<story><title>To my daughter&apos;s high school programming teacher</title><url>https://www.usenix.org/blog/my-daughters-high-school-programming-teacher</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gemma</author><text>&amp;gt; Minority entities will be teased practically any time they exist, regardless of sector or age, and they need to be taught to handle it well.&lt;p&gt;Yeah? So this high school programming class isn&amp;#x27;t so much a programming class as a crash course in coping mechanisms for gender-based harassment?&lt;p&gt;Please. It&amp;#x27;s the educator&amp;#x27;s job to create a safe space for, you know, education--for every student in the class, not just the privileged majority.  It&amp;#x27;s their job to track their students&amp;#x27; education and interest level, and make adjustments if either starts dropping. It&amp;#x27;s not their job to facilitate a hostile environment and let minority students flounder in the interests of &amp;#x27;real world training&amp;#x27;. It&amp;#x27;s not their job to decide that since it&amp;#x27;s hard for women in tech in real life, it should be hard in their class. Education isn&amp;#x27;t about maintaining the world we already live in, it&amp;#x27;s about shaping the world our kids will live in.&lt;p&gt;You want real world training? Show me an HR department in a software company that&amp;#x27;s fine with comments like &amp;quot;get in the kitchen and make me sandwich&amp;quot;. Which real world are you advocating this high school programming class introduce to a 16-year-old girl?</text></item><item><author>cookiecaper</author><text>So, was this article about the student&amp;#x27;s experience or the mother&amp;#x27;s? Because it reads like it&amp;#x27;s about the mother. The guys in class suggested that their peer go make a sandwich. That&amp;#x27;s the only accusation actually made against the class and the teacher. While I don&amp;#x27;t endorse such teasing, it&amp;#x27;s certainly in no way specific to computer programming, and it&amp;#x27;s not anything like the intensity one would expect when trolls find an article.&lt;p&gt;Minority entities will be teased practically any time they exist, regardless of sector or age, and they need to be taught to handle it well. We can continue to attempt to stop the teasing altogether, but in the meantime we have to live in the Real World, and if this child quit programming because a few guys made a kitchen joke, the mother is really misdirecting her efforts by writing a letter to the teacher.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s hard to imagine that any rape joke would be allowed to fly in our classrooms where students can hardly wield pencils anymore, and if you read carefully, you&amp;#x27;ll see that it doesn&amp;#x27;t appear to have occurred. It appears to me that the author is attempting to use some clever wording to create an impression that the &amp;quot;harassment&amp;quot; was much more intense than it actually was by subtly crossing over into her personal experience with online trolls.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cookiecaper</author><text>&amp;gt;Which real world are you advocating this high school programming class introduce to a 16-year-old girl?&lt;p&gt;The real world where HR thought police aren&amp;#x27;t sitting in every room of every company. The real world where even HR people try to &amp;quot;make jokes&amp;quot; and be funny. The real world where HR people generally judge the severity of a harassment complaint by favoritism, which reality a blunt HR person (not employed at my current employer) just relayed to me recently. The real world where real humans, not perfectly politically correct robo-trons, must work, play, and engage.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t endorse teasing that harms a person&amp;#x27;s feelings. But I also think we shouldn&amp;#x27;t be so thin-skinned that we shrivel up and quit the first time a trite, cliched joke is thrown our way, because that happens all the time to everybody (your peers _will_ find a difference to comment upon no matter how mainstream you think you are), and if you can&amp;#x27;t handle it, you&amp;#x27;ll have a lot of difficulty handling more serious emotional situations, like getting passed up for a promotion.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;d be great if the programming teacher first, was made aware of this problem, and the article never claims he was, and second, was able to stop the problem, but there&amp;#x27;s no guarantee he could&amp;#x27;ve effectively done so even if he tried (and he may have), just as corporate HR departments can&amp;#x27;t stop all incidents of &amp;quot;harassment&amp;quot; even though they &amp;quot;try&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;I believe the author probably wrote the piece primarily as a hypothetical, but I also believe it was bad taste to do so since this supposedly is traceable back to a real person who may not deserve that type of criticism, and I don&amp;#x27;t believe her fundamental complaint (&amp;quot;someone said something that made my daughter sad, so you all should feel bad :( &amp;quot;) is very worthy of the community&amp;#x27;s attention.</text></comment>
<story><title>To my daughter&apos;s high school programming teacher</title><url>https://www.usenix.org/blog/my-daughters-high-school-programming-teacher</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gemma</author><text>&amp;gt; Minority entities will be teased practically any time they exist, regardless of sector or age, and they need to be taught to handle it well.&lt;p&gt;Yeah? So this high school programming class isn&amp;#x27;t so much a programming class as a crash course in coping mechanisms for gender-based harassment?&lt;p&gt;Please. It&amp;#x27;s the educator&amp;#x27;s job to create a safe space for, you know, education--for every student in the class, not just the privileged majority.  It&amp;#x27;s their job to track their students&amp;#x27; education and interest level, and make adjustments if either starts dropping. It&amp;#x27;s not their job to facilitate a hostile environment and let minority students flounder in the interests of &amp;#x27;real world training&amp;#x27;. It&amp;#x27;s not their job to decide that since it&amp;#x27;s hard for women in tech in real life, it should be hard in their class. Education isn&amp;#x27;t about maintaining the world we already live in, it&amp;#x27;s about shaping the world our kids will live in.&lt;p&gt;You want real world training? Show me an HR department in a software company that&amp;#x27;s fine with comments like &amp;quot;get in the kitchen and make me sandwich&amp;quot;. Which real world are you advocating this high school programming class introduce to a 16-year-old girl?</text></item><item><author>cookiecaper</author><text>So, was this article about the student&amp;#x27;s experience or the mother&amp;#x27;s? Because it reads like it&amp;#x27;s about the mother. The guys in class suggested that their peer go make a sandwich. That&amp;#x27;s the only accusation actually made against the class and the teacher. While I don&amp;#x27;t endorse such teasing, it&amp;#x27;s certainly in no way specific to computer programming, and it&amp;#x27;s not anything like the intensity one would expect when trolls find an article.&lt;p&gt;Minority entities will be teased practically any time they exist, regardless of sector or age, and they need to be taught to handle it well. We can continue to attempt to stop the teasing altogether, but in the meantime we have to live in the Real World, and if this child quit programming because a few guys made a kitchen joke, the mother is really misdirecting her efforts by writing a letter to the teacher.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s hard to imagine that any rape joke would be allowed to fly in our classrooms where students can hardly wield pencils anymore, and if you read carefully, you&amp;#x27;ll see that it doesn&amp;#x27;t appear to have occurred. It appears to me that the author is attempting to use some clever wording to create an impression that the &amp;quot;harassment&amp;quot; was much more intense than it actually was by subtly crossing over into her personal experience with online trolls.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>peter-fogg</author><text>Thank you. If we accept discrimination of minorities as inevitable, then it will be.</text></comment>