[2008 me] fell in love with the "it just works" and "an actually usable GUI plus Unix under the hood" and "they actually sweat the small stuff" [...] [By 2018, say] The user-annoyance-factor difference between modern Windows and macOS is very slight.
I teach university biochemistry. After eight or ten years, I began to feel that I was no longer a novice.
“Move fast and break things” is a monument to an aberrant culture of arrogance and dismissive impatience. Based on hypercompetitive greed. (That for a generation was funded by cheap money chasing itself around I search of a drain.)
It’s no coincidence that importing this culture to education produces experiences that are superficial and brittle. It’s difficult to think of a counterexample.
Glass houses, my friend. Academia demands people spend their entire lives slowly crawling up a ladder while simultaneously threatening to kick them off that ladder for a large portion of that climb. Spend your life working towards tenure only to get denied and wash out after 15-20 years seems insane.
a decade of your life to get past "novice" level for teaching something like CS to high school students is not something we should be pushing to replicate in other fields.
Education is begging to be disrupted. Maybe this guy doesn't have all the answers, but pretending like what we have is good is a joke. He's on a better track than sitting in a classroom trying to get past "novice" during the most productive time of his life.
You are talking about the restrictive, punitive world of academia where you constantly have to please the powers that be in order to step up. OP was talking about their own feelings about their own abilities in their job.
The parallel to software engineering feels correct to me, particularly if we're talking about working at a giant company like Google. No matter how good of a developer you are you still need to battle yearly reviews, stack ranking, peer review etc. etc in order to advance. But you can strip all that away and still recognize that after two years in the industry you're not that advanced as a developer.
The crucial difference is that in the software engineering world you can take your misplaced confidence, strike out and try something. Worst case it'll fail and you move on. As a teacher with misplaced confidence you can strike our, try something and mess up the educations of children and parents who put their trust in you.
Statistically, what are the odds that you're someone who actually understands enough about teaching and learning to be able to identify why education is 'broken' and successfully 'disrupt' it, as opposed to someone who just thinks they understand it but actually is suffering from Dunning-Kruger syndrome?
If a guy in a dirty denim jacket comes to you outside the bus station and tells you he's Jesus, he absolutely might be Jesus. However assuming that he's not is a perfectly good heuristic.
"Statistically" implies some kind of measurable "teacher skill unit" that one is
a) fully aware of or
b) could be measured, and
c) is precise enough to differentiate between "able to help improve education" and "not able to improve education", and
d) this skill unit is in any way accurate.
Of course none of these are true, and in fact teaching is an amorphous and situation-specific concept that defies all attempts to replicate or quantify success. All attempts thus far to do so have failed in glorious and spectacular ways at every level (e.g. No Child Left Behind Act of 2002).
In reality, the skillset a person who can successfully improve the state of CS education has may or may not be related to their time spent actually teaching or their skill at teaching.
Hell, even one's time spent teaching is mostly uncorrelated with one's skill at teaching. We all know teachers in our childhoods who had many years of experience and yet remained terrible at their jobs.
A good teacher may in fact be the very worst kind of person to fix teaching.
A large part of that is that tools + procedures expand to fill the available space - if there are people willing to spend 20 years doing the same work, the work expands to fill 20 years of your life.
It's more about the social landscape than the practical requirements.
She has published all kinds of different work: comprehensive surveys, biographies of key figures, memoir, the works. She’s so prolific, clear, and consistent that you can just follow your nose to whichever entry point strikes your fancy.
We had a telephone system installed at work, the default password from the company who did all the installs in our area was the upside down version of Boobies
I think TedDoesntTalk got confused because the OP reversed the order if the digits. “80085” turned upside down reads “SBOOB”, which doesn’t make sense to me and, I guess, to them.
But still, it may have confused TedDoesntTalk because, in the general case, have to flip over the calculator. It certainly took me longer to recognize this than when they had written 58008.
But there’s a kernel of an interesting idea in there. Imagine a world where all apps used by everyone were as user oriented as Emacs. Impossible, fantasy, utopian, never, and I agree. But a way to contextualize how much we’ve given up.
> Many people can contribute to the development of the system, for the most part without interfering with each other. This has led the EMACS system to become more powerful than any previous editor.
> User customization helps in another, subtler way, by making the whole user community into a breeding and testing ground for new ideas.
RMS wrote these words in 1981. Org mode was released in 2003 (! twenty years ago?!) and added functionality that for many users is much of what Emacs offers. Today there is a mature ecosystem of incredibly high quality packages, and Emacs itself continues to become even more extensible, with the underlying infrastructure helping “libraries” become even more well behaved and composable.
This part of the story alone is a staggering triumph, comparable to the success of the Linux kernel and all that it has become, absorbed, encompassed, and grown to nurture.
Both changed everything in an epistemologically qualitative manner. Life before calculus/microwave, and life after calculus/microwave.
How did we warm up leftovers before the microwave?
What did the world look like before I learned calculus?