alt Hacker NewsA while ago, I taught CS for a year in a local high school. I can very much relate to the notion of "astonishing facts were presented without astonishment": as a teacher, you don't have the freedom to teach whatever you want (of course), but you're very tightly bound to a curriculum that's developed by the state government. And for CS, this curriculum was so uninteresting and uninspiring (what a surprise: 13 year old kids don't care about the history of computers), that I couldn't blame any of my students not to show much interest in my classes.
As a matter of fact, I gave up after just one year. It wasn't any fun for anyone, not for the students, not for me.
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What a horrendous crime, to turn a fascinating subject into a boring curriculum to be forced on teachers and children.
I've received great intellectual satisfaction from various well-taught subjects. I would rather chop off a finger than lose them. So curriculum committees that make subjects boring are doing something worse than chopping off millions of children's fingers.
I think the whole teaching the history of computers is a big failure at an attempt to Segway into computer organization and architecture. Nonetheless, I get what is happening. If it’s a pure Computer programming class then the goal maybe to have them understand the “basics”…like what is the hard drive vs RAM (memory allocation) or what is a transistor (Boolean logic) and what is a punch card (mnemonics and abstractions of those mnemonics to what is now just a computer programming language).
This is why most good teachers don’t use the books but find creative ways to still meet the standards. More work though, so fewer do it now with pay being so shit.
I've loved the history of computers since I was young, although if I was forced to learn about it in school I know it would suck.
Imagine if they taught the history of English to kids before they could read
Those curiculums developed by sould-dead gremiums in consensus on the minimum knowledge you goto have are a blight on western civilization. Instead of giving students the ability to discover a topic, or built something they are interested in themselves and then give them a understanding and fascination with the discoverers who have gone before them. Instead they kill the subject..
I must confess, it gives my dry old heart some joy, to see the anti-education masses coming from this, voting and storming the fortresses that produced the paywall around education, that only money with tutors could or accidental intrinsic motivation could overcome and burn & salt those outposts of classists academia.
I basically found this in college too, I quickly gave up on computer science as a major. I'd rather just go out and learn how to build what I want to build versus hearing a 3-hour lecture about how the jvm works.
The answer is it's magic and no one cares, now let's go build some games
I can really relate to your experience, even though mine was from a parent's perspective rather than as a teacher. I found a similar thing when tutoring one of my children in trigonometry. The way the material was being presented in school didn't click with him, but astonishingly, despite having studied it decades ago both at school and university, explaining it to him, it finally made sense to me. The unit circle definition of a tangent is a thing of beauty. I had the time to get my child to appreciate it as well, because of the extra time I had to spend with him, whereas the teacher had to hit curriculum benchmarks.
I also think this is where things like intergenerational math-phobia come from: parents who don't grasp core concepts and are scared off, and can't help their own children, creating an ongoing cycle.