with and see the consequences of changes has a lot of potential to make people grasp the concepts more deeply.

Just IMO, programming is addictively fun and can be shallow.

I can get that. In 1985 when I was programming my own BBS from scratch I would skip going out with friends to work on it. All that time spent on a computer as a child provided a very lucrative and rewarding career however so I don’t think I’d change any of it.

Ironically though based on your other comments in this thread I do wish I learned maths more!

Agreed, but it sounds like something that can be taught with a great teacher.

I understand where you're coming from. I'm often frustrated by how our industry allows software to be incredibly shoddy. But attracting kids to programming is not the same problem as making sure they grow into adults who do their job well.

Different ages have different priorities. The best way to attract kids to any activity, including programming, is to give them something fun to do. Let them make crappy stuff that's flashy and fun. If they choose to stick with it, teach them to do it well and help them unlearn the bad habits.

Incidentally, I consider bad habits to be incredibly important. Yeah, sure, you can read about how to program well, but it's not the same as having your own bad habit bite you in the ass and learning from it. It's even better if you learn bad habits and then unlearn them while you're still young and not when it might impact customers.

Same here, with a Timex 2068.

I also don't believe programming should be taught in schools, but for different reasons.

Not everyone is cut out for programming, and schools will inevitably teach it in a lowest common denominator style, where the bright kids will be bored to tears doing and redoing for loops in scratch.

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