Just read Alan Kay’s Early History of Smalltalk. It was timely for me because Brian Marick’s mention of the New Math put me in auto-rant mode on how schools optimize for students who are unlikely to excel in the subjects they are being taught.

One of the themes of Alan Kay’s sparkling career has been to try to make computers accessible to children as a learning tool and his history is full of little anecdotes about how he would teach Smalltalk to twelve year-olds and they would spontaneously invent stuff.

What was so wonderful about this idea were the myriad of children’s projects that could spring off the humble boxes. And some of the earliest were tools! This was when we got really excited. For example, Marion Goldeen’s (12 yrs old) painting system was a full-fledged tool. A few yuears later, so was Susan Hamet’s (12 yrs old) OOP illustration system (with a design that was like the MacDraw to come). Two more were Bruce Horn’s (15 yrs old) music score capture system and Steve Ptz’s (15 yrs old) circuit design system. Looking back, this could be called another example in computer science of the “early success syndrome.”

I get the impression though that Kay thought of this as a failure as he was looking to revolutionize education as a whole rather than train the next generation of super-geniuses (like himself).

The successes were real, but they weren’t as general as we thought. They wouldn’t extend into the future as stringly as we hoped. The children were chosen from the Palo Alto schools (hardly an average background) and we tended to be much more excited about the successes than the difficulties. In part, that we were seeing was the “hack phenomenon,” that, for any given pursuit, a particular 5% of the population will jump into it naturally, while the 80% or so who can learn it in time do not find it at all natural.

I wonder how he feels now when he looks back?

He, along with his team at Parc, invented a huge chunk of the technology that has made modern computing successful.  But computers have still not had much impact on the way kids are taught. When they are not used as glorified textbooks, they are used to teach PowerPoint skills and word-processing.

I wonder if he would have had more success if he had optimized for the kids who are excited about computers? The sweet spot for his glorious Squeak still seems to be kids who find joy in creating and exploring. I wonder what would have happened if he had stuck with that 5% who jumped in naturally instead of trying to satisfy a broader audience? (If someone runs into him, can you ask him for me?)

The rest of Kay’s paper is well worth a read. It’s inspirational despite its underlying theme of if only they had listened to us. He was telling his bosses at Xerox in 1971 that

In the 1990’s there will be millions of personal computers. They will be the size of notebooks of today, have high-resolution flat-screen reflective display.s, wigh less than ten pounds, have ten to twenty times the computing and storage capacity of an Alto. Let’s call them Dynabooks.

The purchase price will be about that of a color television set of the era, although most of the machines will be given away by manufacturers who will be marketing the content rather than the container of personal computing.

He talks a lot about education and about constructionist ideas and about how schools didn’t teach real world skills.

The general topic was education and it was the first time I heard Marvin Minsky speak. He put forth a terrific diatribe against traditional education methods, and from him I heard the ideas of Piaget and Papert for the first time. Marvin’s talk was about how we think about complex situations and why schools are really bad places to learn these skills. He didn’t have to make any claims about computer+kids to make his point. It was clear that education and learning had to be rethought in the light of 20th century cognitive psychology and how good thinkers really think.

He ends on a sad note

When it was hard to do anything whether good or bad, enough time was taken so that the result was usually good. Now we can make things almost trivially, especially in software, but most of the designs are trivial as well. This is inverse vandalism: the making of things because you can. Couple this to even less sophisticated buyers and you have generated an exploitation marketplace similar to that set up for teenagers. A counter to this is to generate enormous disatisfaction with one’s designs using the entire history of human art as a standard and goal. Then the trick is to decouple the disatisfaction from self worth–otherwise it is either too depressing or one stops too soon with trivial results.

Not sure whether he is advocating that we compare our efforts with the entire history of human art and become inevitably dissatisfied or to go ahead and compare and be happy anyway.

[Here's a post that I started about 2 years ago and probably will never finish - which is a shame because it would've been a good one....]

I always look forward to the Science Fair because …

…. rant about baking soda volcanos

…. rant about the winner is a model

…. discussion about benefit of helping kids

…. follow-up post about constructionism

… a bit about Jazz’s piano teacher

Dylan had to make a castle for school and made Leeds Castle which is just up the road from where my sister lives.

If you look closely, you can see the Frenchman in the tower about to fetchez la vache to throw at the silly English kerniggets below.

My lovely wife sent me this:

Mr. Whitson taught sixth-grade science. On the first day of class, he gave us a lecture about a creature called the cattywampus, an ill-adapted nocturnal animal that was wiped out during the Ice Age. He passed around a skull as he talked. We all took notes and later had a quiz.

When he returned my paper, I was shocked. There was a big red X through each of my answers. I had failed. There had to be some mistake! I had written down exactly what Mr. Whitson said. Then I realized that everyone in the class had failed. What had happened?

Very simple, Mr. Whitson explained. He had made up all the stuff about the cattywampus. There had never been any such animal. The information in our notes was, therefore, incorrect. Did we expect credit for incorrect answers?

Needless to say, we were outraged. What kind of test was this? And what kind of teacher?

http://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~leonghw/Courses/cattywampus.html

I wish I had had a teacher like that!

By an odd coincidence, I gave Dylan the lecture last night about how teachers are often wrong and you need to think critically about what they are telling you. Sometimes they make mistakes.
Sometimes you just heard them wrong. Either way, critical thinking helps you see through them.

When I was at grammar school, I used to rank the subjects according to how ‘like maths‘ they were.

We were taught chemistry, physics and biology as separate subjects and, while I enjoyed all the sciences, I enjoyed physics the most because it was more mathematical. Chemistry had less maths and biology, at that level, hardly any at all. In my 11 year old mind, physics was pretty much just applied maths and therefore fun.

In geography, we covered such topics as map reading, how rocks are formed and weather but I never thought of it as science because science was something I enjoyed and I didn’t enjoy geography. Geography had a little bit of counting, measuring and charting but less maths than the sciences. History had no maths at all and I hated it.

At Dylan’s school, they have a single subject called science and they cover such topics as map reading, how rocks are formed and weather. Dylan hates it. In 7th grade he’ll do life science but he already knows he’ll hate it because he hates science. It’s like they want to avoid exposing kids to the hard sciences until it’s too late. Until they have formed an opinion one way or the other.

I have this theory that the people who design school curricula don’t really like science or maths but they know it’s important to the economy and that not enough people are following science careers. The remedy? Make the science in schools appealing to people who don’t like science!

I wonder if they stop to consider the effect it has on people who actually like science? If a kid likes science would making it less science-y make him like it more or less?

I know the answer for me and I know the answer for Dylan. Maths good. Science good. The more the better.

The other day, I went to Dylan’s open house at school and met his maths teacher. We went through the usual awkward self-introduction:

“So, who do you belong to?”

“Dylan”

“Oh! Dylan! He works so hard!”

“No! Dylan Lawrence!”

Apparently, Dylan’s teacher was under the misapprehension that Dylan works hard at maths. I tried to explain to her that maths was Dylan’s favourite subject because it required no work at all. She found the notion very odd. I thought it was obvious.

For me, at Dylan’s age, maths was my favourite subject too. It required no study or work and, every now and then, the teacher would give you some cool puzzles to work on. I would often slyly do maths in other classes when the teacher wasn’t looking. Apparently, it hadn’t occurred to Dylan’s maths teacher that people would enjoy doing maths.

I have encountered this odd attitude before. When Dylan started fourth grade, at back to school night, his teacher explained how hard maths was for the children but that she had a bunch of manipulatives to help with the difficult concepts and she would take them through it step by step and, usually, by the end of the year they would understand.

What would it be like, I wonder, to have math teacher who enjoyed maths? I had english teachers that enjoyed their subject ..and history …and physics …and chemistry …and biology …and french …but never maths.

What if the default assumption in the maths class was that kids like maths and find it easy. What would that class be like?

Imagine if, at the start of the year, they said “OK. Everyone who loves maths come with me. We are going to teach you separately. Your teacher like maths too”. What would that class be like?

To their credit, Dylan’s school has advanced placement for maths and they give the new sixth graders a test. If they pass, they go into a class with a bunch of surly seventh graders who don’t like maths.

Anyway, Dylan just passed the test that lets him take high school maths next year. All he needs to do now is get the form signed and handed in on time which, apparently, was the hardest thing he had to do all year in maths class.

Why is it so hard for him to get a form signed? I don’t know where he gets it from.

The Guardian has an article about new government guidelines for teaching creationism in religious education (RE) classes. Schools will also be required to teach the creation myths of all the major religions and will be required to compare and contrast natural and supernatural explanations of our origins.

This is nothing new to me, of course, since we were taught creationism in school when I was a lad. As I have often said, there is no better way to inoculate teenagers against some of the zanier myths than to have them debate it with their peers.

[to our second year (7th grade) RE teacher]

Miss! So, was Jesus a bastard?

[teacher]

Er. Well. It’s true that Mary and Joseph weren’t married when Jesus was conceived, but we don’t usually call him a bastard.

Wasn’t me asking the question, by the way.

My best, most vivid memories of school comes from the second and third year of secondary school (that’s 7th & 8th grade to all you mercans). That’s the period when I got into the most trouble, had my biggest triumphs, copped my first feel, made my first teacher cry (and the second a couple of days later), got caned for the first time [could that be related to the previous memory? - ed], was most active in sports, got beaten around the head hardest by a teacher, wrote my first song, wrote the most lines (le silence aides le travail) and a thousand other similar memories.

It was shocking to think, when I dropped my son off for his first day of middle school this morning, to think that those kids were only a year younger than I was in Mr Gooden’s class.

I feel a whole lot of memory-related blogs coming on…

Dylan starts middle school tomorrow.

I remember it like it was just yesterday. Mrs Stevenson in her wizarding robes marching us down to the Junior Assembly Hall sounding exactly like Professor McGonagall - she might even have been scottish.

Such a long time ago and, at the same time, just yesterday.