Take Action! Teaching English to Afghan women and girls
Take Action! Teaching English to Afghan women and girls
“I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.” – Audre Lorde
I'm currently working with four young women, ranging in age from about 16 to 28. All of them had their educations interrupted (obviously), and several have directly expressed unhappiness about it in class. :( They're all very eager to learn, and have also talked about the limitations of online classes and how it's helpful to have someone that you can directly ask questions when you're confused about something. That was what led me to this idea of foundational programming lessons. You can very easily get a crash course in Javascript or webapp development, but they don't really teach foundational concepts like...what is binary? Or like, how does a CPU work, conceptually? Which, I mean, these aren't required knowledge to become a web developer, not at all. But let's say you run into an integer overflow bug...like, how do you even begin to understand what that is until you know integer representation? Or binary arithmetic? Or what a byte is?
And so I was hoping to be able to help them fill these kinds of potential gaps in their understanding, so they don't get completely and utterly lost the first time they hear something like, "A char is a byte." The lessons aren't long enough to go super in-depth, but hopefully it'll give them enough of a framework that, when they encounter a new concept, they'll at least have some idea of where to start looking to understand more.
By the way, the program is looking for mentors who have a background in health or health sciences—it seems they have several classes waiting on that. You'd be helping with the stuff that drdee mentioned before, like career advice, etc., not giving medical advice or anything. It has been interesting and fulfilling helping these women, so if anyone is thinking about applying, please do!
Ooookay... 😅 Not too sure what's been going on in this thread since I was last here, but let's just talk about the volunteer program, yeah?
I'm currently working with four young women, ranging in age from about 16 to 28. All of them had their educations interrupted (obviously), and several have directly expressed unhappiness about it in class. :( They're all very eager to learn, and have also talked about the limitations of online classes and how it's helpful to have someone that you can directly ask questions when you're confused about something. That was what led me to this idea of foundational programming lessons. You can very easily get a crash course in Javascript or webapp development, but they don't really teach foundational concepts like...what is binary? Or like, how does a CPU work, conceptually? Which, I mean, these aren't required knowledge to become a web developer, not at all. But let's say you run into an integer overflow bug...like, how do you even begin to understand what that is until you know integer representation? Or binary arithmetic? Or what a byte is?
And so I was hoping to be able to help them fill these kinds of potential gaps in their understanding, so they don't get completely and utterly lost the first time they hear something like, "A char is a byte." The lessons aren't long enough to go super in-depth, but hopefully it'll give them enough of a framework that, when they encounter a new concept, they'll at least have some idea of where to start looking to understand more.
By the way, the program is looking for mentors who have a background in health or health sciences—it seems they have several classes waiting on that. You'd be helping with the stuff that drdee mentioned before, like career advice, etc., not giving medical advice or anything. It has been interesting and fulfilling helping these women, so if anyone is thinking about applying, please do!
