Comment by formerphotoj

2 months ago

This "shouldn't" be surprising. Smart people seeing a wider perspective, seeing the limits of mass-schooling and top-down curricula, seeing other social challenges, and seeing a better option? I live in Seattle; there's a reason it's one of the top metros with per capita private school enrollment and if it weren't for tech incomes, I'd expect homeschooling and homeschooling collectives to thrive. Comments here about neurodiversity needs are also on point.

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formerphotoj

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tobinfekkes  2 months ago

I live in the Seattle metro, and tomorrow morning is the first day of class for our homeschool co-op, where I'm teaching software engineering to high schoolers.

  • cosmic_quanta  2 months ago

    I'd love to read about your experience doing this!

    • tobinfekkes  2 months ago

      It's a wonderful experience! I taught my first class in 2012, one for 6-8th grades, and one for 9-12 grades and then off-and-on through the years as needs arose.

      It's a lovely time in their lives when computers are still "unknown" and a little magical, and they're learning about Minecraft or Roblox. They love to see how things work, but especially, how to create things.

      So much of the grown-up internet is about endless passive consumption, so it's great to plant little seeds about how to use computers creatively and constructively and see where they run with it. Not everything has to be in an app, or behind a login, or from scrolling, or watching. We can just open up Notepad++ and create something. When they understand and master that, we move on to terminal or VS Code, or whatever works best for their trajectory.

      We take a journey from electrons to gates to binary to bytes to characters to files to folders to ports to IP addresses to routers to HTTP to servers and back again. It's fun to see them piece together a mental model for how all this previously-invisible stuff actually works. It's very complex when stacked together as a whole, but each individual layer is rather simple and straightforward.

      I have the career I do, and life that my family does, because nearly 25 years ago, one of the mom's in this same homeschool co-op taught an HTML/CSS class, and a "build your own computer" class. We scrounged some parts together from a Seattle PC recycler and built our own Linux boxes, then played little games or built websites.

      I'm endlessly grateful for the time and experience she invested into me at a very young age.