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Re: Students



Besides my Physics 20 and 30 classes, I am required to teach many other
classes. One of which is Computer Literacy 8. This particular group of 15
grade 8's will not take notes, have a contempt for computers, are openly
destructive toward equipment, and have many other strong behavioral
problems.

The course is one in structured programming on the computer.
Any suggestions?


- Great Cthulhu Saves,
In Case He Gets Hunger Later

Mark Gedak
Gedakm@sk.sympatico.ca
1-306-436-4576
Box 84 Milestone, Sask

If you are being required to take students with behavioral problems to
begin with and teach them how to program computers, it's no wonder they are
rebelling. If they are contemptuous of computers, it is because they don't
see what computers can do for them to make their life better/more
fun/easier/all of the above. Most of us have no desire to be computer
programmers. What we want is to be computer users, because we see that
using a computer has some advantages in terms of our lives. Computer
programming is for those few who like to make things do what they couldn't
before. Put in terms that these kids can understand, everybody wants to be
an automobile driver, but only a few want to be an automobile repair person.

Right off the top of my head I would say you have been given a difficult,
if not impossible, task. The only hope I can see is to convince the kids
that computers are cool. Games. Especially ones that they can succeed at,
which do not require that they have coordination skills they may well not
be capable of developing. I wuold guess that one reason they are
contemptuous of computers is that they do not understand them and are deep
down afraid of them. So activities that will help them build confidence in
their ability to master the machine should help. Games. If yur
administration will stand still for it, I would try to see if they can get
interested in some kind of games (hopefully not ones that pander to their
already too destructive nature). In any event, I would say that teaching
the totally unstructured kids structured programming techniques is doomed
to failure. Talk about an impedence mismatch!

Good luck, I don't envy you.

Hugh

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Hugh Haskell
<mailto://hhaskell@mindspring.com>

The box said "Requires Windows 95 or better." So I bought a Macintosh.
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