On Tue, Nov 3, 2009 at 8:48 AM, Travis Vaught <tra...@vaught.net> wrote: > > On Nov 3, 2009, at 10:04 AM, kirby urner wrote: > > On Mon, Nov 2, 2009 at 8:27 PM, Edward Cherlin <echer...@gmail.com> wrote: >> >> Cards: You are right on the merits for combinatory math, but you will >> run into strong cultural aversions. >> > > Yes, anticipated. However, the Python subculture has done the necessary > work to publish a Diversity Statement, which has an antibiotic effect > against puritanical bigots (assuming you mean some people have moral hangups > about gambling?). > > I was rather assuming that the hangups would be about the more cringe-worthy > aspects of tarot cards. The fact that people of faith may not get a good > feeling about using a tool whose logo is a snake, introductory examples are > using tarot cards, and whose theme music might be construed to be the rather > irreverent creations of the Monty Python players, says less about the > presence of puritanical bigotry and more about a complete lack of > sophistication in marketing.
Thanks for clarifying Travis! I'd completely forgotten that I'd mentioned the Tarot Deck as an excuse to introduce more long-winded string templating, ala Madlibs and Grossology (a recurring theme in my curriculum writing). By way of background, a lot of younger kids especially enjoy scatological material as it's something they can relate to, makes the topic more user-friendly. There's a genre of Madlib that focuses on this theme (you know what a Madlib is right?). http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2009256554_grossology24m.html http://tampabay.momslikeme.com/members/JournalActions.aspx?g=247205&m=388979 Probably the earliest introduction of scatology is in the first Snake method, where you have both 'eat' and 'poop' methods, a way of introducing the list data structure (as the stomach) and using it as a queue (first in first out, ala FIFO). I've had good experiences in my classroom of first introducing string.Template using Madlibs of an entertaining nature, then switching to more auster string.Templates having to do with generating scene description language and/or VRML, for getting polyhedra either ray-traced or brought into a browser plug-in such as Cortona's. >From my slides: http://www.4dsolutions.net/presentations/connectingthedots.pdf (see slides 11, 23-27 especially) > I love a good example (and a good joke) as much as the next guy, but let's > not lean on a diversity statement as an excuse to not attend to some basic > tenets of marketing. If we had examples that incorporated the various > "Stations of the Cross" it would likewise go over like a lead balloon. > Introducing Python as a unifying tool in early education (by some definition > of early) calls for a particular discretion in the choice of examples. > Best, > Travis > Yes, I understand better what you're driving at. However, the death of the mass-published text book as a primary curriculum distribution mechanism means we're able to niche market, not mass market. I used to work at McGraw-HIll and remember how editors would bend over backwards to develop some "acceptable to all" pabulum, focusing mainly on California and Texas as the standard bearers. I think those days are finally coming to an end.** The concept here is teachers will roll their own (develop their own content), quite possibly using a "place based" approach, meaning they up the relevance quotient by incorporating information from the local environment (in story problems, in geography lessons, in history lessons -- not just talking about math). I've worked with the Catholic subculture in Portland some, helping a protege us Pyblosxom to develop a blogging system for one of the local priests (Father Bob), complete with "skinning" depending on the liturgical calendar, with a few secular holidays thrown in for good measure. Coming up with a Python algorithm that'd correctly compute Easter was especially challenging, with the US Navy proving our most reliable source (I think it was -- some dot mil resource). Here we go: http://www.usno.navy.mil/USNO/astronomical-applications/astronomical-information-center/date-easter Regarding Tarot, that'd of course depend on the school and local community standards. In Portland, we tend to celebrate pirates, hackers, wizards and witches all in the same breath (it's the Winterhaven Wizards where my daughter went to junior high). If a student wanted to write a Tarot Reader is a school project, I doubt that'd be a problem around here in any way. YMMV of course. http://www.flickr.com/photos/17157...@n00/4037589946/ (typical Portland pro witch propaganda) What some of us advertise about Python is that it fits well into niches (a variation of "fits your brain" meme) i.e. you're not even obligated to use Latin-1 except for the keywords. Having religious themes for your content is in no way a problem for the language itself, even if your language is Klingon (actually that might be a problem as Klingon is only ancillary in the Unicode standard and might be difficult to come by -- Damian does Klingon in Perl though, so I'm thinking there must be a way). http://www.archlug.org/kwiki/KlingonPerlProgramming http://globalmoxie.com/blog/klingon-not-spoken-here.shtml I regard the Diversity Statement as a way of protecting the niches against any largely fictitious "majority culture" that wants to steamroll some kind of "majority aesthetic" on the rest of us. There's really no need to pay much attention to tyrannical majorities anymore. It's all about locale and localization (another way of saying "place based" education is the way of the future, IMO). Of course that's just one more debating position, not saying you're compelled to agree, obviously. Just my point of view and all that, seems to be working well in practice. Kirby ** I remember the story about John Saxon, a retired military guy who decided to get into curriculum writing, found his textbooks had a large niche market among schoolers. However, his story problems about fairies and pixies were getting him into trouble with that group, which regarded these Narnia-like creatures as too Satanic for comfort. He needed to change his text for the next edition. Such is the relatively joyless life of mass publishers. http://www.home-school.com/Articles/SaxonEditorial.html Related blog post (Oct 17, 2009) http://controlroom.blogspot.com/2009/10/equipment-drop.html _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
