On Jul 31, 2010, at 12:38 AM, Guillaume Marceau wrote:
1. Shriram never clarified that this proposal is for attracting students only.
If so, I'd like to see a path from P4P to full Racket syntax included in the
proposal.
2.
> I also don't think "I hate parentheses" comes from familiarity with
> some other syntax,
I have not run into a "I hate parentheses" attitude in my time of teaching this
material -- except in teacher workshops, usually stated as "my students will
hate all these parentheses when I will teach this stuff in the fall". Even
though you are entirely focused on watching students and interviewing them, I
am sure that in my 18 years of watching freshmen at two colleges and N high
schools over the first few weeks I should have encountered this problem.
I have encountered the "I hate Scheme" attitude a lot in college. To counter
that, I have developed a simple and easy trick. I invite the people who say
this or a variation on it ("I can solve these problems in any other language
than Scheme" or such) to solve the problem in their favorite language; if they
can I promise an A for the semester. I do this two or three times a semester
and all of these kids leave my office with the admission that they are having a
problem and it is NOT Scheme.
If you and Shriram think that this is a problem that pervades the semester --
more than the first two weeks in a regular semester (NEU, Brown NOT WPI) -- the
proposal presentation should include statistical evidence.
-- Matthias
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