I teach tech and I'm often asked why I don't teach some allegedly time-saving proprietary tool/environment/whatever. the answer is that the risk of that proprietary tool just ceasing to exist are really high, and when that happens, the time I spend developing curricula against the tool goes up in smoke. by contrast, notes I wrote for, e.g., python text processing are just as good today as they were ten years ago. over the long run, I think I save a lot of time by teaching only open source tools.

@aparrish It's interesting to see how easy it is to fall into believing that the tools are at the heart of what we do, and to forget that learning overarching concepts will leave us in a much stronger position than learning the steps to accomplish tasks in a single language. I suspect that the neoliberal mentality of schools as worker prep has a lot to do with this.

@mattlaschneider I agree about the neoliberal mentality! but it's a difficult balancing act. one of the things I actually love about teaching is threading the needle just right so that students get the foundational knowledge they need but also feel like they can make cool things with what I'm teaching as soon as possible. (I teach in an art program and there is *very* little patience for boring fundamentals :sunglasses:)