Boys falling behind in education
Boys falling behind in education
This is something close to home for me, I have 3 boys, the education system doesn't seem to cater to a lot of boys.
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I dropped out on my 16th birthday and I never completed level 1 NCEA. I asked to do a programming class and showed them a program I had written, but all they could offer me was Microsoft Visual Basic. Which, from my understanding, is stuff like putting a button on the screen, clicking it, and making it say "button clicked" (that was year 12's programme for 16-17 year olds, but it's probably more suited to a 10 year old's level). I wanted to learn pre-uni stuff like 'c' and c++ but they didn't teach that. I don't think they even taught Python.
The male teacher who I talked to on this matter was really boring and uninspiring. I didn't see how any of my classes would help me with my plans. The principal and secretary of the school kept on dragging me and my divorced parents into meetings because I was bogging down the school's stats. They really are just a bunch of useless paper pushers.
I'd like to volunteer to help primary school children or speak in high school assemblies, but it's impossible to do this, because the government-owned schools don't give a crap about what's good for people. Once I tried to sign up for Big Brothers Big Sisters, but the reference checks were impossible for me to pass. I think they wanted 3 people who had known me for 5+ years and it couldn't be my best mate or family lol. Nobody has really known me closely for 5+ years because I've never held a full time job for 12 months. Like the wojak/doomer meme I'm mostly invisible in this society.
The government won't fix this. What radical change to education could they possibly make? They can tweak a bit of administration, but the rotten core of the education system will remain.
I'd expect at a high school level for any programming course to focus on the fundamentals rather than being particularly worried about any given language.
These days Python would probably be a better choice than Visual Basic; but given how many languages someone working professionally will be exposed to, it doesn't matter that much. They're all just different tools and which one you use really comes down to what problem you're solving.
For late primary / early high school I still think BASIC is a great introductory language; there's a new 80s style PC - Commander X16 that has a really cool looking BASIC coming with it that also has the advantage of being completely offline so very safe to just give to kids to wail on.
Visual Basic is still alive in MANY company codebases across the world. It's not a great language for developers, but it's a perfectly acceptable first language and still used professionally.
Yeah, and is the basis of a lot of the more complicated scripting in Excel; which rightly or wrongly is a very heavily used tool in business. It is also a bit more involved than interpreting screen clicks etc. Its not fun to use, but its also not useless especially if it helps you learn the basics of things.
Should've done Visual Basic, there's way more to it than dragging and dropping WinForms controls in the visual designer and writing event handlers to pop up messages when you click a button.
Try writing a Tic Tac Toe game for example.
For learning the basics of programming, it'll do if it's the only language on offer. If you ever make it into the industry, you'll eventually realise that the language doesn't matter as much as the concepts and you'll have to learn a bunch of languages anyway
Yeah maybe VB isn't so bad, it was the lack of inspiration from teachers and lack of role models and advice that ruined it for me.