September 22 2005
It goes against the grain of modern education to teach children to program. What fun is there in making plans, acquiring discipline in organizing thoughts, devoting attention to detail and learning to be self-critical?
- From ACM's SIGPLAN publication, (September, 1982), Article "Epigrams in Programming", by Alan J. Perlis of Yale University.
While some feminists will vehemently dispute this, it is an understood fact of childhood development that boys (and girls?) at around age 10 or 11 start developing very particular rational abilities. They love to make lists, order things, solve mathematical puzzles, fit things together. I remember my own experience of this vividly. Constantly bored at primary school with no work to do, I would continually seek distraction by filling ring binders with facts and statistics about aircraft, rockets, engines, flora and fauna, anything interesting I stumbled across in books. When I look back, I’m amazed at how spontaneously creative that was. Maybe it was the only way I could learn, because I don’t actually remember being given any attention at school at all. I still consider myself lucky, in that there was absolutely no problem with being left behind for me. But not everyone was that lucky.
These comparisons revealed systematic tendencies for teachers to evaluate the performance of girls more favourably than the performance of boys…. in the areas of reading and written expression teachers showed consistent tendencies to evaluate the performance of girls more favourably than the boys even after adjustment for gender differences in objective test scores were made.
Fergusson, D.M., M. LLoyd, and L.J. Horwood (1991): Teacher Evaluations of the Performance of Boys and Girls. New Zealand Journal of Educational Studies Vol. 26, No.2:
For 20 or so years, the particular paradigmatic view of education research in New Zealand was that girls were not being given a fair go in an education system that was utterly male dominated. Perhaps this is an understandable response to the climate in which femminism emerged in New Zealand in the early 1970’s. The response from some teachers of course, was just to completely ignore the boys, and spend the majority of the class time making sure that the girls were achieving ok. The particular result for me was that I didn’t get taught mathematics between the ages of 10 and 12. And at college, I kept up, but pretty much gave up.
Now I have realised, as I stumble around trying to relearn mathematical thinking with a great deal of difficulty, that there was a 10 year gap in my learning and development where I didn’t really grasp the visual potential of mathematics at all. If I had, it would have opened up so many avenues and possibilities, I am only just starting to realise, much much later, what I missed.
So I have some very tough decisions to make, regarding just how I approach mathematical formalism. It’s becoming more and more important, the further I study, I’m not sure how much longer I can just avoid it completely.
This Note
Asides