Day 583 of 1000
It is my daughter, Kelly’s, birthday today. She is now a 19 year old Statistics major at North Carolina State University and is taking her first two formal programming classes, Statistical programming with SAS and Java. She has also programmed with the R statistical programming language. She enjoys programming a great deal, but is a little frustrated with her Java class. Kelly is not frustrated with the material; she enjoys that. She is frustrated because I taught a lot of programming to Christian, but virtually none to Kelly.
She said, “Dad, why did you teach Christian how to program and not me?”
I said, “Because you enjoyed other stuff like art and crafts and Christian wanted to know how to program his Palm Pilot.”
She said, “You should have taught me, too. I need to know how to program now and I am having to learn it from scratch.”
“You really have to have something you want to do with programming or it is really boring,” I replied.
“You made us do Mavis Beacon Typing 15 minutes every day for two years and we didn’t have any real use for it until years later. It was really boaring at the time, but got A LOT out of being able to type faster and better than everyone else. We are really glad you made us do that.”
All this was true. I think I failed Kelly in this. Christian learned how to program on his own, but I bought him the learning materials, made computers available to him, and vmade a program of study that was both systematic and and integrated part of his homeschool curricula. The reason we did all this for Christian was because he had something he wanted to accomplish. I should have thought to teach them both how to program whether they wanted to or not. The program we put together for Chrisian has given him a huge leg up both in class and with work opportunities. Any student who plans to get a hard (STEM) degree, would benefit from such a study program. I am just sorry I did not do this for Kelly.
I have decided that, when I finish my current series on Why not skip high school?, I will write a series on how we taught Christian to program. I will link to that series from this post as soon as it is started.
I’m looking forward to your next series! I am interested in learning to program for Android and am very open to ideas for projects for Brenden. My only programming experience is in Visual Foxpro and whatever that programming language was in AutoCAD – I dont remember the name now….
Great Gene! If you want to program for Android, I was recommended a new Java programming environment by a friend. I might blog about that later today. The programming language for AutoCAD is AutoLISP. I hope this series is not to far out of the mainstream for most kids. We were a little bit hardcore and started Christian out with a C# book, then moved on to C/C++ before he started picking up PHP, Python and Assembly on his own. He is now picking up Java as part of his class.
Whoosh! (Barely felt the wind on my bald pate!)… but still I’m fascinated by each of your posts, Ken–good reading– and always interested in your family, interests and activities. See you tomorrow!