“For instance, last September, we opened an innovative new school in partnership with IBM that focuses on computer science. It’s a six-year high school – grades 9 through 14, that’s right: 14 – so students graduate with a Regents degree and an associate’s degree and they also get a place in line for a job at IBM."
Is it just me, or is this a really great idea? First of all, by grade 12, these kids will probably already have useful skills. So even if they don’t decide to complete grades 13 and 14, they are already more useful than normal high school students. If they do decide to stay until grade 14, they get relatively good jobs two years before they otherwise would have graduated from college.
Even if this sort of program doesn’t become widespread, the concept seems to have a lot of potential. NY is lucky to have a forward thinking guy like Bloomberg in charge. Here in San Francisco, the city supervisors are a bunch of nuts. Seriously, they are fucking crazy. (mayor is ok though)
New York has specialized high schools for Arts, Math and Science, and I think something social sciencey too. These were set up before Computer Science became a discipline of its own.
So, although it’s a good idea, it’s not a radical rethink of anything; it’s more of an update to modern times.
But it is interesting and useful to see that Computer Science was not bundled in with the Math and Science high school. Perhaps that makes for better marketing of graduates (not to mention another budget line for human capital preparation).
If I had to redo high school, I would have definitely taken much deeper computer programming classes then the garbage world history electives. It’s a real applicable skill you can walk away with.
I know a major news station recently published some article about how companies want “well rounded” candidates and are shunning away from Bschool’s, but at the junior level as a grunt, I doubt companies actually care. When your job requires smoozing with clients, then fine, it matters.
Yeah, screw history. Even those who know history are destined to have to repeat it, because there are just too many who don’t, and the ride is more exciting if you don’t know how it all ends ahead of time.
Make no mistake, you can’t excel at computer science without excelling at math. If you truly want to understand and learn computer science you need a very solid math background, so all high school classes should be geared towards math, including probability, geometry (VERY IMPORTANT for abstract thinking) and other subjects that are overlooked. Anyone can learn how to write for loops. Majority can learn how to deal with recursion. Some can learn dynamic programing and advanced graph theory, but no one will directly teach you to organize and structure your thoughts better than math, and that skills, ladies and gentlment is critical if you ever want to have a successful career as software engineer
We don’t know that the CS schools won’t teach any history. We also don’t know that the graduates of this school will not be sociable. Even if this was the case on average, 80% of programmers don’t really need to be great schmoozers. As long as the top 20% or so are ok, that might be fine.
I love watching stuff on WWII with other people and when they say things like, “Oh yeah, Normandy was crazy how they stormed those beaches.” I always look at them and go, “Oh, so you’ve seen this one already?”
Also, history, literature is also VERY IMPORTANT. You can’t become a great software developer without massive imgaination and memory, and nothing trains imagination and memory like history and literature.
I would give Black Sawn +1, but i really don’t understand why he quoted Stalin as his signature before. That disgust me.
I should mention that I never studied the US civil war or the battle of Normandy in school. However, I still know about these events. Just because something is not covered in high school does not mean that you won’t eventually learn about it.
Did you read the quote? It wasn’t an inspirational quote, it was a comment regarding the role of US manufacturing in WWII from someone who clearly had a good knowledge of the course of events. BTW, you can study and learn a great deal of history from a character without prescribing to their beliefs. It really annoys me when people get a stick up their butt about historical individuals and shut down all open minded discussion on the topic. I think we can all agree he was a nut without getting bent out of shape about it, seeing as how we’re all in agreement on the big picture.
It was emphasizing the importance of manufacturing production 1) economically and 2) for the strength of a nation. It was partly driven by a debate where a bunch of posters from the former Soviet block mentioned the US’s military involvement in WWII as not crucial to the victory. And largely they were right, given that 70% of German casualties through the war were incurred on the Eastern Front, however, our manufacturing contribution was key, as Stalin himself stated. I also thought it was an interesting quote because it was recorded at a Tehran conference (where Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt were discussing how they would manage postwar territories and assuming victory) before D-Day even occured. So at whatever time I thought it was an interesting endorsement of American production (which has obviously been let to decline) and it’s central role in our strength and identity. Cry about it, I quoted Stalin on American production in WWII. Not to mention the fact that that hasn’t even been in my signature for about a year. Jaysus.
Of course, none of that is really important. My counter question is what’s the purpose of your panties being all up in a bunch?
I understood the initial purpose of the quote, and there was one Russian guy that was so adamant that the West had absolutely nothing to do with the ultimate defeat of the Nazis that I figured that the quote was to remind him that even Stalin thought that the West was an important part of the outcome.
I did think that the quote stayed there in your sig for an awfully long time, but figured that nothing better had come up for a while.
You treat stalin as historic figure, i treat him as a mass murderer, an inch below hitler. I would have never quoted him in respect for all people who lost their lives because of his madness. There are a lot of other people worth quoting. I was irritated by his name showing up wether i would open any topics and would see your comment. I am glad you got rid of it. Good riddance.
Aren’t schools these days very much geared towards teaching with computers?
My wife’s parents are both teachers and everyone at their school has a laptop on their desk during class. Is this the norm in most schools these days in developed countries?
There should definitely be classes dedicated to not only CS but also to general stuff like how to create a website, how to make the most of google/twitter, etc.
I was having some interesting conversations with my in-laws over Easter about the how different things are with computers and google and what not as sources of information. They were arguing that a lot of creativity is being replaced with cut-and-paste thinking. Kids are just googling stuff and getting ideas of the net instead of thinking for themselves. I don’t know, I think every generation looks at the new generation and thinks “kids these days, they’re so different, blah, blah, blah”, but it does make you wonder how all this technology and access to information and social networking is affecting us, for better or for worse.
