Adventures in Teaching
Tours of Duty in the Silicon Forest
What as teaching K-12 in the Silicon Forest been like? My detractors will say I wouldn’t know, as I’m not a member of any teachers union and am therefore barred from public schools. Whereas that’s technically true, I was driving around to public schools, assigned by a scheduling program on my phone, programmed in Prague, right up to the mandated shutdown owing to SARS-2. At that point I jumped onto Zoom and conducted a “summer camp” for kids, something I’d done previously. Now add in all the private schools I was visiting.
You may have guessed my secret (“programmed in Prague” a clue): I was working in the private sector for a commercial company that profited off that time between “school is over” (bell rings) and “parents are finally off work” (a couple hours later, rush hour traffic always a variable). The kids who aren’t going home alone in latch key mode, to watch TV or whatever, stay behind on campus until a parent can pick them up, with “enrichment learning” or “sports” or “arts and crafts” occuring in the interim, and often provided by outside vendors.
So with some authority I can report a subculture that got started early with MIT Scratch, like they sometimes start at Harvard (CS50). Then a large percentage of those might migrate to Python in the guise of Codesters, a cloud based coding environment with many Scratch-like sprite controls, so not the Python you get from the Python’s website, nor from Anaconda’s either. Robotics. Minecraft. Arduino… the curriculum branches at this point. We even did some CAD (likewise cloud based).
Some schools have a Microsoft Lab, with desktop computers lined up on desks or tables. Others have laptops in charger carts. My organization was prepared to show up with ChromeBooks, as many as needed, were the client academy to have insufficient hardware, perhaps owing to scheduling conflicts. The school might be using its lab for something else in that time slot. I’d bring the ChromeBooks in my car, or another teacher would.
So far, I’m mostly talking about the middle school level, and junior high, although I consider Codesters and even MIT Scratch both useful resources even unto adulthood. If you’re retired and wonder what coding is all about, don’t let MIT Scratch scare you away with it’s kid-focused aesthetics. It’s an elegant portal into the world of automation.
At a higher level, my approach was to work through Saturday Academy. This was back in the days when my curriculum needed (a) field testing and (b) public exposure. My curriculum still has those needs today, but starting from a different place, as the materials have come together in more lasting formats than summer meetups on the Reed College campus, Portland State, or the University of Portland. I taught Martian Math at all three.
Martian Math features Python as a CAD tool, using Visual Python or VPython, a tool well-known in the physics learning community. I came to learn of VPython through a projective geometry guru (ala Klein of Klein Bottle fame) on Python’s education-focused listserv: edu-sig (sig means “special interest group” and Python, the organization, has lots of sigs). Before VPython, I used POV-Ray and VRML. I’ve only dabbled in Blender myself, but future Martian Math teachers may rely on it almost completely, given it speaks Python and real time renders in 3D, at game engine speeds.
My most recent field testing experience with Martian Math came in connection with covid (what SARS-2 caused), now winding down. An eighth grade class in Bethany Village needed a teacher. This was a private school devoted to high achievers. When I showed up espousing Python, my students expressed an elitist desire to stick with C/C++. I couldn’t blame them. They focus was winning contests requiring dynamic programming and a lot of the literature is C/C++, with Python a relative newcomer, and never as fast.
This was an accredited school and my position as long term substitute was not such that I could experiment too broadly. We had bases to cover. However, around the edges, I could bring in some of the Saturday Academy materials, already programming friendly, starting with number sequences and series. You’ll find my name in the links section of both 1, 12, 42, 92… and in its cumulative version (1, 13, 55, 147…). Learning enough of any language to generate such sequences, which visualizing a geometric interpretation, is definitely a way in to STEM subjects more generally. Coding Pascal’s Triangle as a Python generator is one of my biggest hits. I’d do a little of that with Codesters too. Pascal’s Triangle is our bridge to data science with its binomial and normal (bell curve, Gaussian) distributions.
In the wake of these field tests and fine tunings, I’ve built up the Jupyter Notebook stash, all in the copyleft space, meaning Oregon teachers have access at no cost. I have very little competition at this point, for the Martian Math stuff, despite my focus on science fiction and writers such as Ursula Le Guin. The main focus is Buckminster Fuller, likewise caught up in that same science fiction writer world, in turn overlapping the namespaces of futurists, urban and regional planners, economists, speculators, developers and investment bankers. We might shift gears from Martian Math to Casino Math at this point, another one of our generic four: Martian, Casino, Neolithic and Supermarket).
4D Solutions nowadays helps backstop other teachers in their various field tests. My Google slide decks feature the fruits of numerous collaborations, with David Koski, Casey House, Daniel Ari Friedman and many others. I go into more detail in my Graph Theory 2025 YouTube, which mentions Koski, Buckminster Fuller, and a number of other geeks, philosophers and mathematicians (Friedrich Nietzsche, Donald Coxeter, Margaret Fuller…) and even a couple spies (Applewhite and Angleton). I call this “place based education” (not my invention), in which content is customized to the teacher’s own time and place (“private sky”).
