
To my daughter's high school programming teacher - Anechoic
https://www.usenix.org/blog/my-daughters-high-school-programming-teacher
======
acjohnson55
I feel for the daughter who (like many women before her) had a crappy
experience in the male-dominated programming world. I feel for the parent who
sees her daughter possibly reject a very fulfilling career path after a bad
initial experience, when the future could be so much better. But as a former
high school teacher, I also feel for the teacher. Giving them some benefit of
the doubt, I just want to point out a couple things:

1\. As many others have mentioned, if this is a public school, it's quite
unlikely that this teacher is college educated as a programmer, let alone has
ever been a professional developer. I'm sure they're teaching VB simply
because that's what they have experience with, probably making them the most
experienced programmer on staff at the school.

2\. High school bullies are typically quite good at restricting their bullying
to times when they're unlikely to be spotted by an authority figure. As a
teacher, you try hard to maintain awareness of the entire room as much as
possible, but there are always tons of gaps. You might be writing something on
the board, helping a student 1-on-1, addressing some other kid's behavior, or
doing any of dozens of other tasks.

3\. Most teachers try to keep tabs on their students on a personal level,
especially when they behavior or attitude noticeably changes, but not all
students open up. It takes _a lot_ of effort to maintain an authentic
connection. Parents have trouble connecting authentically with their children
--imagine doing it with scores of students per semester. And when it comes to
bullying, most teenagers downplay to avoid being though of as a snitch. Some
are self-conscious to be bailed out even when they haven't "snitched".

4\. For many of the author's suggestions, the teacher may be doing these
things (recruiting, cross-promoting, etc.), to the extent that they have time.
But these are outside the job of teaching. These are things the author could
be doing at the school too, but presumably she's too busy. I'm sure the
teacher can relate.

Teaching high school was by far the most grueling and emotionally taxing job
I've ever had. My work career also includes being a custodian at a health
club, a baseball umpire, a senior software engineer, and and a startup
founder. None of those jobs is anywhere near as demanding.

~~~
irahul
> I'm sure they're teaching VB simply because that's what they have experience
> with, probably making them the most experienced programmer on staff at the
> school.

VB is a fine language to get children interested in programming. Personally, I
know many people who weren't able to grasp programming via C but were pretty
excited about VB's gui designer and easy database connectivity. Most of the
introduction to VB didn't teach them much programming, but at least it got
them interested.

> High school bullies are typically quite good at restricting their bullying
> to times when they're unlikely to be spotted by an authority figure.

The author is being unfair when she is holding the teacher solely accountable
for bullying.

> It takes a lot of effort to maintain an authentic connection. Parents have
> trouble connecting authentically with their children--imagine doing it with
> scores of students per semester. And when it comes to bullying, most
> teenagers downplay to avoid being though of as a snitch. Some are self-
> conscious to be bailed out even when they haven't "snitched".

There is also the fact that being teacher's pet generally invites more
bullying. If they can't harass you, they will begin isolating you. And of
course, the general mentality isn't in favor of snitches even when the
snitches are hapless victims. Children don't have a strong sense of right and
wrong and peer pressure muddies it more.

> For many of the author's suggestions, the teacher may be doing these things
> (recruiting, cross-promoting, etc.), to the extent that they have time. But
> these are outside the job of teaching. These are things the author could be
> doing at the school too, but presumably she's too busy. I'm sure the teacher
> can relate.

I haven't taught at professional level, but I do like teaching. And I like to
teach people who are interested in learning. If I were a teacher, I won't
really do much recruiting and promotion. If the job requires me to do it, I
probably won't take it.

~~~
Tloewald
I think that if I were going to teach programming to high school kids I'd show
them the console in Chrome / Safari, because it's something they all have easy
access to (I assume we're talking about a first world country, right).

VB seems to me to be a poor choice because it doesn't intersect with the kids'
lives. They likely won't go home and build VB apps (on their Macs...) The
console is like lifting the curtain and revealing the motor underneath
something we all use every day.

~~~
irahul
To each his own. I find web development(dynamic or just html/css) doesn't have
the instant gratification something like VB has(it doesn't have to be VB). The
main purpose of teaching programming to high-schoolers is to con them into
learning it themselves. VB, despite its warts, was one of the most popular
programming languages of its time. Excel and VB owe its popularity to the
simple fact that they aren't hostile(or at least not as hostile as others) to
newcomers.

~~~
xauronx
As someone who learned programming in VB, I agree with you. As a junior high
kid I was able to make things from business calculators to arcade style games.
Was my code great? NO. Was it hip and trendy? Back then... maybe, but no. Am I
now a successful programmer "who knows better" with a degree/full time
job/start up? Yes.

I'm not sure VB was a "make or break" factor in my education, but it certainly
didn't help. Also, I'm trying to teach my girlfriend development and web
development, it turns out, IS NOT a good place to start.

~~~
Tloewald
I learned to program in school using BASIC on an Apple II, and it was great,
but that doesn't mean I think this is the way to teach programming today. As
recently as, say, 2000 desktop applications written in VB were kind of cool
and relevant. Today: not so much. In 2000 the original writer's daughter would
probably have bugged her for a Windows laptop and not a Macbook Pro.

> I'm trying to teach my girlfriend development and web development, it turns
> out, IS NOT a good place to start.

I totally agree, which is why I would teach _Javascript_ , not web
development.

~~~
xauronx
And then what happens when they go "Ok, so... can I actually make anything
with this? How would I use this in the real world?" Which is exactly what
happened to me a week ago.

Then you're on the hook for "Well, first you'll have to learn HTML, then
you'll have to learn how to access the HTML from javascript... then you'll
have to learn CSS to actually make it not look embarassing." I SUPPOSE I could
make my novice girlfriend write a backend server in node with her new found
looping and if/else if skills.

I think once she gets the basics down I'm going to have to switch her over to
objective-c, which is going to be a bitch but at least she can do something
and see results. I love javascript, but it's not a fun and immediately
rewarding experience like you get with a design->compile->run process.

------
cookiecaper
So, was this article about the student's experience or the mother's? Because
it reads like it's about the mother. The guys in class suggested that their
peer go make a sandwich. That's the only accusation actually made against the
class and the teacher. While I don't endorse such teasing, it's certainly in
no way specific to computer programming, and it's not anything like the
intensity one would expect when trolls find an article.

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.

It'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'll see that it doesn'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 "harassment" was much more intense than it actually was by
subtly crossing over into her personal experience with online trolls.

~~~
gemma
> 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.

Yeah? So this high school programming class isn't so much a programming class
as a crash course in coping mechanisms for gender-based harassment?

Please. It's the educator's job to create a safe space for, you know,
education--for every student in the class, not just the privileged majority.
It's their job to track their students' education and interest level, and make
adjustments if either starts dropping. It's not their job to facilitate a
hostile environment and let minority students flounder in the interests of
'real world training'. It's not their job to decide that since it's hard for
women in tech in real life, it should be hard in their class. Education isn't
about maintaining the world we already live in, it's about shaping the world
our kids will live in.

You want real world training? Show me an HR department in a software company
that's fine with comments like "get in the kitchen and make me sandwich".
Which real world are you advocating this high school programming class
introduce to a 16-year-old girl?

~~~
cookiecaper
>Which real world are you advocating this high school programming class
introduce to a 16-year-old girl?

The real world where HR thought police aren't sitting in every room of every
company. The real world where even HR people try to "make jokes" 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.

I don't endorse teasing that harms a person's feelings. But I also think we
shouldn'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't handle it, you'll have a lot
of difficulty handling more serious emotional situations, like getting passed
up for a promotion.

It'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's no guarantee he could've effectively done so even if he
tried (and he may have), just as corporate HR departments can't stop all
incidents of "harassment" even though they "try".

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't
believe her fundamental complaint ("someone said something that made my
daughter sad, so you all should feel bad :( ") is very worthy of the
community's attention.

~~~
kaitai
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why 16-year-old girls leave programming.
Remember, guys ganging up on you and telling them to make them a sandwich is
just funny! You're so thin-skinned, ladies! thought police!

[http://hoydenabouttown.com/20110218.9512/sexist-joke-
bingo/](http://hoydenabouttown.com/20110218.9512/sexist-joke-bingo/)

...almost got bingo... good work, cookiecaper.

~~~
serf
that's the most PC thing I've seen all week.

and I mean that in the worst possible way.

~~~
codygman
> Third, "politically correct" is a label principally used by reactionary
> dullards to dismiss arguments or objections that they see as excessively
> leftist. It's equivalent to calling someone a commie. Mind you, some people
> are communists, some people are knee-jerk excessive leftists, etc... but if
> that's true in a particular situation, you can just explain why it's true.
> Calling it "political correctness" is just a lowbrow dismissal.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6358263](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6358263)

------
RyanMcGreal
The entitled and largely unconscious male privilege in most of these HN
comments is pretty hard to stomach against the large and steadily-accumulating
picture of just how very _different_ this industry presents itself to men and
to women. Just because you don't directly experience or see it doesn't mean it
doesn't exist. Just because you haven't been (consciously) chauvinistic to a
woman doesn't mean women don't experience deep and pervasive chauvinism.

It's not a fucking "free choice" that women are making when they steer away
from programming in the face of the grotesque pastiche of misogyny and
bullying that underlies our vocation, in which most of the people who aren't
actually bullying women are falling over themselves to deny its existence or
make excuses for it.

Male programmers need to stop congratulating ourselves on how "libertarian"
and "meritocratic" we are and start taking responsibility for how profoundly
hostile and off-putting we have allowed this field to remain for most women.

~~~
hacker789
_We must protect the fairer sex at all costs._

This use of "privilege" as a targeted weapon to silence specific demographics
has to stop.

Women in the western world have always been among the safest, most privileged
people on Earth. This entire thread, in fact, has been a shining example of
female privilege.

No one cares that women soundly outnumber men in university admission, and
university graduation, and even high school graduation. No one cares that
young women without children (i.e. the majority) earn more money their male
counterparts. Heck, no one cares that it is men who overwhelmingly make up the
bottom of society.

Instead, we're having a collective anxiety attack because a hyper-privileged
white woman is upset that her hyper-privileged white daughter might have had
her feelings hurt in high school. This is surreal.

~~~
lambda
I know I shouldn't respond to the troll, but here goes.

> This use of "privilege" as a targeted weapon to silence specific
> demographics has to stop.

Sorry, no specific demographic is being "silenced" here. If you think that men
are being silenced, well, why are you able to speak?

> Women in the western world have always been among the safest, most
> privileged people on Earth.

Always been, hm? So they were privileged when they were denied suffrage until
less than 100 years ago? They were privileged when they were denied admission
to some of the country's top universities until just 30 years ago?

> This entire thread, in fact, has been a shining example of female privilege.

What, exactly, do you see as female privilege? What do you see women being
allowed to do, that men are not allowed to, that men are harassed for doing,
that men are driven out of the industry for doing due to attacks? And if you
do see any such behavior, perhaps someone being harassed for being a dancer,
or into musicals, or the like, please note whether it's women doing those
attacks, or other men.

> No one cares that women soundly outnumber men in university admission, and
> university graduation, and even high school graduation.

Awful generous of you to round down to "no one." If no one cares, why have you
heard about it? Wouldn't people who don't care not be writing articles about
it? There are plenty of people who care, who are concerned about this, who
write about it and worry about it. That's not "no one" caring.

However, despite all of that, there are many fewer women in technology, and
fewer still are programmers. Just because there might be other biases in other
fields, doesn't mean that we shouldn't worry about biases and harassment in
our own.

> Instead, we're having a collective anxiety attack because a hyper-privileged
> white woman is upset that her hyper-privileged white daughter might have had
> her feelings hurt in high school. This is surreal.

I'm not really clear on what you mean by "hyper-privileged". Is it a privilege
to be bullied and told to get into the kitchen? That doesn't really sound like
the definition of "privileged" to me.

Yes, there may be ways in which she is privileged compared to others. There
are other problems out there. But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to
address this one.

It is a problem when women don't enter a career due to harassment, and
indifference from others in face of said harassment. Can we have a realistic
discussion if a casual dirty joke counts as harassment? Sure. But there's a
difference between a casual dirty joke told by one conference attendee to
another, and several kids harassing another and telling her to get into the
kitchen while the teacher does nothing about it.

You sound fairly threatened and insecure; it sounds like you're worried that
women might do better than you at technology, and then the one way you use to
make yourself feel secure in yourself may fall away. You seem to have caught
on to the power of being a victim and having other people come out to defend
you, so you're trying to apply that tactic to defend yourself from women who
threaten your sense of technological superiority. It's not a very attractive
tactic, however; it makes you look defensive and reactionary. I'd recommend
trying to find other ways to feel good about yourself; for instance, by being
supportive and welcoming of new people, and making programming a skill and
trade that is accessible to all.

~~~
sillysaurus2
_You sound fairly threatened and insecure; it sounds like you 're worried that
women might do better than you at technology, and then the one way you use to
make yourself feel secure in yourself may fall away._

Why do you have to make your points while simultaneously being a complete
douche about them? Personal attacks on HN, on purpose?

~~~
lambda
Did you read the grandparent post? Bringing up complete strawmen, making vague
censorship claims, making off-topic arguments about "well, men have it tough
too in these other cases, so really men are the victims", and so on.

I tried to find some reason to explain why someone would do something like
that, and that's the best I could come up with. I was also trying to point out
how ridiculous an argument of "stop playing the victim card, look how much of
a victim I am" is. Perhaps I went a little beyond what I should have when
trying to point out how ridiculous it is, but I'm not really sure how to point
that out much more gently.

Perhaps you have a better suggestion for how to deal with such ridiculous,
hysterical, off-topic arguments? Perhaps one that doesn't involve calling
someone a "complete douche" in the same breath as criticizing personal
attacks?

------
bangbang
I cringe reading this.

Since when it is alright to tell teachers how to do their job in bullet
pointed letters?

* Be an adult and talk about any issues, complements or concerns during the class.

* Talk with them in person or on the phone.

* If you wish, post to your blog after the issues have been resolved. To put a global context on the situation should be supported with evidence as it pertains to life as a women in the IT industry. (See what I'm doing here with the bullet points?)

Parents theses days...

\--edit-- As I'm reading some of the responses to my post, I have to ask, what
pillow soft existence did many of you grow up with? Kids (and people) say
terrible things. This isn't the sign of a bad teacher, it's an opportunity for
this blogger to prepare her kids (Not just the girls) for the real full-
contact brutal reality known is the the real working world. Life gets waaaay
harder than this.

~~~
jessedhillon
One time in college, I went to a busy ice cream restaurant with some friends
of mine (Fenton's in Emeryville).

After entering, we saw there was just one single open table, so we went and
put our jackets down on it and then got into line. After getting our ice cream
we went back to the table only to find our jackets gone and some fat people
sitting there, eating ice cream with their fat kids.

When I asked where our jackets were, a man, presumably the father of the obese
family, told us that there were "some jackets" on the table but that they had
the security guard come and clear them. As we went to find our coats, he
informed us that "putting your jacket on the table doesn't count" for
reserving a table.

In reading your post I am reminded of the certitude with which this large,
stupid man asserted the correctness of an arbitrary and stupid set of rules,
completely of his own making.

~~~
discostrings
> After getting our ice cream we went back to the table only to find our
> jackets gone and some fat people sitting there, eating ice cream with their
> fat kids.

> When I asked where our jackets were, a man, presumably the father of the
> obese family, told us that there were "some jackets" on the table but that
> they had the security guard come and clear them.

Is it just me, or is this comment really absurd, off-topic, and offensive?

First, why would you leave your jackets on a table out of your sight? The
whole "put your jacket on a table to reserve it" thing is somewhat socially
acceptable (though irritating), but it usually also involves keeping an eye on
your jacket. You're lucky it wasn't on the floor or taken by someone other
than the security guard when you got back.

But the larger issue I have with your comment is your reference to the size of
the people who you're still mad at for taking "your" table. What does their
obesity have to do with your story? In response to an article about
discrimination, it almost seems like you must be trolling. Seriously, you
could just substitute "slanteyes" or "niggers" and the substance of the story
would not be at all changed. It read exactly that way to me.

Normally I'd just move on and assume others were offended as well, but this is
somehow the highest voted reply...

~~~
jessedhillon
You're right. Well, maybe -- I'm not agreeing that obesity slams are on the
same level as racial slurs, but what I wrote was needlessly offensive and I
can understand that it was hurtful to some others. I apologize to you and
anyone else, I could have written the story without those references and the
point would still remain. I should have known better.

------
revelation
If CS education in the USA is anything like here, the teacher of this class
will be the unlucky fellow assigned with maintaining the school networks and
other random "computer stuff". His qualification will be that of an interested
layman, augmented by several one day seminars on random topics from Office to
Java.

There is simply no curriculum, there are no standards and no requirements, and
if we are honest, the level of computing in most schools and even businesses
are a very far cry from the high-tech filter bubble we surround ourselves in.

~~~
spamizbad
My Programming I class was taught by a math teacher (who was an excellent
_algebra_ instructor). Unfortunately he was only a chapter ahead of the class
in computer programming. But that wasn't the worst part. For guidance, he
turned to his brother-in-law, who was a manager of developers at Motorola. He
stated as much the first day of class, boasting "You're going to have the rare
treat of learning how programming is done in the _real world_!"

All the joy of programming was quickly sucked out as we had to meticulously
document our code. Sub routines needed 2-3 paragraph plain-English
explanations of what they were doing. Each variable's purpose needed to be
stated. And before you could write a single line of code, you first had to
write it out in a form of "pseudo code" which had its own syntax rules that we
had to follow. Lots of emphasis was placed on the _process_ of what we should
be doing instead of the _how_ and _why_. Students struggled.

I understand what he was trying to do: having us write everything out gave him
a window into how our minds were breaking down the problem. But in the
process, he turned what should have been a fun, exploratory class into a
grind.

The notion that programming could be a _fun_ activity, and not just mindless,
process-driven office work was completely foreign to him, and I suspect the
same is true for many teachers who are stuck teaching Programming classes in
both public and private schools.

Edit: And on the issue of gender, my class had 25 students, 11 of whom were
girls. I remember being amazed at how a programming class could have a 50/50
ratio. I didn't notice anyone being bullied or teased. I imagine once women
reach "critical mass" women won't be singled-out to the same degree. A few bad
apples or even a sexist teacher can't "single out" 44% of their class. Why
were there so girls enrolled? I don't know, but the class did have a
reputation for being an easy A, so perhaps it was viewed as less intimidating.

~~~
yeukhon
How does he get through the course certification? Shouldn't he has to
demonstrate he has the qualification to teach CS class? Is this a high school
from a small town? I'd imagine in NYC this could mean firing the school's
principal if New York Daily finds out.

~~~
hga
My high school programming course, in 1977---IBM 1130 FORTRAN 'IV'\---was
taught _by a coach_. Who, without referring to notes, nor was it in the book,
one day taught us 2s compliment representation on the blackboard (and boy was
it useful to get a peek under the hood!).

I suspect, like in the real world, programming ability still sometimes counts
more than credentials. Pity that unlike my teacher he wasn't so good at the
teaching part of it.

~~~
dandrews
Heh, Louden's book? Still got it here somewhere. For an hour of nostalgic fun
and an excuse to burn a Bass Ale while your wife watches DWTS, take a look at
the 1130 emulator at [http://ibm1130.org/sim](http://ibm1130.org/sim)

~~~
anigbrowl
_while your wife watches DWTS_

You're part of the problem.

~~~
dandrews
I regretted that as soon as I hit the "reply" button... but really, that's the
way it is in my house and I meant it innocently. Bernice was literally
watching that show a couple of years ago while I installed the Hercules S/370
emulator and the MVT 21.8F Turnkey system on my Nokia N900. Mainframe on a
handheld! I was laughing like a maniac while she wondered what in the world I
was doing in my office.

~~~
anigbrowl
Well, no harm done. but I'd point out that my wife watches talent shows at the
same time as doing stuff in Code Academy. I can't figure this out but she grew
up in a household where television was almost always on and likes having some
background noise (or likes having it focused through the TV, or something).

------
Pxtl
Maybe it's an age thing, but is it just me or is this phenomenon really new?
When I was a kid, geeks were inclusive. Weird and horny and therefore prone to
awkward creepiness, but not _hostile_.

Was it always like this and I just need to "check my privilege" as a dude or
has the 4chanification of geek culture invaded real life?

And as for the VB, VB.Net is actually an okay language if you expose them to
modern features. I mean, the boolean algebra syntax is weird, as are the array
sizing, and the "Dim" keyword is just dumb... but other than those legacy
issues the rest of the language is just "C# with words and a smaller
community". Not great, but not that bad - there's modern closures/lambdas and
full OOP and generics and all that great stuff.

~~~
glesica
The money probably has something to do with it. In the distant past (80s, 90s,
earlier I'm sure) there perhaps wasn't quite the connection between computer
programming and money in the eyes of the general population. Of course there
were the Jobs-types and such, but the whole thing really moved into the public
consciousness in the early 2000s I think. This has, perhaps (this whole
comment should be read as speculation that seems reasonable to me) driven up
the level of competition and general testosterone and brought in people who
are less likely to see themselves as underdogs and more likely to look on
their "competitors" (classmates) with disdain.

------
grandalf
I think the key point is having a zero harassment policy. It should not matter
if the victim/subject of the harassment appears to be tolerating it (or even
enjoying the attention). Chances are he/she is just being a good sport and is
socially intimidated.

The worst thing about harassment culture (even when it's largely good-natured)
is that it creates and reinforces a power dynamic and subtle "law of the
jungle" status hierarchy where the most inappropriate, brazen harasser becomes
the dominant figure.

In my opinion, this is particularly dangerous in the way that it obstructs
critical thought and group problem solving. Not necessarily relevant to high
school but highly important if a team of coworkers evolve toward such a
culture.

~~~
chernevik
Nah. Nothing about this course was done well. No competent teacher needs a
policy to notice or stop crap like this. Here you have some time-serving
cypher filling a slot to help the administration check a box. With everything
else done so thoughtlessly, why would we expect them to perk up and get
intraclass dynamics right?

Even if you exerted enough political pressure to suppress _this_ stuff, it
would still be a bad and poorly taught class. Fix the quality of the teaching
and you fix a lot more besides.

~~~
codemonkeymike
You probably didn't go to public school(/end ad hominem). The teacher are so
dense that you need rules like that so the parents have something to point to
when their kids come home and tell them they are being harassed.

~~~
chernevik
One, if the teacher is that dense, then the key problem isn't the rules, is
it?

Two, yeah, I went to public school. I've seen all sorts of well meaning
"policy announcements" that hack solutions to glaring embarrassments without
doing anything about the underlying problems.

------
mncolinlee
I spent a year as a high school computer science teacher back when the AP exam
was in C++ and I had one young woman in my classroom. The OP's comments are
reasonable as a parent, but like many she doesn't properly comprehend the
difficulties encountered by a modern day teacher.

When I was teaching class, I had to contend with numerous learning obstacles
and then had to leave after class for my other full-time programming job. The
idea that I could preempt kids from saying a comment is something only a
parent could believe. In the minds of high school students, policies were made
to be tested.

The OP further wants to make young women into white elephants by reminding
them how rare they are on the first day of class. I had a far more interesting
and engaging introduction to algorithms on the first day of my class using
paper airplane folding instructions as an example of how literally computers
interpreted your instructions. The students loved it.

The one salient point of the piece was the fact the teacher did not respond
properly after the harassment occurred. We can all agree on that.

~~~
mathattack
_The one salient point of the piece was the fact the teacher did not respond
properly after the harassment occurred. We can all agree on that._

This is the key. People don't expect teachers to control what comes out of the
mouths of their students. They can't stop the initial bullying from happening.
What teachers can do is react once it happens.

Edited to remove: "It sounds like the OP went out of her way to help the
teacher turn this into a "teaching moment". The teacher refused to go along."
as this was based on my misreading the OP's "I consulted with friends — female
developers — and talked to my daughter about how to handle the situation in
class. I suggested that she talk to you. I offered to talk to you. I offered
to come talk to the class. I offered to send one of my male friends, perhaps a
well-known local programmer, to go talk to the class."

~~~
Wizecoder
Wait, how did she help the teacher turn it into a 'teaching moment'? What I
got from it is that neither of them contacted the teacher at all about any of
this, and then expected him to be able to spot the issue and understand that
it was a problem with his class rather than an issue of burnout or other
normal teenager problems (I doubt the boys in the class harassed her in front
of him). My guess is that he was actually less worried about her because she
was actually doing well in the class and I imagine many of the students
weren't. Sure, it is a real bummer that she was turned off of the programming
industry because of her classmates, but if he had devoted most of his non-
teaching time to just her, imagine the struggling students in the class who
might have wanted to learn but couldn't get any of the teacher's time or help?
Odds are they would be demoralized and unlikely to continue programming as
well. It most likely could have been handled better, and it would have been
great if the teacher had noticed the problem, but I don't think it is fair to
place all the blame on him and suggest that they were helping him do the right
thing.

~~~
mathattack
I'm sorry - I misread the following quote as the OP offering suggestions to
the teacher to turn it into a teaching moment. Upon a second reading I realize
that your interpretation is correct, they didn't raise it to the teacher. I'll
correct my prior note.

 _I consulted with friends — female developers — and talked to my daughter
about how to handle the situation in class. I suggested that she talk to you.
I offered to talk to you. I offered to come talk to the class. I offered to
send one of my male friends, perhaps a well-known local programmer, to go talk
to the class._

------
waveman2
According to the author she did nothing about the problem at the time ie did
not talk to the teacher, but is now more than happy to create drama by the
track.

The author's qualifications in teaching appears to be zero, and her
qualifications in programming seem to be that she is a tech journalist and
author of a work of fiction. Why should the teacher have any notice of her?

The extent of the problem is that some people said things like "go make me a
sammich" etc to her daughter. I would suggest that this is actually not a huge
problem. I recall my days in high school, when I was beaten up on a regular
basis for the sin of being good at Math and Science. I mean hard punches to
the head and body, possessions destroyed, etc. I spite of my complaints to
parents and teachers alike, nothing was done until I managed to create some
bad publicity for the school. But it seems it only hatters if it happens to a
girl (TM).

Bear in mind also that the salary of the teacher is probably around 60% of the
salary that a production programmer can earn. So unless the teacher is a very
idealistic soul, it is likely the teacher is struggling and knows little about
programming. Which makes the teacher's job all the more difficult.

Finally, there is no proof any of this actually happened. Given past feminist
false claims, it is quite on the cards that it didn't happen or is
exaggerated... particularly given the acknowledgement that she did nothing
about the problem when it counted.

~~~
tptacek
You were bullied viciously in high school, and the perverse result appears to
be that you've become in adulthood a defender of bullying.

~~~
waveman2
No I am saying that trivia is trivia. What happened is at worst micro-
bullying.

Actually I suspect the daughter did not want to do the course, was pressured
into it by her mother and pickup on on this minor incident as an excuse to
stop the course.

~~~
tptacek
Notice how nobody is questioning your experience of bullying, but you're
casually questioning someone else's? Like I said: perverse.

~~~
Dylan16807
It's not 'perverse' to have different standards on what qualifies as
punishable bullying. You're using some kind of false equivalence here. Yes,
both an insult and a beating qualify as 'bullying', but that does not mean we
should categorize them similarly.

------
danso
Ugh...I saw the title and had positive expectations because usually, it seems,
letters to high school teachers are positive, as in: "My teenage child was
depressed but your class made her love school again, etc. etc."

A couple of takeaways:

1\. The fact that the OP's daughter signed up for programming class because
she wanted to impress her parent is truly a parenting win. Not just for
programming, but _anything_ , at that age.

2\. I consider myself pretty open minded about gender diversity...but as I was
reading the OP's post, I completely assumed it was written by a programmer-
father, until I got to the part where the OP describes being harassed. Still,
the mental stereotype was so strong that when writing this comment, I kept
having to not refer to the OP as the father of the daughter. The trolling that
the OP describes is troubling. But it's easy to be angry at the trolling, and
raise awareness about it. Unfortunately, I think women in tech still have the
much more difficult task of fighting pervasive, subconscious stereotyping and
assumptions in the industry.

edit: 3. The OP treats the use of Visual Basic as an ancillary problem...and
it is, compared to what her daughter had to put up. But yeah, VB, seriously? I
respect people who do VB -- and do it well, because they have to maintain
legacy software at a big company...but if you're a programming teacher, you
should have a passion to make your subject as relevant to your students and
their contemporary lives when possible...nevermind that using VB, in this day
and age, has some considerable barriers to just "dive into" compared to, say,
Javascript. It'd be like a physics teacher who didn't make a single reference
to CERN, Elon Musk, or physics as it applies to modern athletic competitions.

~~~
garretruh
With regards to your third point:

Is there a modern (or better suited for introductory courses) language that
has the kind of curriculums built around it that VB and Java do?

Codecademy and the like are awesome for independent learning and exploration,
but it doesn't work for classroom instruction. There don't seem to be many
curriculums designed around modern, web-focused languages like Ruby or
Javascript that your average teacher can use for high school CS classes.

~~~
danso
I think JavaScript fits the bill.

I never took programming in high school, so maybe I'm setting my sights
low...but even with a well developed curriculum, it's hard to imagine that the
class gets very far.

Whereas with JavaScript, they can literally start executing code as soon as
they open their browsers. I think that makes up, at least a little, of the
time lost in not having as mature of a curriculum.

But I think the big win with JS is opportunity. Whatever crappy program they
might come up with, they can immediately show it to their classmates and also
to any friends or family with a simple link...it's not quite as easy to
distribute a VB or other compiled executable. This kind of sharing makes
programming...I would think...much more dynamic and lively.

And in addition to that, they get some web development experience...which is
handy now and likely to be useful in 5 years. Whereas with VB, and most other
programming languages...it's possible to learn them without gaining any hands-
on experience with the Web.

~~~
garretruh
I'd tend to agree with you. But the problem of teaching it still remains.
While it'd be great for dedicated teachers at each school to create a
flexible, Javascript-based curriculum built around online courses and
projects, I think the reality is that very few would have the time, energy, or
motivation to do so. So far as I know, there don't exist very many Javascript
textbooks aimed at the high school, middle school, and (hopefully) elementary
school levels. Without that kind of traditional material, it's difficult for
even passionate teachers to get classes approved by administrators.

~~~
c1c2c3
See
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6358970](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6358970)
for my previous comment about why I chose VB (I'm a teacher and was a
developer)

The questions/problems that the exam board sets (considering the number of
hours the students get to solve them in) are really suited to VB, or another
Visual based language. What I'm trying to say is that the language chosen also
has to fit the requirements of the exam board, as the students, school and
myself are all judged by our results (GCSE grade etc).

Edited: changed wording for clarity

------
smoyer
Is Visual Basic really any worse than what you'd be exposed to at a Drupal
conference? I think you'd be hard-pressed to explain why you chose anything
beyond a 4th generation scripting language if you were starting a new class
with an unlimited budget.

Schools are often behind with this sort of technology, so depending on the
development environment available, isn't one language as good as the next to
explain concepts like assignment, boolean operations and program flow? (My
high school computer classes were BASIC on a Burroughs B3300 mainframe and my
first COMP SCI class at college was Fortran on an IBM s360 mainframe, so maybe
I haven't got a clue!)

~~~
glesica
I don't disagree with you, strictly speaking, but I do understand how VB might
not be the best way to get people interested in programming. While JavaScript
is, in my very humble opinion, a rather poor "first language", I understand
why so many people seem to want to use it as such, because it is easy to get
"neat" results.

When I was a youngster, I thought the copy of VB 5 my dad got me was the
coolest thing ever, because being able to create "real" computer programs like
the ones I used every day was super-awesome-sweet. Today, kids are much more
likely to interact with mobile apps and web sites. So teaching them to make
those things is more likely to be exciting, the way Windows GUI apps were for
me in the 90s.

~~~
Achshar
Not only is it easier to get neat results in JS but it has a very low barrier
to entry. Everyone uses the internet and is just a shortcut away from
executing javascript code in console of their favorite browser on a live page.
That and the language itself is very "loose" when it comes to rules and
strictness. It just gets the work done. Nothing like cpp for example. Now it
can be both good thing because the results are easy and instantaneous and a
bad thing because this gives a false notion to newcomers of how programing is
done (but then again js is pretty ubiquitous on any modern computer, so it is
as "real world" as it gets.)

~~~
c1c2c3
I'm a IT/Computing teacher in the UK. We've only just started to teach
Computer Science recently and although I was a developer before retraining as
a teacher I chose Visual Basic.

Why? Well, we don't have to pay to install it, our technicians are happy to
install it, the GUI design stuff is easy for students to use, I think it is
easy to learn quickly and most importantly it allows our students to get high
marks easily. Also I'm the only person in my school who can program - others
will have to pick it up as the number of classes increases - again VB is easy
for a novice to learn.

The exam board dictates what programing assessment is to be done and the
amount of time it is to be done in. As much as I'd be happy to teach another
language VB is the best fit in this case.

~~~
smoyer
This is exactly the scenario I was guessing led to the choice of VB. I'm also
going to agree with many of the comments saying Javascript might not be a
great first language for new CS students.

------
grannyg00se
Didn't everyone grow up facing some kind of regular harassment in high school?
I expected things to take a serious turn for the worse in this story and it
actually doesn't seem all that bad. A mother is upset that her daughter was
slightly harassed. In one class. In her entire high school experience.
Obviously it doesn't make it okay just because many people have faced worse,
but dragging the teacher through the mud for it seems unreasonable.

" Sadly, you only get one chance to make a first impression, and you, sir,
created a horrible one for girls in computer programming. "

No, he didn't. Not by any reasonable definition of "horrible". Nor is it his
responsibility to create any particular impression for any particular race,
gender, or religion. Your own pet issue is not his concern.

While on the topic of things horrible, that seven point list is horribly
patronizing. Complete with little insulting gems like this: "Good grief, man —
how were you even able to make programming boring?".

So glad I'm not a teacher. Must be excruciating at times dealing with the
entitled, self obsessed parents, let alone the students.

~~~
cnlwsu
First off I would expect a parent who sees their children suffer to lash out
at someone when they have no way of controlling it. That doesnt mean it goes
without merit though.

If a child is bullied in PE to where every day he just tries to curl in a
corner and try not be noticed not only does he not get anything out of the
class it can alter the childs desire of becoming an active participant in
sports. I think you can draw a lot of correlations between that and this.

If we want to avoid and undo segregation between the sexes in our field having
them attacked for it at a young age and have the idea indoctrinated in them
that computer science is not for them is something that needs to be prevented.
The only people really with the ability to do so in this scenario is the
teacher and parents of the other children. The teacher is the single
=individual= with the most ability to affect the lives of the children and
although he shouldn't be held accountable he should try to be more attentive
to prevent the bullying or at least try to make the class more engaging and
fun.

She was pretty patronizing and mean, but I associate that with her frustration
and anger with her lack of control. In her shoes I would probably do the same.

------
morgante
This seems to be a vast overreaction. The only actual "harassment" is about
making a sandwich, which is pretty low on the scale of insults.

In fact, the teacher was probably _right_ to not intervene. For two reasons:
1) Regardless of your gender, being the person who caused adult intervention
isn't likely to win you respect in high school. If he had intervened, she
would likely have been further ostracized. 2) Growing up is about learning to
interact with people. A big part of this is categorizing what matters and what
does. If I made a fuss every time someone made a slightly off-color joke about
my religion (I'm Jewish) I'd have both no friends and no job.

------
maxinem
I experienced this kind of bullying not in school, but at work. I used to be
very cheerful and helpful until in a particular work situation, I finally
realized guys were randomly pinging me or stopping by to disturb me with how
to write a quick unix command to do X or how to make some regex, just to see
how cute I look when I'm stressed and how fast I can give them an answer. And
I'm pretty good, and they joke with each other about it and keep doing it like
you play with a dog. Its also the power thing, some people like demanding an
answer from across the room. I totally relate to "quickly finish assignments
and bury her nose in her book". Now I work in a less difficult environment,
but this is basically how I deal with work now -- efficiently, then get out of
there, offer nothing personal. I went to college that had a pretty good gender
balance and was self-taught before that so I never experienced it before work.
So in conclusion, this may be good preparation for your daughter good
preparation for technical work in certain environments. There are many good
workplaces but you can't be guaranteed that all your life, so dealing with
this kind of thing is important to learn. You should tell her that this is a
career that pays well. You may have to be smarter and a more hardworking than
your peers to make up for the lack of networking, but actually the extra self-
reliance that you need to exercise will make you a better and more confident
programmer. Also as a woman, you need to be careful of accepting mentorship,
especially male mentorship. Sometimes there's no reason for it other than the
mentor wants to spend some time with a young woman.

~~~
ceras
A big problem with experiencing it as early as HS is that you really have
little reason to stick with it anymore. Who cares if it pays well if you're
going to be emotionally drained dealing with harassment? She can pursue many
other degrees instead. Perhaps as far as she's concerned, she's saved herself
a lot of hassle and can now choose a career where she feels accepted. Or maybe
she'll be strong willed and push through. But I know in my mind I would just
think, "Why bother when there are other cool things to study where people will
respect me more?"

I don't really know what the right path is for her, but I hope whichever one
she chooses brings her happiness. And I really hope in the not-too-distant
future girls won't have to make this trade-off between programming and feeling
respected.

------
tsumnia
Background: Currently teaching Intro to Programming using VB (not even 2012...
cause our lead instructor's textbook is for 2010). I created a stir when I
suggested we move to C, which we are next semester.

Many of people have already commented on this, but from my understanding, this
parent did NOTHING and it going a passive-aggressive route to complain. Going
into the article, I was excited to read it initially because I was going to
use it in a discussion piece in the class. When I got to the end... not so
much.

Does IT attract socially inept male students who resort to real-life trolling?
Yes. Quite honestly, it is my opinion THIS is the reason why we have so few
women in the industry. Tons of guys get interested via video games, well what
happens when a female gamer 'slips up' and reveals she's not a male? Creepy
PMs and sexism.

People want to dance around the issue and say its from few role models and the
like; no, spend 5 minutes acting like a female online (however you'd do it),
you'll see it immediately. My Steam tag is an old MacHall webcomic joke
('Susan'). If I don't have my mic on and just do basic banter in chat, yes I
get the occasional guy getting too friendly.

Getting back to the article, not to defend the instructor, but they saw the
female was (at one point) positively responding to the jokes. Should something
have been done? Depends on the class dynamic, in my opinion. I can't
accurately tell how the class ran based on this blog (as it is a biased one
side to the story).

Without getting into anymore of a rant, VB isn't bad, per say... it teaches
variables, loops, and conditionals, the basics of any intro class. I'd only
have a problem with this if it was a high-level college course.

~~~
jere
>Many of people have already commented on this, but from my understanding,
this parent did NOTHING and it going a passive-aggressive route to complain.

Did we read the same article?

>I consulted with friends — female developers — and talked to my daughter
about how to handle the situation in class. I suggested that she talk to you.
I offered to talk to you. I offered to come talk to the class. I offered to
send one of my male friends, perhaps a well-known local programmer, to go talk
to the class.

Unless I'm misunderstanding, the author claims to have spoken to the teacher
and offer solutions... then writes a letter clearly outlining more solutions.

>Without getting into anymore of a rant, VB isn't bad, per say... it teaches
variables, loops, and conditionals, the basics of any intro class. I'd only
have a problem with this if it was a high-level college course.

Going to have to agree with you here. I think the teacher is going to have a
much better impact than the language involved. For example, a friend and
classmate took a Java course during high school. The teacher did nothing but
force them to copy programs out of the book. I took a VB course and learned
quite a bit. By the end of the class, I was writing games in my down time
(pong, asteroids, a raycasting engine, etc.)

~~~
tsumnia
To me it sounds like she made those offers to everyone but the instructor.
There is no mention to the instructor's reaction to this offer. Also, when she
later mentions the instructor 'not noticing' the daughter's less eager
attitude, it gives me the opinion she never brought this up to the instructor.
I might be wrong, but that seemed to be a discussion point in this thread so
far.

------
pyj
I got a feeling that the OP was ranting due to her own hurt feelings rather
than her daughter's. I failed to see anything out of the extraordinary that
made the teacher deserve such harsh criticism. Yes she was harassed by some
boys, I agree that sucks and the teacher should do something about it.

I have a baby daughter my self and can imagine the feelings if I heard she got
harassed by her schoolmates, but then I would write a letter that focuses on
THAT problem and not criticizing irrelevant points like the teacher's choice
of programming language and overall teaching methods.

Also, if the girl truly has an interest in programming than years of
encouragement is not even necessary, she will naturally be attracted by it and
there is no parent who can stop her from it.

~~~
Pxtl
> I got a feeling that the OP was ranting due to her own hurt feelings rather
> than her daughter's. I failed to see anything out of the extraordinary that
> made the teacher deserve such harsh criticism.

The classroom culture is the teacher's responsibility. If a student is being
harassed and has a hostile environment in this classroom, the teacher has
failed in a serious way. Doubly-so when the harassment is driven by bigotry.

~~~
pyj
Then she should have kept the criticism relevant to that and not attacking the
teacher's technical judgement:

"Visual Basic? Seriously?? Yes, I know I said I'm not writing to complain
about your choice of programming languages, even though I'm still scratching
my head on this one"

That only moves the focus from the real problem and creates a dispute that is
not even relevant and necessary.

------
zenocon
My favorite comment...a tad subtle:

> During the first semester of my daughter's junior/senior year, she took her
> first programming class. She knew I'd be thrilled, _but she did it anyway_.

Edit: before anyone harangues me, I don't mean to take away from the shitty
circumstances surrounding the core message in the post, just got a chuckle out
of the subtle dad/daughter humor inserted.

~~~
glesica
> dad/daughter humor inserted.

Not to be a dick, but you may be guilty of a little benign sexism yourself
there... the author is a woman.

~~~
johndavidback
> Not to be a dick

Not to be a dick, but doesn't saying Not to be a dick mean you're being a dick
but saying it's okay?

~~~
glesica
Hehe, yeah... sorry for that.

------
h4pless
I am sorry to say that I assumed the author was her father for most of the
letter. Her arguments made much more sense to me after rereading it with that
information, but I guess it's a statement in itself that with the discussion
of her technical background and her strong assertive tone, I assumed her a
man. Reality: checked.

~~~
jsmeaton
I'm in the same boat, but I don't think there's anything wrong with me (or
you) for making that assumption. It's a male dominated industry, and it makes
sense to make that assumption without extra information, especially when the
authors gender isn't really relevant to the story.

~~~
ArtDev
I assumed it was written by a man at first as well. Would you take the
accusations of sexism stronger if it was coming from a dad? I would.. and
there is something wrong with that.

~~~
jsmeaton
Late reply, but no I don't think I would. I thought the message, a school kid
having to tolerate sexism without the support of the school/teacher/class,
more than shameful enough.

Willing to agree with you that the gender of the author having a greater
impact, either way, is probably wrong.

------
akg_67
I am wondering why author is not offering to volunteer to teach or help the
teacher recruit students and do other things she is recommending. I guess it
is easier to criticize than do something to make a difference.

When I was in college and a class that I wanted to take kept getting cancelled
due to low enrollment, I went out recruited students for the class.

Did daughter report the bullying? Did the author report the bullying? Teachers
and school admins are not mind readers and not tagging along with all students
all the time.

The whole article displays nothing but the arrogance and superior ego of the
author. If you have a problem, get off your butt and do something instead of
whining.

------
kevinmchugh
These situations are always regrettable and awful. High school strikes me as
the place to expect immaturity and shittiness the most, and because of that, I
would expect teachers to be all the more committed to fighting that shitty,
dumb sexism.

By not stopping the shitty, dumb sexism dead in its tracks, the teacher also
did a huge disservice to the boys in the class. They've now had a chance to
learn that treating women in CS this way is okay. I hope that in the <5 years
it takes them to get to the professional world, they have realized how
damaging they were. More importantly, I hope the author's daughter finds the
personal strength to pursue CS.

------
ryanmarsh
As the father of daughters, one of which has an engineer's mind like her
Daddy, this kills me inside. I really want my daughter to be able to express
her meticulous deconstructing brilliant mind through software. I pray that her
first experience with computer programming outside the home isn't like this.

------
klrr
This is a bit ridiculous. The problem here is not "male-dominated" class room
but more likely the ordinary bully problem.

I had a friend who was bullied due to his clothing. He reported the bullies
and they got suspended. Later they comeback to the school in an attempt for
revenge. Fortunately a teacher witnessed the assault and they were later
charged for their crimes.

Also, you can't expect high school teachers to know any other languages than
BASIC. It's _high school_ , you don't become a programmer there anyway. Either
you are self-taught or you seek higher education. I got many friends who have
taken programming classes in high school and in _all_ cases the teacher wasn’t
even a programmer but solely followed a book written for high schools.

------
kazagistar
>> Instead, they pull away, get depressed, or drop out completely, just like
they do in IT careers.

Maybe it is just me, but this part came off as particularly sexist. Is the
author claiming that women respond worse to negative social pressure then men?

------
yeukhon
__EDIT __

Seems like people generally are agreeing with my interpretation. I am
rewriting my comment.

First, it seems to me that she simply told her daughters what she could do.
When her daughter said no the mother just left it to her daughter to deal
with. After the semester is over, she's publicly denouncing the teacher.

So this is a little bit wrong because she could correct the issue by letting
the teacher know the problem when it first occurred.

Let's not really speculating whether the teacher is old, simply doesn't care,
sexist or what not. The daughter still got A. According to the mother, she
assumed this was due to her daughter's long-term involvement with technology.
I am sure she is a bright girl too. '

So can we just say there are two possibilities:

(1) the girl had hidden her sad face when she was in her classroom and since
she did her homework and continued to excel on her quizzes and exams, the
teacher didn't notice much

(2) the girl did show her sad face but the teacher failed to acknowledge that
sign

If #1 were to be true, then we should say the mother has a bigger
responsibility here than the teacher. First of all, she did not take action.
Kids are weak but they wanted to play strong so they often hide their true
feelings. I think any parent should step up to help solving bully issue right
away. Not in a public way to name a few kids, but work with the teacher in a
very constructive way (such as bringing in more women to talk about tech
industry. That's better than bringing a man in.... if you want to show women
can do the job too).

We don't know much about how the kid actually behaved in the classroom so we
really shouldn't blame the teacher too much at the moment. What we need to
realize is poor communication among the kid, the mother and the teacher. It's
tough because half of the parents don't use email or they don't have time to
talk to the kids or speak with the teacher reguarly. PTA is usually dead with
a couple parents from time to time.

So the mother should learn her mistake, help reconstruct her daughter's
confident and stop making her rants public now. It's not helping. It is sort
of one-side if I had to be really harsh (you can downvote me if you want), but
that's how I feel as I read through the post again and again.

Also, please, please, be careful when your daughter adds people she is still
not very familiar with to her FB.

~~~
jessedhillon
From TFA

 _I suggested that she talk to you. I offered to talk to you. I offered to
come talk to the class. I offered to send one of my male friends, perhaps a
well-known local programmer, to go talk to the class._

~~~
yeukhon
None of that said she actually did. The previous sentence said she was
suggesting all these options to her daughter.

 __edit __here: "I consulted with friends — female developers — and talked to
my daughter about how to handle the situation in class. I suggested that she
talk to you. I offered to talk to you. I offered to come talk to the class. I
offered to send one of my male friends, perhaps a well-known local programmer,
to go talk to the class. Finally, my daughter decided to plow through, finish
the class, and avoid all her classmates. I hate to think what less-confident
girls would have done in the same situation. "

~~~
jessedhillon
Oh interesting, I did not interpret it that way but you may be right.

------
droithomme
I'm confused by the general scenario here - the daughter graduated high school
last year, probably at age 16 - and is now repeating high school in India? The
letter is to an Indian teacher in India? Is she going to a public school for
Indian students there? It's the students in India asking her to make
sandwiches? Is this some sort of student exchange program?

~~~
jazzyb
The letter is directed to the teacher who taught the daughter's programming
class during her last year in the US, and all the incidents that the mother
mentions occurred in this US class:

"During the first semester of my daughter's junior/senior year, she took her
first programming class." \-- We are told she finished early; therefore, we
can assume that the "junior/senior" usage denotes the last year she was in the
US.

The daughter is _currently_ attending high school in India not because she
necessarily needs to but rather because it is a learning experience before
college:

"My daughter ... is now attending high school in India as her 'gap year'
before heading off to college."

------
ef4
The author's main point is well-stated and deplorable.

As for the ancillary issue of the class material itself being crap: yeah, duh.
And it's not just computer programming. You only notice how bad _that_ class
is because you have relevant expertise.

It's a safe bet that the other courses are similarly terrible. Send a
biologist or physicist or mathematician or historian to observe a randomly
selected high school class and they will find that their subjects too are
being taught by people without the slightest appreciation or aptitude.

------
scotty79
You can't be different than other kids and visibly better than them without
becoming a target of harassment. I've been better than other kids in anything
computer, math, physics or chemistry related and I remember I had to tread
very carefully even while I was helping them. Same way as when you give a good
ideas to your boss, your concern should be not only about him accepting your
idea but also about him not hating you for it afterwards.

And I don't even have any discerning features that could be used as a trigger.
Being only fat, short, tall, ginger, 4-eyed, girl can get you seriously in
trouble if you don't pay attention to social dynamics.

The thing is such targeting should be noticed and properly countered by the
teacher and almost no teacher knows how to do that. I have no idea what's the
proper response to usual lord of the flies school environment.

~~~
SwellJoe
Victim-blaming. Just because abuse happens commonly, and has happened to all
of us at one time or another (to varying degrees; and I was certainly on the
receiving end of plenty of abuse and bullying, as a kid), does not make it OK.

So many responses here are of the form, "Toughen up! I did!" Would you not
have rather had a safe, non-abusive, school experience? I certainly would
have. Would you not rather girls (and boys) in school today have a better
experience than you? I would.

There are techniques teachers can use to address these kinds of behavioral
problems in their classrooms. And, there are ways for schools to help prevent
them in the first place. Smaller class sizes consistently reduces behavioral
problems and increases success among students, for instance. I don't think
it's useful to merely blame the teacher...the system as a whole is culpable
(and, society as a whole is culpable on some level, if our budgetary
priorities place making war over education). But, the teacher could certainly
be better educated in his job and more responsive to a child who is being
singled out.

~~~
scotty79
> Victim-blaming.

Sorry. It was unintended. I was just describing my own experience as almost-
victim. Personally I mostly place blame on lack of teacher training in
detecting and properly reacting to harassment. I hate "Toughen up!" advice. I
even hate term "bully". It sounds tolerant, even affectionate. I'd go with
thug or hooligan. In my language there isn't even a word for bullying. It's
called beating, name calling, stealing, breaking someones stuff, persecution.

> Smaller class sizes consistently reduces behavioral problems

That's because it's easier for the teacher to pay attention and react. Above
some limit it's no longer leading the class, it's crowd control.

> I don't think it's useful to merely blame the teacher

I'm far from blaming teachers personally. For me it's mostly about what
teachers don't get. Like psychological training, smaller classes, framework.

------
Uchikoma
I'm feeling sorry for the daughter.

The poster is hard to take seriously, one mention of the harassment
("sandwiches"), at least three times he mentions "Visual Basic? Seriously??".
He seems more concerned about language wars actually.

So many people confusing programming and programming languages - the act and
the medium.

On top the "(violence and rape references)" that had nothing to do with the
incident of the headline "To my daughter's high school programming teacher".

This is a disservice to all people who work on more gender equality in tech.

[Edit: As pointed out, it's a she. Thanks for pointing this out. Sorry for
over reading this, I usually don't care about the gender of a person. Yes I've
read the article very fast as it is 90% not about the headline]

~~~
zainny
Your post is the one that's hard to take seriously given that you continuously
to refer to the poster as "he".

Near the end of the article, _she_ writes: "I'm a single mother working in
tech publishing — believe me, I get it".

My guess is you barely read it.

------
pc86
> _I 'm no teacher, so forgive me if you think I'm out of place when it comes
> to telling you how to do your job._

And yet, here we are.

> _But I am a mother, and I 've spent years encouraging girls and women in IT,
> so perhaps my perspective will help you._

Being a parent does not qualify you to discuss anything other than being a
parent. It's no different than saying "As a mother, I feel that we need to
bomb Syria." It's just patently ridiculous.

> _Here are seven suggestions for teaching high school computer programming:_

I'm not a teacher either, but at least I know enough not to pretend that I can
rattle off ways to "fix" the teaching of high school computer programming.

~~~
cnlwsu
Isnt this kinda ad hominem? in fact the first 3 paragraphs explain she has
more expertise in the topic than most. She more then has a right to an opinion
and her points make sense it was not "dont foster an environment that
belittled and harassed my daughter because I am her mother" even though that
alone is perfectly reasonable.

------
ChrisAntaki
It's too bad the teacher was too weak to protect your daughter's honor, and
ensure decency in the classroom. High school can be a cruel place. I hope she
realizes those hurtful comments didn't represent her at all. It was just
scared boys searching for some semblance of masculinity they may never find.

~~~
rossjudson
_Johnny, you did great in my class. You did well in the assignments and were
heading for a nice B. But you know what? I 'm knocking that down to a C for
one simple reason -- you acted like a sexist fool towards Susan and created a
hostile environment. You're not the only one. Karl and Larry and getting
downgraded too. This isn't on your permanent record...yet. Don't do it again.
Grow up. What made you think this behavior was acceptable?_

~~~
kaitai
That is also terrible teaching. A good teacher sets up a productive classroom
environment from the beginning, with expectations set out in words and also
modeled in behavior (calling on a wide variety of students, modeling how to
ask questions about a student's thoughts, modeling how to give praise and
criticism, giving a continual example of how to work through problems). When
issues like negative interaction between students come up it's easy enough to
set up a group work lesson that separates problem personalities, put people in
groups with supportive folks, leave alone students who want to be left alone
and try to channel energy in the right direction. I've worked with nerdy
teenage boys and socially awkward types of all genders, and it's a matter of
skill to deal with this but that is after all the job!

For instance, I had a student (13 yrs old?) in an advanced math class that was
all male (I'm female) and he had a habit of starting to blurt out mildly
veiled sexual comments to me. I said a few things to him about what was
appropriate in class, in a kind way and privately, and I also arranged for a
male administrator to chat with him. It stopped. Grades have nothing to do
with this -- they're not effective in any way in setting classroom tone,
especially as they're feedback far after the semester ends.

I'm sorry for all these Hacker News readers who had shitty high school
experiences, but you do need to grow up and realize they were shitty. Turning
around to dump the shit downhill -- or indulging in some sort of Stockholm
syndrome -- is not going to make the world a better place and it does not make
you a better person.

I don't always do things perfectly; I remember one female student who was
being aggressively and unwillingly courted by a football player in one of my
classes and I wasn't able to prevent all the distraction. But I noticed and
did what I could, and commented to them separately about what is and isn't
alright in the classroom. Seriously, folks, it's not that hard to have
expectations for appropriate behavior and enforce them.

------
nullgeo
I also had a teacher in HS that taught Visual Basic in a computer programming
class. Not VB.Net, but VB6, and this was 4 years ago.

And they removed AP Computer Science that same year, when I was about to take
it, that's why I had to settle with the class that taught VB. The state of HS
education in this country makes me sad.

~~~
javert
I went to high school from 2001 to 2005, and there wasn't any programming
course. This was in the small-town US.

Any form of VB is still computer programming, and would have been a big step
up.

> The state of HS education in this country makes me sad.

Yes, and that is not going to change unless we privatize education.

~~~
EdgarVerona
> Yes, and that is not going to change unless we privatize education.

Or start paying higher taxes so that public education is given the funding
they need to implement these programs.

~~~
WoodenChair
We spend the fourth most per pupil of any country in the world:
[http://www.businessinsider.com/us-education-spending-
compare...](http://www.businessinsider.com/us-education-spending-compared-to-
the-rest-of-the-developed-world-2012-1) Money is not the answer - in fact some
of the states that spend the most, have the worst results.

~~~
EdgarVerona
That is a good point as well - beyond the monetary needs is the need to cut
out the bullshit that has impeded our school systems. We've got a lot of
people lining their pockets at the expense of quality education, and we've got
a lot of terrible teaching strategies/ideologies that have hurt education more
than it ever helped. Would a private system help that, or would it stratify
who has access to education at all? I don't honestly know the answer to that.
But something has got to give.

------
ryanx435
my theory is that there are not a lot of women in tech jobs because the men in
tech jobs generally don't know how to interact with women. any woman that
shows an interest in tech is not disuaded by the material, but rather by the
inability of her male coworkers to treat her normally.

I would not want to work or study in an environment surrounded by social
akwardness and harassment either.

the problem lies with the men.

~~~
nilved
Was there ever any doubt that the problem lies with men?

~~~
drdaeman
Yes. Those classmates didn't invent that sandwich stereotypes on their own,
they got it from the environment.

I think the problem is not with men or women in particular, but society in
general, as it has a concept that genders are socially different while they're
[mostly] not. I strongly suspect, neither men, nor women are prerogative
carriers of such stereotypes - although, naturally, as those stereotypes are
discriminating to women, they're primarily opposed by them, not men.

------
nsfyn55
My experience in the professional world is that its full of assertive,
aggressive individuals men and women included. There are only so many slots at
the top and the ones not occupied by the CEO's nephew belong to thick skinned
individuals who have endured a careers worth of mental/emotional abuse. How
many times have your heard someone utter the words "My boss/colleague/lead is
an idiot." Is it a disservice to create these mushy teeball environments where
everyone gets to be an astronaut?

~~~
daxelrod
I understand that you're advocating for helping people develop a thick skin.
Where I take objection is when you start talking about abuse. There's enough
other kinds of adversity out there to be resilient against.

> My experience in the professional world is that its full of assertive,
> aggressive individuals men and women included.

It's possible to be assertive and aggressive without being abusive.

> There are only so many slots at the top

Not everyone wants to get to the "top".

> Is it a disservice to create these mushy teeball environments

They certainly sound better than environments full of mental/emotional abuse.
Why can't we create abuse-free environments in the real world, too?

~~~
nsfyn55
Obviously I use the term "abuse" facetiously. However, no one buys the memiore
about the individual that coasted into prosperity with the love and support of
everyone around them.

> Not everyone wants to get to the "top" sure, but how about you let them make
> that decision rather than taking the liberty of handicapping them in
> advance.

>They certainly sound better than environments full of mental/emotional abuse.
Why can't we create abuse-free environments in the real world, too?

Sure but they will need to compete against the environments filled with
vicious, agogi-bred cutthroats who are there by choice.

------
broodbucket
I think this has bugger all to do with women in IT and everything to do with
abhorrent high schoolers and a lack of discipline. This kind of harassment
should be strictly punished and for some reason the article only discusses the
culture and not why it wasn't dealt with.

At university my computer science classes are about 1/4 females and I've never
seen anything close to disrespect over gender. This is just a bunch of high
school guys picking on the only girl.

------
esperluette
Wow. Feeling pretty good about my HS Pascal class (yeah, I'm old, so what)
now. I was only ignored and dismissed, not harassed and told to make
sandwiches (!).

The OP's daughter sounds awesome. The OP's daughter's teacher sounds like a
real idiot.

~~~
anaphor
Nothing wrong with Pascal though, it's probably much better to learn with than
say C++ or Java.

------
cranklin
Was this letter really written with the intention of giving the high school
teacher a message? Or was this just a way to showcase her daughter's (as well
as her own) accomplishments?

What was the purpose of writing this as an "open letter".

------
FrankenPC
Passive aggressive preaching. If she REALLY wants to change things, offer to
assist the computer department with digging up funding for a C based
curriculum. It costs a lot of money for public schools to shift curriculum's.

~~~
Bar_Code
At my daughter's school I offered to run a computer club, speak in class, redo
their website, all for free. I said I would pay for all teaching materials.
The head of technology rejected all offers. His response, "We use technology
to teach, not teach technology". "A computer club would only teach kids to
hack". "Besides, Cisco sponsored one years ago to teach about routers and it
was poorly attended". I wish it was just a matter of funding.

------
doctorwho
If a kid being bullied/harassed doesn't speak up and it doesn't happen right
in front of the teacher, how is the teacher supposed to know what's happening?
Kids lose interest and get depressed all the time, it could be bullying, they
could be having problems at home. Teachers are not therapists. They are not
trained to recognize warning signs of anything. That's why schools have
guidance counselors and principals for kids to talk to. Yes, there could be
some preemptive measures taken at the beginning of the class but that often
gives the little bastards doing the bullying more ideas. If the OP had been
more involved (not just interested in bragging about, but really involved) in
her child's life and recognized the warnings signs (that she easily picked up
on months later) then she could have done her job as a parent an intervened.
It's your job as a parent to watch out for your children. You _should_ know
them better than anyone. If you didn't see the signs, how could a teacher who
barely knows your child pick up on them?

------
GhotiFish
I would of posted this in her comment section, but the requirements for
signing up are beyond the pale of acceptable.

    
    
      "Thanks to my career, my daughter's Facebook friends list
       includes Linux conference organizers, an ARM developer 
       and Linux kernel contributor, open source advocates, and 
       other tech journalists."
    

I, am so jealous right now.

    
    
      "but I was unprepared for the harassment to start in 
       high school, in her programming class."
    

but her mother seems to have an interesting idea of what High School actually
is.

    
    
      "Did you not see her enthusiasm turn into a dark cloud
       during the semester? Did you not notice when she quit 
       laughing with and helping her classmates, and instead 
       quickly finished her assignments and buried her nose in 
       a book? What exactly were you doing when you were 
       supposed to be supervising the class and teaching our 
       future programmers? "
    

That's hard to notice for a specific student when that's happening to 30% of
the class, don't you think? That your god child should be spared, because
she's female? I wasn't spared, why should yours be? She didn't get subjected
to anything that I haven't gone through. At least from your description.

    
    
      "I'm no teacher, so forgive me if you think I'm out of 
       place when it comes to telling you how to do your job. 
       But I am a mother, and I've spent years encouraging 
       girls and women in IT"
    

and he _will_ have to forgive you, up to him though.

    
    
      "Recruit students to take your class. Why was my 
       daughter the only girl in your class? According to her, 
       she only took the class because I encouraged it."
    

Because women are free to do what they want, and they're choosing not to. This
discrepancy manifests everywhere. More deeply in countries with a focus on
personal liberty. There are few male orderlies in hospitals.

    
    
      "My daughter said she [didn't know] about the programming 
       class ... Have you considered hanging up signs ... asked 
       the school counselors to reach out ... spoken to other 
       classes, clubs, or fellow teachers ... asked the 
       journalism students to write a feature ... asked current 
       students to spread the word"
    

It was a full class. Wasn't it?

    
    
      "Set the tone. On the first day of class, talk about the 
       low numbers of women and lack of diversity in IT"
    

You do not understand teenagers. Evidenced by that the teacher should single
someone out to lessen harassment.

    
    
      "Don't be boring and out-of-date. Visual Basic? 
       Seriously??"
    

You also might not understand schools. I can tell you four things that have a
high probability of being true:

1\. The professor doesn't have a choice.

2\. The professor doesn't care.

3\. This is all the professor knows.

4\. There is no one to replace him.

    
    
      "Check In ... Follow Up" 
    

How many students? ~30? In one class? In the ~5 classes he teaches every day?

    
    
      "my daughter learned why there are so few women in IT"
    

They choose not to be, and because they are so few, the ones that remain are
singled out. There are few male orderlies in hospitals too, despite the fact
that there's an "objective" demand for them (I was furious when I was
confronted for the reason. It's to help lift patients, and help deal with
patients experiencing an episode.

~~~
eru
So, high school sucks in general. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't care.

~~~
Tichy
Sure, but care about the right things, and not construct a gednder issue where
thete isn't one. Do you think gender issues are the most important problem
schools are facing?

~~~
eru
There's a gender issue in the balances of sexes as reported in the article.

I don't know how American schools work, so I can't comment on your question.

~~~
kamaal
What about an all-girls school? It will be interesting to see how many
students there opt for Programming subjects.

Obviously there can't be male domination there, because boys are absent.

~~~
pekru
Try organizing a seminar on programming in some womens only college. Not more
than a handful would land up.

Bangalore/Chennai/India, same story throughout.

------
astrogirl
I've been a programmer/analyst for 17 years, and I have never experienced
anything _like_ what's being discussed by these women. I am older than they
are (I'm a Gen-Xer), but still.

I've worked in web development shops, and I currently work for a regional
grocery store chain, but most of my time was spent working for companies that
own an internet backbone doing statistical reporting for the web. I can assure
you, those places were heavily male and heavily geeky. No one ever suggests
that I should be getting them coffee, much less making them a sandwich.

If anything, the younger, nerdier guys find me a little intimidating.

I wonder if some of the women in question are simply getting their ass handed
to them in a code review and they think it's sexism. It's the opposite,
actually. That's equal treatment!

------
cbp
I had a pretty bad experience in highschool (and elementary school) because of
a small deformity on my face that I was born with. That didn't make me hate
programming because I was getting bullied on programming classes. In fact it
made me love it more because it doesn't have to be a stupid social activity.
It did make me hate school up to the point that I got "expelled" from college
for skipping classes. If the author is so concerned with her daughter being
pulled away from a profession that she claims to like then work harder at
home. Or you know, not assume that her daughter is an impressionable idiot and
let her choose whatever she wants.

------
X4
That's absolutely, absolutely, absolutely true!!!

When I was in the first semester I knew that we had lots of women in there 20
in 200. What I also knew was that some damn idiots, (who I'd punch up, if I
knew) would cause them to quit. Honestly just 6-8 girls stayed, the other
girls left CompSci to study something "better". Those who stayed stopped
having contact with anyone in class. They told me that the people are weird,
which is mostly true, but they also got treated badly and excluded from
anything which would help to make them look stupid.

A year later or so, I wanted to redo a course from the first semester that I
didn't pass back then. To my surprise there were even more girls and
admittedly hotter ones, like a gf that I knew from before univerity and some
of her gf's. However I tell you, all of them, with only a few exceptions left
CompSci after the first semester again!

I still have a good relationship with them, but it annoys me that some idiots
managed to make almost all girls leave this time. They had so much potential.
If you ask me, that's nothing else, but pure mobbing. Hey don't think that
only the students were at fault!! The Profs made such ugly and shocking jokes
about women (and gays), that I wondered if they ever had sex with a women in
their life...

Things like: If the last man on earth would be gay, it would still be better
than a women, but also not be a (hu)man. (Only a handful people boo'ed, that's
courage huh?)

------
Qz
I see a lot of posts here simply making excuses for the teacher, proclaiming
why it wasn't really his fault or responsibility. So what? The situation
presented is unacceptable, and we're kidding ourselves if we think that
whether the details of this particular instance are sufficiently condemning or
not makes a difference as to the fact this this kind of thing goes on all the
time in our high schools. It's not okay. This woman at least made an effort to
do something about it.

~~~
aka_butters
When it comes down to it, I have to agree with you. I think dealing with
situations like this is part of growing up, and while I disagree with a lot of
the points of this blog post, the main issue, harassment (of any kind) should
not be tolerated anywhere (including and especially schools).

On that same note, I think OP would be hard pressed to find an industry that
isn't like this, if not towards women, towards some "different" group of
people, possibly even men or Anglo Saxons. One of the things I have the
hardest times with is when people say a specific form of harassment isn't
tolerable (can't segregate based on color, can't discriminate against race,
gender, religion, sexual orientation, etc.), but don't get at the root issue,
singling out anyone for being different. It doesn't matter that she was a girl
or that the comment was sexist, what matters is someone was singled out for
the sole purpose to make them feel bad and shameful for who they are.

------
jayrox
The start of this article started off very similar to my experiences with
programming class, we also used vb6. Going into the course I already had
several years of programming various languages including vb6 so I wasn't
really learning anything new.

Just like her, I only took the class to make my parents happy and maybe, just
maybe get something out of it. I didn't.

Just like her, when I finished my assignments I would go around and help
struggling kids with their stuff. I wouldn't ever do their work for them, more
like guide them into the right direction, helping them figure it out on their
own but with a little nudge from me.

Just like her I was bullied, except I wasn't bullied by other students. I was
bullied by our teacher, a female.

The teacher was the only female in our class. I would venture to say she was
pretty intelligent. I mean she could write the day's lesson on the board in
backwards cursive.

I nearly failed the class because she insisted I was cheating. There was no
way I could know what I knew at that age. I had to prove to the principal that
I wasn't cheating in order to get an entire semester of zero's reversed.

I'm pretty sure that was about the time I went from wanting to be a
professional programmer when I grew up to never taking a paying programming
job. Here I am, 30 years old, doing IT support instead of what I really
enjoyed doing.

------
Cthulhu_
ITT: overprotective mother tries to shield daughter from the cruelty of high
school. Link is posted on a site where a large percentage of the audience were
nerds in high school when computers and an interest in science was considered
uncool and grounds for getting dragged through shit.

I'm all for gender equality in IT and the like, but again, high school. Put a
girl in a classroom full of hormone-ridden teenage boys that probably don't
see much of that kind very often, see what happens.

------
joyeuse6701
The setting is irrelevant to the situation IMO. It could have been any
environment that was heavily teen male with a teen female outclassing them,
the animosity is sexist in nature. The tragedy is someone that had a passion
seemingly lost it because of bullying. As a society what we can and should do
is teach that this behavior is wrong and harmful. This has a lot less to do
with the tech industry and a lot more to do with high school and lack of
maturity.

From an individualist perspective we can only encourage her not to give up on
her interests because of the cruelty of others, and that she may receive this
treatment often because she is above average. This is an unfortunately common
scenario anywhere for anyone.

If this was a white girl in a black history class or a guy in a women's
studies class the tone to this thread may be a little more compassionate I
would imagine. It just so happens that the anecdote of female encountering
sexism in tech is so often repeated and posted here, it's made a number of us
callous to it.

As for the author: If she has a problem with 'get back in the kitchen' I
suppose I can legitimately raise a concern with her characterization of all
the boys in that class as brogrammers... which is just as sexist. Takes one to
know one I suppose.

------
Tycho
I think VB is a good choice for high school programming. As well as being
closer to spoken English than most languages, it has excellent GUI development
tools and also the by useful IDE features like Intellisense and auto
formatting. But the best thing about it IMO is that it's the only programming
language that most people might find useful later in their careers - via
Excel's VBA. That shouldn't be underestimated.

~~~
brokenparser
VBA is almost universally the wrong tool for the job. MS-Office applications
are COM servers, so you can interface with them from almost any programming
language and throw useful frameworks into the mix such as Qt or wxWidgets. The
sort of things that make a programmers life easier, in stark contrast to the
abomination called VBA.

------
SkyMarshal
From a purely utilitarian, game theoretic pov, harassing and chasing girls out
of your personal and professional social circles and networks is a very poor
reproductive strategy. I would have thought programmers would be more logical,
even if initially unthinking about it. If you love sausage fests, by all
means, continue. Otherwise, think twice before disparaging girls and women,
even jokingly (it's never a joke).

~~~
roopeshv
high school students taking CS class != programmers. I would have thought
person talking about logic would be more logical.

------
aaron695
Parents telling teachers how and what to teach from only their childs
perspective and thinking that's 100% ok.

This is what's wrong with education today.

------
the_watcher
It's fantastic that this article has stayed on the front page so long.
Regardless of your thoughts on the author's claims, I don't think anyone can
deny that this was a thoughtful, reasoned take on sexism in tech. We need more
of these if anyone wants to take the discussion back from the
Gawker's/Valleywag's of the world. There is an intelligent discussion to be
had here. Personally, I lean towards advising women to take the Booker T.
Washington approach of focusing on becoming as competent as you possibly can,
but also working to change the culture as much as possible. I know it sounds
like a contradiction, but I just think that teaching girls and women to learn
to love programming over encouraging them to fight a culture war will bring
more women into tech than the opposite, which will bring more into activism
(not a bad thing, but I am approaching this with a goal bringing women into
tech). I found this author's approach to be one of the best attempts at what I
described I've ever seen.

~~~
masmullin
"I don't think anyone can deny that this was a thoughtful, reasoned take on
sexism in tech"

I can. It was a reasoned, thoughtful take on a single teacher's inability to
effectively discipline a male dominated classroom, and how this lack of
discipline severly impacted a woman's hopes for her child. Nothing more.

To say that this is "sexism in tech" is an extreme reach. I dare say
dishonest.

Back when I was in grade 9, my friend and I were the only two boys in 'home
ec.' It was always only us two in the cooking groups because the girls
wouldn't ask us to join their groups. Should I take this to show the inherent
Misandry in the entire culinary arts field? Of course not.

------
agentultra
"Deal with it," is about the worst advice I've ever heard.

I've never had to deal with sexism. When I was bullied in high school my car
was vandalized, I had to take time off from exams because my face was a wreck
and I was being monitored for brain injuries. I skipped class because I didn't
want to hear, "fag," for the thousandth time. I didn't want to _deal_ with the
food being thrown at me in the cafeteria or the snickers as a I walked past
the gossiping kids in class. I've never had to deal with being discriminated
against because of my gender but I cannot imagine that it hurts any less.

I was lucky. A friend of mine was beaten into a coma. The bullies showed up to
his benefit concert to throw pennies and harass the attendees. He has been
living the rest of his life with the effects of severe neurological trauma.
Yeah, kids are mean.

It has been more than a decade since I escaped that hell-hole. I've since read
articles about other unlucky kids who've died being stabbed to death by a mob.
I've read about girls who have committed suicide because they couldn't deal
with the slut shaming. Sure these cases are beyond the norm but I wonder if
they are not indicators that things are just getting worse for kids these
days.

It doesn't have to be this way. We can single people out who make sexist jokes
and correct them, loudly and publicly, and try to help them understand that
they're not funny, clever, or cool. I agree with the author that teachers can
be a part of the solution. But I don't think that is the final word (and it
never is when trying to change prevailing attitudes and norms): parents need
to tell their kids to stick up for people who are being bullied, that it's not
funny, and that it's dangerous to not say anything when they hear someone
spout off something hateful.

------
voltagex_
"how were you even able to make programming boring?"

Puts into words the question I've been trying to ask some of my teachers for
so long, but haven't been able to.

I know programming isn't intrinsically interesting to everyone, but I think
there is still magic to be found in seeing your instructions (in VB, Pascal,
C, Logo, whatever) translated to _something_ on the screen.

~~~
tsumnia
The basics are not always interesting, especially when you 'get them'. But its
through this repetition you build upon the knowledge. Eventually every fancy
thing falls back to the basics.

Think about Chemistry; the instructor can show all these cool reactions but
you eventually have to sit down and mindlessly run through on paper the
chemical reaction.

Now think programming-wise; I can show you wireless communication between two
Arduinos and some XBee radios, but eventually you have to explain how
variables are stored in memory, or how the communication is made, or some
other basic.

Intro classes can be boring because there doesn't seem to be an endpoint, but
that's why everyone encourages open source communities, they offer that real
life feel to everything you learn.

------
Tichy
Only girls have a bad time at schools. For boys it is just fun and games all
the time. They also never target jokes at each other. Imagine if there hadn't
been a girl in that class. Who would those boys have directed jokes at? It
would have been a very dreary affair.

Can you imagine a boy losing interest in a subject because school is so awful?
I can't.

------
doctorfoo
> discussed illegal gender discrimination in tech

Can't we just call it "bullying"? Illegal bullying.

I experienced an awful lot of similar things when at school, in 50-50 gender
split English classes and others. Sure, the wording was different, not
mentioning my gender, but the effect was the same. I remember a particular
group of girls picking on me consistently because I was so quiet and shy.
Physical as well as verbal harassment. The bullies will choose anything that
is different about a person: be the lone female, and they obviously choose
gender.

I really see the problem in all "discrimination" type cases, whether gender,
race, sexuality, being: unpleasant people. Cure these people of gender
discrimination, and they'll just be bullying the quiet kid instead. Or the
poor kid with the cheap clothes.

We need to be teaching kids to simply be _nice_ and to accept everyone else
for who they are. But like that's gonna work.

------
kunil
> And then the threats of violence started: "The author of this article is a
> whiny bitch and needs a good beating to be put in her place." Ten minutes
> later, the rape threats began, and I shut down our comments site-wide. And
> then the emails started...

Seriously? I am thinking a little exaggeration. I don't think trolls would
send e-mails, what is the point if noone reads your trolling.

And what is the fault of the teacher (other than visual basic). "Guys, please
don't harass this girl", yeah tell that to a bunch of boys and see how that
works. I don't think students would just openly harass her. He might be a bad
teacher but harassments is not his fault.

If there is one to blame, I would blame the parents. Didn't he researched the
school before applying her daughter? Doesn't her daughter already above high
school programming?

~~~
melindajb
" don't think trolls would send e-mails, what is the point if noone reads your
trolling."

Then evidently you don't go on the internet very often.

And at least trying to stop the boys would have been a point in his honor.
It's called doing his job as a teacher to protect a student from misogynistic
bullying.

You see, attacking someone BECAUSE of their gender ("fix me a sandwich") is
the very definition of sexual harassment. If someone said, "hey (nword)! shine
my shoes!" would the teacher also then be expected to do nothing?

Questioning the author's veracity is a standard derailing tactic in
discussions about this type of situation. Since you engaged with the article,
you must assume the author is telling the truth, otherwise why bother
discussing it?

------
simias
When I read articles like these I often get the impression that we don't have
the full story.

How do we go from "After she finished, she'd help classmates who were behind
or struggling in class" to "my daughter emailed to tell me that the boys in
her class were harassing her"? Those two statements are one sentence apart.

I was in a technical cursus in high school, there was exactly one (1) girl in
the class. And not for a single course, for all the classes. I don't remember
her being harassed, but I can't speak for her obviously.

I'm not saying that "she asked for it" or anything equally terrible, I'm just
curious to know how things degraded seemingly very quickly? It seems important
to understand what's the core issue here.

I'm obviously not very familiar with US education, maybe the culture is just
different over here.

~~~
vickytnz
I was at a girls' school. As a straight-A student in a rough school, helping
fellow students was a tactic for not being bullied. But all it takes is one
kid to decide to take an exception to you and it can all go horribly wrong.
And you might have done absolutely nothing (I know I didn't, many years later
the bully apologised and admitted exactly that) but it's the one wave that can
turn a tide. And that was with all girls!

------
theyak
It is completely unclear from this rant what the daughter knew before entering
the class. I don't care if she had used Linux, that doesn't mean she knew jack
squat about programming.

I taught an intro to computer programming course at a local community college
for a semester. The curriculum was set, so I couldn't really venture off to my
own thing. What I learned is that what we have to teach simply is boring.
Sorry, but you have to learn about loops, conditionals, variables, and all
those other mundane things before you can move on to more interesting things.
And let's get real, how interesting are things ever going to be in a class?
Not very. It gets exciting when you know enough to create a project on your
own. An intro to computer course is not that course - I wish it were.

------
sthommes
Shame is really hard to assign and even more difficult to self apply. So while
society (let alone our small, sometimes dark programming/tech back lot) is a
long way from where we should be, each of us does have a responsibility to
more than our own self-entertainment. Trolls are not unique to HN and blogs,
they exist in real life too - they're called bullies. And with regards to this
story, there's not really a 'both sides' here. There are females and males.
And of the males, there are men and boys. Deep down and up close in your own
personal mirror, you know which one you are. Instead, why not be awesome and
redirect negative, petty energy and do something productive. Change the World,
it's clearly needed

------
sologoub
When I first read that, my blood boiled. Regardless of the tech nature of the
class, it's that kind of blatant negligence that really underscores the
problems of many an education system. The myriad of excuses made for the
incompetent teacher are even more maddening.

If you do not hold people to a higher standard, but instead make excuses for
them, their conduct will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

An educator was once one of the most revered professions. Whether or not they
earned a comfortable living, educators of all walks of life were respected and
took pride in their teachings. Today... not so much and by making constant
excuses, we make it worse.

I would hope the school board would be interested in why such clear harassment
went unpunished/corrected.

------
mosselman
Do any men have any experience in classes where they were the only man amongst
many women?

------
lil_cain
>Talk to your students in private to see how class is going for them

This shows that the author doesn't really know anything about modern teaching.
Talking to students in private is probably a breach of the school's child
protection framework.

------
gcatalfamo
I would pay to know if that teacher read it and what his answer would have
been.

------
kbart
Common, seriously? Blaming teacher (and even tell him how he should do HIS
work) just because other kid said something to your daughter? That's just
hilarious and wrong in so many ways.. Kids are rude and cruel - always have
been and will be - it has nothing to do with programming or teachers or
schools. If you really want to make a difference, go to that school and teach
them yourself (if you are such a talent, I'm sure school board will gladly
accept). Then you can even choose the programming language to teach!

P.S. Haven't read such bullshit for a long time..

------
Fuxy
Ok harassing is out of line and as a teacher he should have intervened. WE all
agree on that.

Pointing out that the reason the other students were saying that is because of
envy that she is so far ahead of them should have been enough.

But talking about the low numbers of women and lack of diversity in IT is like
saying we should treat women special because there's not many in our field.

We should treat the like a fellow human being and colleague but stop making us
idolize women, that rubs me the wrong way.

Bottom line the teacher had no passion for programming and shouldn't have been
teaching in the first place.

------
bcRIPster
I can speak for this, my daughter has already shunned programming in any
capacity. While my wife and I have spent our time encouraging our children to
excel at math and sciences, where my two older boys sailed through, my
daughter (who used to love math) feels so isolated that half-way through high-
school she now is talking about how she sees no value in the knowledge because
of the social repercussions of showing math aptitude as a young woman.

This seriously pisses me off.

------
baak
This is less a "women in tech" issue than it is a standard bullying issue. You
think the "go back to the kitchen" comment is limited to just programming
class?

So this mom never brings this up with the teacher, presumes if she does it
won't help, and then writes a letter at the end of the year detailing all the
problems? Mother of the year, right here.

Also, "VB? Seriously??" got funnier every time I read it too. Jokes never get
old.

------
nopal
I really wish the mother would have contacted the teacher, even if her
daughter had decided "to plow through."

I'd like to give the teacher the benefit of the doubt and assume that he
didn't knowingly let a student endure a semester of harassment. He probably
didn't see or recognize the issue.

Open communication from the mother could have helped the teacher recognize the
problem and deal with it.

------
stigi
My girl friend and some of her friends had some bad experiences with their CS
teacher too. Leading up to the point that one of her friends didn't dare to
work with computers throughout her studies. She would even go so far to
dictate texts and had her boyfriend type them for her when needed.

It's hard to understate the impact a bad teacher can have on a persons life.

~~~
hnal943
She dictated texts to her boyfriend to type up? In my view, this is far more
degrading than a "get me a sandwich" joke.

------
Angostura
> I suggested that she talk to you. I offered to talk to you. I offered to
> come talk to the class. I offered to send one of my male friends, perhaps a
> well-known local programmer, to go talk to the class. Finally, my daughter
> decided to plow through, finish the class, and avoid all her classmates.

Why oh why did they not bring it up with the school?

------
anuragramdasan
I find this very weird. I wasn't even aware of such a situation until I
started reading about it online. Back here in India, Computer Engineering is
one of the branches of engineering with a high amount of female students.
Thanks to that, I wasn't even aware until some point that there was a scarcity
of women in tech.

------
baoyu
What's really sad: most of the comments here either say “Teachers don't need
to be good, that's OK, we should never change it or complain about it or even
worry about it” or “We need more vivid descriptions of bullying until we can
agree there's some problem”.

------
optymizer
I went to school in a third-world country. We had girls in our CS classes -
because CS was mandatory in high school. No one made fun of the girls. Most
girls weren't interested in CS, but the few that were, kicked so much butt at
coding, no one would dare make fun of them.

------
contingencies
Hey author or daughter, if you're reading this, try a hackerspace! Far more
convivial environments for intelligent experimentation and learning than a
classroom. Mother: Seriously? It was your fault to clinging to out of date
notions of formalistic teaching.

------
krob
I think that programming in highschool should be left to R.O.P (Regional
Occupational Program) courses. The people who teach them are usually much more
modern than the teachers who teach english / math in the H.S. courses.

------
marcuspovey
This shit has got to stop. Seriously.

As MEN in our industry we need to take a stand against this sort of behaviour
which is truly endemic and all pervasive in our industry.

This is not a women in tech issue, it's a problem with MEN.

~~~
VladRussian2
Is the situation/problem in our industry special? If yes, does is mean the MEN
in our industry are special or the industry is special?

------
yongcat
After reading this, I will make sure and constantly remind myself that I will
respect everyone.

Doing any more will make one more of an activist than before,

doing any less will make one less of a decent human being.

------
mosselman
This article is very sexist. What happens is that there is someone 'bullying'
and you assume that it is just because they have a penis and your daughter
doesn't.

------
ivanbrussik
I definitely see why he chose Visual Basic - you get to drag and drop windows
and little buttons around and can take periodic breaks in btw churning out
code to play with UI.

------
swamp40
Sad.

Her suggestions to her daughter's teacher seem reasonable and useful for other
teachers.

I hope sending her daughter to India (of all places!) for her final year of
high school wasn't a mistake.

------
jheriko
this is depressing ... but i can't help but wonder if this analysis isn't
sexist itself.

if the sexes were reversed i think it would be a case of saying "well son,
women are just like that - you'll have to learn to live with it" and be on
your way.

is that sexist?

i'm pretty sure there are natural and cultural tendendcies for men and women
to behave certain ways. the behaviour described is not unique to programming,
when there is one girl in a group or even school... its just people.

------
progx
You are absolutely right!

Turbo Pascal or Cobol AND Coding on Paper are the right places to start and
learn programming.

If students know the basics, they were able to learn other languages.

------
loahou04
Thats a shame. Some of the best developers i've worked with and worked for are
women

------
flylib
not sure why your criticizing Visual Basic, it is a good language for Intro HS
courses

~~~
frozenport
Not in the US, where Java is required for the Advanced Placement exam in
computer science.

~~~
newsreader
Are you serious? You want a HS teacher to teach Java?

~~~
Pxtl
Java's no more complicated than VB.Net, imho the only barrier for new users is
its use of C-style Boolean operators instead of using words. Oh, and the
danged checked exceptions.

The problem with Java is mostly its enterprise-y frameworks. If you have a
nice user-friendly GUI library that measures up to Windows.Forms for ease-of-
use? Java's fine.

------
EdgarVerona
I've got a couple of problems with the tone and where the finger is pointed in
this article, though I sympathize with her plight.

1) I feel like attacking the teacher is unfair. There is a much more
significant root cause that should be addressed, and the teacher's inability
to detect her bullying is merely a symptom of that root cause.

Bullying is terrible - I experienced that myself for alternative reasons in
Middle/High School - and indeed, inexcusable. Little kids can be assholes, and
I do hope that teachers get better at recognizing when kids are getting picked
on... but it's a lot to ask when they're strained with multiple classrooms of
students that they have to teach. With classroom sizes getting larger, it
becomes a laughable proposal to tell them to "pay attention" or "check in"
with individual students. These teachers are dealing with potentially hundreds
of students every day.

If you want to attack the real problem, attack the fact that teaching is
considered and compensated as a "second class career," and thus causes the
best and brightest to avoid it. Attack the low pay that teachers receive, the
low respect in their community, and in particular the low budgets for public
schools brought about by the continual demand for lower taxes. If schools got
the budgets to hire good teachers and (most importantly) give them
significantly smaller classroom sizes, they could do the kind of one-on-one
mentoring proposed: and that would diminish the core problem significantly.

Let's kill the root of the problem rather than blaming the already stressed
out teacher at the tail end of said problem. This is a problem we can FIX as a
society, if we can recognize that it's worth putting money into our community
to solve the problem. This is a solvable problem, made difficult only by the
fact that we refuse to give public school systems the funding that they need
to sufficiently address it.

2) Far less important in the grand scheme of things, but I feel like people
(including this author) belittle Visual Basic unfairly.

It's a great teaching language, and the simplicity of its syntax is helpful
for situations like high school where the majority of students don't even want
to be there, much less programming. The author's daughter is enthusiastic, and
that's great - I'd be willing to bet that the vast majority of that class had
absolutely no interest in being there. It's unfortunate, but true - and
teaching a straightforward language can at least make the barrier to entry and
the remote chance of getting through to some of these students just a bit less
remote.

Yeah, it's not going to be something that she'll likely run into in the real
world - well, maybe, depending on the industry - but teaching programming in
high school is about attempting to break through the oversized wall that is
general student apathy. You want to teach an apathetic kid Objective-C so that
they can make iPhone apps? Nope. You need something simple - something that
will hopefully be simple enough that they won't feel like they're struggling
against it. Is it sad that kids are so apathetic? Sure, but wishing they
weren't isn't going to make it better. So you give them a softball intro, and
hope they feel empowered enough with it to start actually caring about it. Or
for that matter, about something, anything.

This teacher also may have been teaching it because it's all they know. High
Schools seldom (ever in the public system in America?) have the budget to hire
a Computer Science teacher. This person was probably recruited as the only
teacher in a related department who happened to know some kind of programming
offhand.

Lastly in the defense of Visual Basic, it provides a vast wealth of easy-to-
use, easy-to-install, well-documented libraries that perform what (to lay
people) seem to be magic. Not only is it easy to learn, but these libraries
can be leveraged to very quickly make programs that feel like they're doing
something interesting with minimal resistance or struggling against the tools.
Learning how to struggle against tools without giving up IS an important skill
- but when you're just trying to start by teaching kids to care AT ALL, it's
more important that they feel like they're winning. They can learn how to
properly struggle once they've learned that it's worth the effort. When they
can throw the use of some advanced libraries together and come up with
something fun in a single classroom session, they're more likely to also view
programming as fun - and thus hopefully just a LITTLE more likely to actually
care about it.

In short, Visual Basic is a gateway drug - and a pretty effective one at that.

Anyways, that's my two cents.

~~~
swamp40
Teachers are the leaders of the classrooms.

Same as with all leaders anywhere, in addition to their main goals (teaching
the material, sailing a ship, etc.), they must maintain discipline and right
any wrongs.

If _anything_ goes wrong, they are the ones ultimately responsible.

It is _not_ fair, but being a good teacher requires more than just the ability
to teach a specific subject.

These qualities _can_ be taught, and this woman's letter contains some good
insights for the teacher.

~~~
EdgarVerona
Her suggestions are good, but the vast majority of them are unrealistic in a
world where we have 30+ kids in a classroom. We have a problem here, and I
feel strongly that the problem is class sizes. Blaming the teacher is akin to
a tile falling from a shoddily constructed roof and killing someone, and then
blaming the tile for the death.

If this teacher saw what was happening and refused to stop it... sure, blame
the teacher in that situation. I'd join you in blaming them. But I can't in
good conscience blame a teacher for not noticing bullying inside - or outside
- of a classroom with the overloaded nature of our school system. Give
teachers a 10:1 - or hell, even a 15:1 - student to teacher ratio if you want
the kind of one-on-one support she suggests. That would be a fantastic world,
and I would love to see that come to pass.

------
zekenie
Wonder what the response from the teacher was...

------
Datsundere
>learns linux >wants a macbook pro

~~~
brandoncapecci
Whose to say she didn't install linux on the MBP?

------
stefantalpalaru
trigger alert: Linux user at 11 asks for MacBook Pro at 16

~~~
coolnow
Also, is it common for 16 year olds to ask for a car in the US? I asked my mum
to make my favourite food, and some money so i could go out with friends.
Compared to "a car" or a Macbook Pro, it sounds like i had a deprived life.

~~~
alistairSH
Yes, very common, at least in the wealthier regions. Many kids have a car
available as soon as they can legally drive.

That said, I've noticed a trend among my son's peers. Many of them delayed
driving until they left for college. Not sure why. When I was that age,
everybody skipped school on their 16th birthday to go take the driving test.

~~~
daxelrod
NPR did a piece examining this phenomenon:
[http://www.npr.org/2013/08/21/209579037/why-millennials-
are-...](http://www.npr.org/2013/08/21/209579037/why-millennials-are-ditching-
cars-and-redefining-ownership)

------
Kudzu_Bob
High school kids can be mean. Film at eleven.

------
icecreampain
Parts of this article I can relate to. When I was growing up I had a mother
that was constantly involved in what I was supposed to be taught at school:
What are they teaching you? Why are they behind? Why are you behind? Why is
the teacher so incompetent? This led to me changing schools quite often and
each time that happened I lost friends.

It didn't matter that the classes were beginning easy for the sake of
revision, the classes were never good enough for her and I had to switch
school. Note: not good enough for her, not me. I lost friends and only managed
to learn to handle people in my 20's. Her destruction of my childhood ensures
that I will never forgive her.

The article does bring up several other things that I dislike: the child being
herded into an elite echelon of society by a bossy mother, being surrounded by
successful people, the high expectations of the mother upon the young child,
the child's [forced] willingness to please the bossy parent, probably also a
feeling of helplessness of not being able to say "no, I'm not interested in
that extra course".

But wait, there's more...

I see the whole article as a bossy, sexist, entitled mother wanting to raise
an entitled child: "my DAUGHTER deserves a better teacher", "my ANGELIC
DAUGHTER should not have to face adversity", "my LIGHT OF MY LIFE DAUGHTER is
so perfect, just like I want her to be, and is better than the rest of the
class combined".

The kid here is innocent. The mother needs to be put in her place. I will try
and do so with a bullet list.

* Fuck you and your snobby, antisocial attitude.

* Fuck you and your criticism of teachers. If you think you can do a better job you're welcome to try.

* Fuck you and your feminist entitlement. Your daughter is going to face far, far harder shit in her life than a couple of people making sandwich jokes. In Sweden we call your kind "curling parents". You're fucking up your kid for the sake of your own insecurity.

* Fuck you and your "journalism". I see you ain't much of a programmer yourself, but you'll criticize others? Oh wait, that's what "tech journalism" is: complaining about other people's work and not having a public git repo yourself.

* Fuck you and your egotistical "tech" blog. If you wanted some hits you could have just asked.

You know what happens to people who are good in tech? They get hired because
they're good at what they do. You don't have to be a white, american male to
show well-written code to people. You know what happens to people who are
mediocre in tech but are noisy as fuck because they want to be pampered and be
treated all special? They write blog posts and hope thier kids are hired
because mom's public shaming of everyone the kid comes into contact with
intimidates people into not being able to say "no" when interviewing.

When was the last time you asked your kid if she wanted to just go outside and
fucking play with the other kids? Just ride a non-feminist bike with non-
feminist neighborhood kids or sit on the non-feminist curb and talk non-
feminist shit like normal people? You're too busy signing your kid up for
extra-curricular activities and having her influences by successful WOMEN (not
people mind you, because people includes men and I suspect that's a gender
you're not quite hip with) that you aren't noticing that her childhood is
passing by without her having the time to enjoy it.

~~~
josephagoss
I agree with what you wrote. This person is so wrong to write that letter and
this type of "nannying" will ensure the child grows up to be the same. So
unfortunate.

------
rorrr2
This whole situation is such a huge WTF to me. I've been in the programming
industry for more than a decade, and I have _never_ seen this happen. It's the
lack of women that always sucked, and most of my dev coworkers agreed.

Any time we had a girl interview for a programmer position, it was like a
breath of fresh air.

I'm not saying it didn't happen or doesn't happen in general, I believe this
story. I just find it strange. We live in 2013, it's unbelievable this shit
still happens.

