“I Don't Like Your Examples” (2000)
I agree with cwyers that the example are bad. Databases (relational ones, anyway) are good at describing relationships between clearly defined entities. The reason that people use Employees and Managers or Sales and Month in books is because they are clearly defined relationships and entities at the most basic level.<p>Those kinds of super-dumbed-down examples serve a purpose: to provide a prototypical way of thinking about the technology and how it&#x27;s best used.<p>I mostly agree with the author about his politics, as far as I can tell from what he wrote. But I think his agenda got ahead of him. I had really hard time going to a small religious school when I was a kid because a daily dose of &quot;Jesus says . . .&quot; seemed to me to be completely irrelevant to a math class. It was, for lack of a better term, an unnecessary context switch. WTF am I supposed to be thinking about right now? What I think or what I believe?<p>But examples of a war criminal database just don&#x27;t fit when you&#x27;re trying to teach someone to (hopefully) do more than just copy and paste some code. The point of these examples is to provide a mental template for how to think about relationships between entities and what entities are.<p>If, on the other hand, the book were supposed to be more advanced and dealt with topics like, &quot;How to navigate hot-button topics in the workplace&quot; or if the example really wanted to model how one might design a database that served the purpose of categorizing war criminals, I would be okay with it. As it is, I just think it&#x27;s a garbage example.<p>I do, however, think the author has a point about how much we gloss over sublimated political and social speech. It&#x27;s true. We do that. And we often accidentally espouse the status quo by trying to be neutral. That is a legitimate problem not only in technology but also in journalism and in every endeavor that involves written language.<p>From that point of view, I applaud the author for trying something different. And I can certainly understand the need to try something different when you&#x27;ve been doing basically the same thing for 10 years.<p>That&#x27;s my general response to this. My specific response to it is that teachers--in whatever format: book, in-person, classroom--have an obligation to only teach. Never to preach. People can go to churches for that if they want. But if I&#x27;m teaching you, my mandate is to lead you. To point you in a direction that will enable you to increase your knowledge. I struggle with this quite a lot as a violin teacher of young children.<p>Classical music and its history and theory are full of politically and morally charged ideas. It&#x27;s not all about how to get the fingers of your left hand to fall into a certain configuration in a certain time constraint. Or about how to put your bow in exactly the right place with regard to a vibrating string.<p>You have to manage your relationship with your audience. You have to understand why this music came to be, and yes, how things like religion were a factor. It&#x27;s not simple.<p>But my job as a teacher isn&#x27;t to tell my students that Mozart was a womanizing asshole, or to pass judgement on Tchaikovsky for being a closet homosexual who was very kind to his wife in spite of being very frustrated.<p>My job is to lead the student. To show them where facts can be discovered and ultimately to enable them to process those facts and draw their own conclusions. To give the student a framework for how to process facts, analyze them, and draw their own conclusions.<p>What I think about this author&#x27;s approach is tied to my personal opinion of what we should be doing when we are in leadership positions. Saying that Kissinger is a war criminal doesn&#x27;t inspire the kind of learning I think is appropriate. It&#x27;s stated as a fact. It&#x27;s the copy-paste mindset that is so detrimental to practically everyone. Memorize a fact. Repeat it. You need to learn how to do a thing on the web. Use jQuery. Repeat it.<p>I find this didactic method deeply and morally repellent, even though I agree with the politics espoused.<p>When we take up the mantle of a teacher or mentor or leader, we have an obligation to lead people down a path of growth. Not browbeat them with ideology. This approach smacks to me of someone who doesn&#x27;t understand what teaching really means.<p>Finally, I would bet money that the author has a different attitude about things today, and that we shouldn&#x27;t sit around crucifying someone for an experiment they did 17 years ago. It was mostly harmless. We all make mistakes when we are writing and teaching. I make mistakes as a teacher almost every day. Sometimes more than once.<p>It&#x27;s a good topic for thought, and even though I think it was the wrong move, it makes me question and think about my methods and the ways I relate to people. So maybe it wasn&#x27;t so far off the path of leading-not-preaching as I thought.