We Forget to Teach Typing
When standing on the shoulders of giants, do we need to see the ground? On average I get less than 5 hours a week with my students so how do I balance teaching fundamental concepts, modern developments, and all of the work in-between?
When I teach Physics, this is what haunts me when I teach electricity. The state standards only briefly mention the topic so time is always tight. But the subject matter has such a beautiful progression from the ground up! Going from a single electron and Coulomb's Law to how that could create the phenomena of a circuit and Ohm's Law makes sense. Adding in the historical anecdotes and experiments that shaped these discoveries make the experience so much more robust. Showing students the story of Faraday or Franklin's 50/50 chance on the direction of current adds a much needed humanity to Science. So I have to distill all of this into something more utilitarian that my class can see and retain over a handful of hours and they will be perfectly fine with it! But I can't help but mourn what could have been.
I do not feel at peace about the curation that I have to do in Computer Science. My course has to cover a wide breadth of topics, from binary to coding to AI to ethics. To cover this all requires heavy pruning, especially with the added constraints of an AP exam and project. I fear that I must trim essential content and context from my course to make things work.
During the pandemic I helped out fellow teachers with the tech they would need to run their course online. There were fundamental gaps in tech literacy that teachers could no longer work around. Knowing the difference between file types or cloud versus local storage were essential to make a class work. But when should any of my colleagues learned this? When does anyone learn that aside from luck and circumstance? Computer Science is still an optional course and most folks aren't still going to school anyways.
The current buzzword in CompSci education, in education in general really, is AI Literacy. Without digression on what that even means, it has put all of tech education into the paradox I face when teaching electricity. Data-driven programs require a depth of knowledge to understand, especially to digest the intricacies that make them diverge from "traditional" code. There is a justified push to get concepts like algorithmic bias into classrooms at the elementary level, but those teachers only have so much time.
I can't assume my students know about file management. I have to explain what a browser is. I need my students to be able to efficiently use a computer. But the "digital natives" are growing up on frictionless tablets and the teachers are expected to start on the shoulders of tech. I have to make learning how to type extra credit. Most students do it, but never the ones that need it.