It's just because I love to read and learn. I was doing Autocad in 1988 in 8th grade. I was learning Unix/Slackware inside out in 1993 after I graduated. School barely gave me basics in 13 years and I could of learned all of that in less than a year. If my wife wasn't a stay at home mom I'd probably home school my kids. Sadly though I have to work all the time so, they go to a boring school and only learn how to take tests.
Oh the irony...
What I learned from the public school system was that I was not a good writer, and didn't know how to appreciate literature. As it turns out, that was antipodal from the truth. I have since re-synthesized the available data and revised my conclusion: my interests in school simply did not align with the curriculum mandated by school administrators. My grades were a measure of correlation rather than indicative of causation.
For instance, my teachers made me read Dante's Inferno. If Dennis Miller ever dropped the name Vanni Fucci into an obscure joke, I would probably get it, still having vague memories of the Malebolge filled with thieves and bitey reptiles. But I consider Planescape: Torment to be a better work of art. It isn't in a standard poetic form, though. Torment is a bit tougher to read in its entirety, and no one would dare to allude to bronze spheres to make a point without some inkling that the audience has played it. It is one thing to be exposed to art that has been blessed as a canonical masterwork in a controlled, sterile classroom environment: it is another thing entirely to recognize art in the wilds of your own life, and to recognize its worth because you feel emotion in its presence. When the system values the former over the latter, it has failed in its purpose. It failed me.
So I consider myself fortunate that I taught myself to program in BASIC and C many years before my public schooling system decided to offer a programming course in Pascal. Had that been my first exposure to software development, I would certainly not be here, writing this, now.
Not a constant, there isn't even an ideal.
I had the worst stereotype of a 9th grade history teacher you can imagine with a curriculum of a dumbed down textbook written at about 80 IQ level to maximize sales and tests consisting mostly of matching names and dates. I almost failed that class...
We can't teach dead white male texts for political reasons anymore. Nothing motivates a white male teenager like telling him a book is forbidden. I'm reminded of a nearly illiterate friend who forced himself to read Huckleberry Finn solely because it was banned. So needless to say as a little rebel I grew up reading and enjoying Plutarch, Xenophon, Gibbon, Herodotus. In a different era under superior political leadership, those books would have been considered masterpieces. Today they are considered fuel for book burnings solely for racial reasons.
There's no constant to "canonical masterwork" but if there is any constant at all, its probably that your school textbook was not a "canonical masterwork", LOL.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_canon#Literary_canon
There is literally a literary canon. It has certainly evolved over time, but almost everything I was assigned to read in my high school literature classes was in it. My personal opinion is that no one would bother reading Inferno today if it wasn't in the canon.
The best example I have was when he brought in other classes into his. Our classroom was small about 5 people and all of us were taking Physics and Uni Math (In Ontario you have different streams of Math and physics is an elective). We created a small gravity / momentum / acceleration and deceleration game. We had to apply certain formulas from physics class and math. As the course progressed we started doing more complex tests and implementations I think it really help solidify the physics course because we where going through documentation more and reading outside of course material for the resources which then applied back to the classroom afterwords.
But the main reason why I really got into programming was a story that he told the class. A power plant of sorts was having issues with hydro costs. the prices would increase at certain times throughout the day and decrease in others. This facility didn't need all the machinery working all the time so he was brought in to build an optimal solution which sadly was simplified to a y=m*x+b and checking it's slope then based on a bunch of different conditions certain machines would be powered off and then when the slope started to balance back out and go below a certain value it would turn on machines in the expected order of importance.
I'm not sure why, but I guess this story to a 9 grades just made this field feel like we can apply theory from a bunch of different fields and If I ever get bored in 1 area I can always take time to learn another field and apply programming to it. But programmers will always be employed for the foreseeable future and that was a huge worry in my mind at the time but seems everything turns out alright.
Mmm. There's some of that, yes, but I think it'd fail for not being so entirely sublime as the best canonical works of prose and poetry (and art, generally). It avoids some of the drudgery of its genre, yes, but while much of the "waiting for the pathfinding to take The Nameless One from one side of this room I've already seen 10 times to the other" might be fine in a narrow sort of way, given enough of it (and there is enough of it), that probably takes it out of the running for any sort of grand cross-medium canonical great-art-of-all-time collection.
Unless you cleverly add constant wonder and discovery or some kind of emotional connection to the gamey-because-this-is-what-games-do bits (or cut them, somehow, without making it Not A Game) it's like a film with a great story and acting, but poorly-selected shot framing and uninspired editing constantly working against it.
Say it's in a genre you like a lot, though, and maybe you'd feel put-out that it's not being shown in film courses, because you don't notice the parts that aren't so good or could easily have been much better and better served the film's purpose, and besides most of the movies in the genre you like are that way, so what's the big deal? Certainly you like it much better than Kurosawa or Truffaut or whoever's in the curriculum.
FWIW the only real masterpiece of a game I can think of that I've played, in that kind of broad all-of-human-art sense, with a real understanding of its sources, its direction, art in a larger sense, the games that have come before it, and the way games work and how it can use that constantly to its advantage for more than just occupying the player's time, is Kentucky Route Zero. I've never seen the game-parts of games used in such a literary fashion before, with everything else also coming together nicely. Just beautiful. And I've played and enjoyed lots of games.
[EDIT] The Witness shows signs of qualifying, too, but I haven't played enough to be sure, and it's the kind of thing that needs good follow-through to fully work. Gotta get back to that one and finish it.
To me, Inferno read like historical fan-fiction, where Dante put some well-known figures and some people that he just had some personal grudge against into his own version of Hell. The words were well chosen, but I didn't like it. Yet there it was, in my Norton Anthology. Someone liked it well enough to decide that I had to not only read it, but also dissect it and write BS essays about it.
That's a horrible enough thing to do to art you actually enjoy, but to chop up and rehash something you feel nothing for is even worse.
From my perspective now, as 2017-me, I wouldn't say that Planescape: Torment was "sublime". But 1999-me thought it was just the best thing to ever grace my hard drive. And 1999-me was able to look back on 1994-me and think "This is way better than Dante's Inferno." Dante took the concept of Gehennom from the Judeo-Christian-Muslim religious tradition and turned it into an epic poem. Black Isle Studios took the Planescape campaign setting from D&D 2nd Ed. (aka AD&D) and turned it into an epic CRPG. In it, the ordered layers of Hell had to be renamed to Baator because of the moral panic from D&D 1st Ed. When Nameless One actually (re-)visited renamed Hell, I thought that the pillar of skulls was at least as good as anything Dante ever dreamed up, and the protagonist actually had a plot-essential reason to see it.
I think I actually need the gamey bits. I have tried the artsy walking-simulator games where the story is on rails, and I don't like them. For me, an essential part of enjoying the art is in the discovery. I tend to like it more if I had to work to get it. So as tell-a-story games go, I much prefer something like The Stanley Parable over something like Dear Esther.
*Edit: words
Good training would identify the misconceptions teachers are prone to, and the practical application of adolescent psych. There's also an appalling lack of guidance through the states' regulatory framework.
I suppose there are past experiences that you have forgotten what it was really like.
After reading this I remembered sitting in some really boring high school classes boiling with almost rage at how boring it was. Sitting and looking at the clock. I wouldn't have remembered that without the help of the article.
I can easily see how a teacher would lose this prospective.
These things are pretty obvious. I always just assumed teachers didn't care.