Bob Bridges wrote: >Wait, it's "sexist" to distinguish between the beauty of female Arts students and of female computer-science students? They're both female, so that can't be sexist.
>(Belatedly) Oh, you mean "...had no idea what they were doing with computers". But we don't know whether that's sexist until we know whether it was an observation or an assumption. That was an observation. It meant they needed my help. Lots of it. Including offers of one-on-one tutoring (never taken up on, I'm afraid). Srsly, it was a fun class to work with. My dad's assignments were all text-based, things like: "Given a list of names: 'firstname lastname', convert them to 'lastname, firstname'. For extra credit, sort by lastname". They'd be COMPLETELY lost as to how to start this, and I'd say "Well, what do you need to do first?" "Um." "Maybe.read the input file?" "Oh, yes, that makes sense." and it would go from there. I quite enjoyed the didactic aspect of it, and I like to think it gave me a better appreciation of end-user thinking, which has come in handy over the last decades. A very Artsie friend took my dad's class several years later, and for his term project he fed it a list of teams and scores and generated headlines: "Bears claw Tigers 6-1" and the like. Good basic stuff, and a lot more relatable than "Calculate a square root" and the like, which (at least at the time) beginning CS class assignments tended to be! I've always been convinced that you learn a lot more doing things you can relate to. And my perspective it might've been sexUAL, but was hardly sexIST. My sisters inform me that the average male arts student is more appealing than the average male math/CS student, too. Meanwhile, nobody here uses PL/I, eh? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
