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In today's Journal, an Albuquerque legislator is proposing computer programming as a language to fulfill high school students' language credits, instead of Spanish, French or German.
After seeing plenty of people take Spanish (when for them Spanish is spoken at home) because it's an easy A, I can't help but wonder if maybe this isn't such a bad idea. Would imagine 50% of high school graduates can't remember the little they did learn in terms of foreign languages by now.
As a CS minor I wish they would do that here. I'm already bilingual, but not in a language typically offered at most Universities, so I'll probably have to pick up Spanish in the near future.
This idea about classifying computer programming as a "foreign language" has been around for years. I don't know how it should be classified. There was also a time when computer science in college was part of the math department. So was it "math" back in the day? Could it be bundled up into different disciplines like math, foreign language,logic, etc?
In today's Journal, an Albuquerque legislator is proposing computer programming as a language to fulfill high school students' language credits, instead of Spanish, French or German.
After seeing plenty of people take Spanish (when for them Spanish is spoken at home) because it's an easy A
What's everyone else here think?
An interesting concept but I'm not fully convinced of the advantage New Mexico Senator Candelabra claims "could help teach an important – and potentially lucrative – skill to students in classrooms around the state". Getting an education is important. But we really need to get on a track of what we really need. "Currently, New Mexico high school students are required to complete at least 24 units to receive a diploma, and at least one of those units must come from a category of classes that includes a language other than English". Offhand, I don't even know what a "unit" is. My native language is Spanish and it was not an "easy A" in the required 60 days of class I had to take it in a U.S. School. In fact I failed, sorry, you don't speak the Spanish we teach. I also lived overseas (Europe and Asia) where it was very common to find multilingual people who frequently used their languages. I was a programmer in a previous life, (Assembly, Pascal, C, Basic) and I finally saw some of the similarities of the languages.
If it helps a student, then allow them to substitute Cobol or whatever instead of a language the student may not be interested in and is only taking just to complete a requirement.
A related article in the Journal about a dual language program at Truman Middle School which seems to be working. Students in the program get half of their day’s instruction in English and the other half in Spanish. Specifically, they learn social studies and science in Spanish and learn math and language arts in English.
. . .
After seeing plenty of people take Spanish (when for them Spanish is spoken at home) because it's an easy A, I can't help but wonder if maybe this isn't such a bad idea.
If it's an easy A, then how come native English speakers have been failing English for more than a century?
jakabedy - Simple answer is the language taught in schools is not the language most people have learned from their parents. The Truman Middle School technique sounds like it might work.
I remember being required to read nonsense like "Wuthering Heights" and similar "literature". What a complete waste of time. Eventually I discovered Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Heinlein and John LeCarre. Now those guys could tell a story.
I still remember a very small parts of Spanish I was coerced into studying in High School. If we ever live in New Mexico I will get a Rosetta Stone language course and learn the language because it will be useful.
Programming languages have little in common with natural languages. It's not like you'll suddenly be able to communicate with someone across the world. I think there's probably better ways to encourage programming classes if that's something you want to do.
Programming languages have little in common with natural languages. It's not like you'll suddenly be able to communicate with someone across the world. I think there's probably better ways to encourage programming classes if that's something you want to do.
If they speak the same computer language as me, I absolutely can communicate with them, even if only one of us speaks English.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ABQConvict
Utter BS. Computer 'language' is not a human language, it is a code. And that is what professionals in the IT field call it, 'code'.
And yet the law is referred to as the US Code, or perhaps the Health Code, or Zoning Code, or maybe Code of Ethics. Quintessential human language.
100 years ago, when they first started foisting terrible-even-when-written literature like that of Melville or the Brontë sisters on hapless schoolchildren, the purpose was to enable them to engage with the law (understanding it, following it, and perhaps one day writing additions to it or striking down parts of it) in an informed manner, probably more so than any other purpose. In essence, they were teaching kids code.
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