Kentucky: Programming Language = Foreign Language 426
jackb_guppy writes with word that "Legislation that would let students use computer programming courses to satisfy foreign-language requirements in public schools moved forward in the Kentucky Senate on Thursday." From the article: "Kentucky students must earn 22 credits to graduate high school, but 15 of those credits represent requirements for math, science, social studies and English — and college prerequisites call on students to have two credits of foreign language, [state senator David] Givens said.
Meanwhile, Givens pointed to national statistics showing that less than 2.4 percent of college students graduate with a degree in computer science despite a high demand in the market and jobs that start with $60,000 salaries."
Re:there's lots of them (Score:5, Informative)
In Ontario we used to have this thing called OAC(Grade 13) which gave you equivalent degrees or partial credits towards university. So in a sense, they can be valuable. When they killed and gutted grade 13 here, the quality of students entering university dropped through the floor.
kentucky needs help (Score:2, Informative)
Re:So I speak four languages now? (Score:3, Informative)
In Canada most universities will accept math to fulfill a grade 12-level second language requirement, and have for decades. The point is not that you can order a beer in some other country while on vacation, it's that your brain has been stretched in the right direction. It makes sense.
Federal government jobs require that you actually speak French (and English) well enough to serve someone in that language, because there the point is that you actually speak the second language. That's well beyond what a grade 12 level French class would teach you, by the way.
Re: Not if you work for the Commonwealth of Kentuc (Score:5, Informative)
I know it is popular to mock the Southern US, but lame values of living are relative. I live in rural Southern Alabama, which is probably not much different than rural Kentucky. I have a nice 2 story home overlooking a pond. My morning commute to work is around 20 minutes if you count dropping the kids off at school. I might pass 10 cars during rush hour. I know most of my neighbors for a mile in both directions. When I want to go on a walk in the park, my backyard has 130 acres of pine trees planted. Sure the pay scale is not as much as a similar job in other areas, but neither is the cost of living. What would $70,000/year get you in Chicago?
Re: Not if you work for the Commonwealth of Kentuc (Score:5, Informative)
Sorry, but I've seen rural Alabama and rural Kentucky. From my experience, Kentucky's doing significantly better.
Re:KY SB 16 2014 (Score:5, Informative)
"Romance languages". Not "Latinate languages"[sic].
Learning Latin because you want to learn one Romance language is counter-productive, but if you want to learn a bunch of them, basic Latin is really helpful. It helps you to understand the languages' quirks better - and to predict them. Simple examples: /k/) or an S (always /s/) in that position.
*Italian: words like uovo-uova that change gender when plural: check for Latin 2nd declension neuter words.
*French: it's far easier to put circumflexes if you remember which words had an S in Latin, as hôpitalhospital or maîtremagister.
*Portuguese: wondering if you should use Ç or S? Check if Latin had a hard C (always
Portuguese won't help you with Italian plurals, Italian won't help you to put French circumflexes and French will barely give you orthographic clues for Portuguese. And, even without being a Romance language, it also helps a lot with English, due to the amount of borrowings the language did from Latin and Norman [itself a Romance language].
It's also worth mentioning that Classical Latin (the non-church one) has a HUGE literature, and translations in general usually suck.
TL;DR: "Latin should be left to the priests" my ass.
[Even because they can't pronounce Latin for shit. "ky-loom", not "cheh-lo", paedicatores stulti.]