nondeterministic . net

Over these last three days, I have gone from davening at the Western Wall on Shabbat to giving our thirty kids what was for most of them their first introduction to programming and Java. I was up there for a sort of Linux/Java demo today, as well as questions in lab, and I loved every single minute of it. We have the full spectrum of students, from a couple of hotshot Israeli boys who plow through the material, to a couple of quiet Palestinian girls who have no programming experience whatsoever, and every combination in between. I think this wide range of skills will be one of our greatest challenges, but I’ll be damned if the kid who today needs Java’s capitalization rules carefully explained can’t reason about code with the best of them by the end of this month. I know it won’t surprise anyone reading this, but my lecturing and teaching style is naturally very performative, with hand gestures and voicing and the rest. I think that’s my strength; it’s also my weakness. Very often. I need. To slow. Down. If my English is going to be intelligible. I also need to kick myself into teacher mode, throwing questions back and making students think, guiding rather than answering. And who knows what other personal and group challenges lie ahead. Now, to the Friday tour: the Old City of Jerusalem. We walked through the Armenian Quarter to the (Catholic) tomb of Jesus (um, guys? He was a Jew, and Jews bury their dead neither in stone sarcophagi nor inside city walls. But I digress). That was high point number one. The rather higher high point number two was coming to the Western Wall as the sun was starting to set. Hundreds of Jews. I said some of the evening prayers standing not centimeters from the wall, having moved up close before the crowds were thick. The experience I will not recount here. But to see the packed space in front of the wall, Jews from American Reform groups and Russian Israeli Jews in their frankly ridiculous costumes of white and black… amazing. Add to this the sound of a muezzin calling Muslims to the last daily prayer and the imposing sight of the Dome of the Rock, and one begins perhaps viscerally to experience the Problem of the Middle East, of Israel, and of Jerusalem. Tomorrow: the Solution — realistically, a tiny part of one aspect of one solution — returns, in the form of variables and operators in Java. Tuesday: a visit to the Technion.

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