Discussion Class

Discussion Class Topics

- Friday the 27th of June -

(12pm)

- The LA protests/riots -

As you may have seen in the news, there are protests and riots breaking out in LA. This comes after Trump directed immigration officials to the area, which has a high population of latino people. Since then, there has been a back and forth between California governor Gavin Newsom, and Donald Trump about what is happening and what should be done, wiith Trump sending in the marines to try to get the situation under control.

But what is the purpose of this conflict? Trump says he is doing what he was elected to do, which is remove illegal migrants and send them back to their original country. Why are people protesting that? Videos online make it look like chaos, but the mainstream media is claiming that it is all peaceful protest.l

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Let's discuss this!

- Friday the 27th of June -

(8pm)

- War with Iran? -

What is happening with Iran? This is somewhat breaking news so it's hard to keep up with everything happening. The conflict with Palestine and Iran seems to drawing Trump into another war in the Middle East, which is upsetting many of his voters, who specifically supported him because he was anti-war. Now suddenly he seems very keen on getting involved with this conflict.

Anything I write here today (Saturday) may be completely wrong or outdated by the time of the class, so please check the news before the class.

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Let's discuss this!

- Sunday the 29th of June -

(11am)

- Should schools allow substitution of foreign language credits with programming language courses? -

During the Obama administration, there was a bit of concern that the US was falling behind in STEM. To address this, one of the ideas floating around was to allow foreign language class requirements to be satisfied by programming language requirements. For example, instead of taking two years of Spanish classes, students could take two years of Java. As far as I know, this never became the mainstream and now is mostly just a blip in the past.

But is there any merit to this idea? How do programming languages and human languages differ? Could there be merit to teaching students programming languages in secondary or even primary school?

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Let's discuss this!