This is an opinion column.
Maybe we got this computer coding thing all wrong, those of us who dwell in the code-or-no-code world.
It took an Alabamian — one who leads one of the largest companies in the world, whose products touch us all in some way every day — to set us straight.
Robertsdale native, Auburn graduate and Apple CEO Tim Cook, whose aging father still lives (stubbornly) in the home where he helped raise his children, is leading Apple to invest a considerable chunk in Birmingham. Apple, and partners, have quietly transformed a historic downtown building into a coding incubator called Ed Farm. Cook came to town Thursday to show it to the world.
They want to convey the message that coding is not just for kids. Ed Farm’s initiatives include 11-week coding programs for Birmingham City school students, teachers, and adults.
“Coding is nothing more than a language,” Cook tells me later Thursday afternoon, not long after helping to reveal Ed Farm, located in the Forbes building of Fourth Avenue North. ”Just like using English, or whatever your natural language is, coding is like that.”
We are sitting in a relatively quiet corner of the library at Oxmoor Valley Elementary School, where a bevy of giddy students are using tablets to record Black History Month PSAs and interviews. “May I watch?” Cook asks. “Yes, sir,” was always the response.
“We think coding,” he says later, “is the most important second language people can learn because it’s global. It’s the only global language that exists in the world.”
I get that. I took a few years of French and many behind me took Spanish.
Now coding? It’s imperative for the jobs that exist now and will exist tomorrow.
“We are in an environment where you don’t go to school once or twice with college,” Cook says. “You have to continually learn because the destruction of jobs is happening at a faster rate, and the creation of jobs is happening at a faster rate. You have to be able to move from one to the other. [Adults in the coding class] may conclude they want to be a coder; they may conclude that they don’t. But the skill will still help them become employed in a different role.
“It’s important that people know the art of the possible and the way to do that is to learn to code, even if you have no desire to code.”
Cook, though living 2,000-plus miles away in Silicon Valley, keeps tabs on his home state and on its education performance. He hopes Apple’s planting of Ed Farm in Birmingham can contribute to moving Alabama’s children and adults forward.
“People in the state deserve a great education,” he says. “In too many places [in Alabama] that’s not happening.”
Just a few hours before, Cook met Odessa Woolfolk, the 87-year-old visionary for the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, a true gem for our city who dutifully took instructions from much younger people and “coded.” She did the work alongside the equally challenged Birmingham Mayor Randall Woodfin and excitable school superintendent Dr. Lisa Herring.
The apple CEO and Woolfolk shared a few words, a few smiles.
Now, later, Cook is almost speechless. “Talk about a privilege to meet her,” he says. “It’s over the top. She has a lot to offer. She’s a natural teacher, whether in a classroom or not. She’s seen so much and studied so much.”
He pauses. “Just amazing. It was an overwhelming meeting.”
It’s natural for Birminghamians to wonder if Apple’s work in Alabama is sustainable, even with commitments from other entities involved, including Alabama Power, University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham City Schools and others.
But Tim Cook, who leads a giant corporation that has helped sustain the digital age worldwide and equally change cultures, has a reminder about Apple: "We don’t do something just for the moment.”
A voice for what’s right and wrong in Birmingham, Alabama (and beyond), Roy’s column appears in The Birmingham News and AL.com, as well as in the Huntsville Times, the Mobile Register. Reach him at rjohnson@al.com and follow him at twitter.com/roysj
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February 28, 2020 at 08:36PM
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We’re in for long term in Birmingham education effort, says Apple CEO and Alabama native Tim Cook - AL.com
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