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Is our children learning?
- Everybody is sad and lonely. Well, not everybody. And not all the time. It's not clear why this should be. Life shouldn't be that complex, and I don't think it's logically necessary that it be. We're trying to overthink it, I expect, (or at least we're misthinking) and it seems like we need to take a step back and reevaluate. Beyond that, I can offer very little, aside from the idea that the issue mostly comes out of being afraid of each other and ourselves in relation to each other.
- Summer camp is tremendously interesting. The instruction part of it is going a lot better than I thought it would, after the first day -- it seemed like we weren't going to be able to get anything across, and I was afraid that conflicts in teaching styles were going to undermine the whole learning process. But it turns out that Kris is a much better teacher than I'd originally thought; she just must've been nervous or stressed the first day, and her "get up and act things out" method is way less lame than I'd expected -- more "effective way" than "malarkey", even though we have highschool kids. And we're working increasingly well together. Today I walked a group of girls through writing a function to rotate the RGB values in an image... I think this was the first original code they'd written, and it was satisfying for me at least -- they were like, "we're going to make a new one of those??". And then we did it :) And then I had a group of kids volunteering to be in my group, when we walked across the campus to get lunch. I think our children is learning.
- At first I was struck by the self-segregation on the part of the campers... race/culture relations are terribly interesting. The white kids separate themselves out (they're less than half of the group, maybe a third), and it seems like the white boys and white girls aren't talking to each other. On the other hand, the AfAm kids are mostly socially globbed together, and they seem like they're having a great time of it... and there are two little Indian girls who don't seem like they're talking with anybody, except perhaps our singular Indian counselor. I assume public schools around here are more or less like this? ... (one of these days I will do cultural studies or social psychology or something)
- There are a couple of guys who can already write code, and I told them we're going to make an image spirally fractal in on itself, recursively :) It'll be kinda cool.
- Hmm, speaking of writing code, I think I hear some Java and mysqld calling me... half bleargh and half well-let's-get-gradschool-paid-for-by-doing-fun-edutech-work.
- Summer camp is tremendously interesting. The instruction part of it is going a lot better than I thought it would, after the first day -- it seemed like we weren't going to be able to get anything across, and I was afraid that conflicts in teaching styles were going to undermine the whole learning process. But it turns out that Kris is a much better teacher than I'd originally thought; she just must've been nervous or stressed the first day, and her "get up and act things out" method is way less lame than I'd expected -- more "effective way" than "malarkey", even though we have highschool kids. And we're working increasingly well together. Today I walked a group of girls through writing a function to rotate the RGB values in an image... I think this was the first original code they'd written, and it was satisfying for me at least -- they were like, "we're going to make a new one of those??". And then we did it :) And then I had a group of kids volunteering to be in my group, when we walked across the campus to get lunch. I think our children is learning.
- At first I was struck by the self-segregation on the part of the campers... race/culture relations are terribly interesting. The white kids separate themselves out (they're less than half of the group, maybe a third), and it seems like the white boys and white girls aren't talking to each other. On the other hand, the AfAm kids are mostly socially globbed together, and they seem like they're having a great time of it... and there are two little Indian girls who don't seem like they're talking with anybody, except perhaps our singular Indian counselor. I assume public schools around here are more or less like this? ... (one of these days I will do cultural studies or social psychology or something)
- There are a couple of guys who can already write code, and I told them we're going to make an image spirally fractal in on itself, recursively :) It'll be kinda cool.
- Hmm, speaking of writing code, I think I hear some Java and mysqld calling me... half bleargh and half well-let's-get-gradschool-paid-for-by-doing-fun-edutech-work.
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And, an image sprially fractal in on itself??
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Here's our page about the image filters we made today:
http://swiki.cc.gatech.edu:8080/icecamp/163
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i was afraid of this. that's not python, that's guzdial's insidious jython wrapper around a java wrapper around the java API!
I think I hear some Java and mysqld calling me
that's the dark side beckoning. use the source, luke. use python and postgresql.
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Exactly like that.
Even Cross Keys High School, which is the most ethnically diverse school in the state.
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And it's not like it doesn't all present itself with a python interface.
And it's not like the edutech/usability kids speak python. At the very least I'm getting them to switch to running their webserver on a proper OS :)
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His heart is in the right place, but he's more than a little bit confused. Also really loud. Stentorian, even.
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http://swiki.cc.gatech.edu:8080/icecamp/170
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I had a kid today who just hugged and hugged me after I worked almost two hours to show him the proper way to paddle on a kayak.
-Love,
the tan and fab. Whit :)
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There's nothing quite as satisfying as helping to bring about an epiphany. One of the kids today had this flash of understanding about variables, and I've been at least half-smiling since about 11am...
... although I guess you didn't get an epiphany so much as a slow and arduous learning process...
But still: rock, rock on. *hugs*