Teachers

very common thing actually...

---------------------------------------------
Resist {noun}

It depends on where you go to college I guess..in my experience NO

Keep in mind, this is still a new science..the ones that really know what they''re doing are usually on the front lines, not in the classroom..

If you''ll allow me to draw a very weak analogy, consider this: if medicine was as young as CS is, and was progressing at a similar rate, they would be showing students how to perform leechings and bleedings while at the same time, real doctors would be using the latest technologies..I said it was weak

I remember in the mid-80''s when computers became more publicly available(C64 KICKED ASS), a few teachers in my jr high started teaching basic computer courses..I remember asking several times exactly how binary numbers worked, the only thing they could tell me was "Ones and zeros..it''s all ones and zeros.."..I never could get a straight answer..

Now I realize that they were simply following the (hopelessly inadequate)textbook..none of them had any real clue about how computers worked, they just relayed whatever they were told to teach..

Don''t expect to find a John Carmack giving lectures about bsp''s in your high school, college, etc..chances are when you do take college courses you''ll be more up to date with your own knowledge than they are with their curriculum..

Most important, don''t let it get you down ..even the best programmers spend alot of time learning and doing on their own, simply because there is nobody else to teach them..this is a VERY new science, and even though it''s a great time for the average guy to do something totally new and brilliant, it''s also uncharted territory, which means you''re on your own in alot of things..




"Like all good things, it starts with a monkey.."

I talked to a university engineering professor once and he told me that college courses are commonly about 7 years behind the rea world. This margin gets narrower for some upper level seminars but for the most part I think this holds true. Now for the computer industry, 7 years may as well be 50. My reccommendation? Don't be satisfied with what you're learning in class. Get online and teach yourself as well. College will teach you the core concepts and hopefully instill a good understanding of techniques and how things work, but it will likely be up to you to make sure the knowledge that stis on top of that is up to date.

Personally, I think a basic assempler/machine design course, some data structures courses, and a few programming courses are invaluable. But all this does is give you a good understanding of the costs of things and what's going on behind the scenes when you write code.

As for teachers. Good ones are hard to find at every level. At least in college you have more of a gurantee that they are really into what they're teaching, however, whether or not they're good at communicating it. Also, in college, remember that every teacher has a specialty that's a small subset of the courses they teach (that being generally whatever their PhD was on). Try to find out what that is and go to the person who's most interested in the problem you're trying to solve. For example, I had one professor whose PhD was in speech recognition. I might not go to him for a networking question but I certainly would for something related to adaptive software, linguistics, or pattern recognition (it turns out that the algorithms for image and speech recognition are nearly identical).

Edited by - kensai on April 25, 2001 6:43:01 PM

Let''s see, with 5 years C++ experience, your choices are:

Standard job: $90K year
Teaching others C++: $35K year

Gosh, I wonder why the school teacher sucks...

Oh and I thought this was about the brilliant series on channel4 here in the uk

"Its not hard to teach writing letters and downloading porn, this is english." - Simon ''Teachers''

"I once had a wank in the IT room, what? it was break time!" - Kurt ''Teachers''

smashing stuff.. hehe

resist [BANNERS]

quote:

---

Original post by atcdevil

Whats the deal with high school computer teacher???

she just doesn''t know what she''s talking about!!!!

---

The AP computer science teacher in my high school used to talk about things like "if loops." What in the hell is an if loop? What it comes down to is that if you know enough of that stuff to be a competent teacher, there are ten thousand jobs you can get that are better than sitting around dealing with kids all day, 90% of whom don''t give a damn about anything they''re supposed to be learning. That''s not an attack on anyone personally, just a general observation about high school that I think most people on this board can appreciate.

-Ironblayde
 Aeon Software

Down with Tiberia!
"All your women are belong to me." - Nekrophidius

quote:

---

Original post by atcdevil

Whats the deal with high school computer teacher???

I''m taking AP Computer Science, and my teacher''s nice and all, don''t get me wrong.

But she just doesn''t know what she''s talking about!!!!

Why do schools hire teachers that are incompetent. Does anyone here have a teacher that is actually well above all of their students?

I can only hope it gets better when I go to college!

---

Those that can, do.
Those that can''t, teach.

quote:

---

Original post by Dustin_00

Let''s see, with 5 years C++ experience, your choices are:

Standard job: $90K year
Teaching others C++: $35K year

Gosh, I wonder why the school teacher sucks...

---

And then you get the likes of me, that just want to be a lecturer because, heck, that''s what I am good at.
I am not a brilliant programmer, I could have if I was working in the industry, but I got bored of it after 6 months.
So I made a simple choice, Money and no social life, or back to college and no money...
After three years I am now doing a Masters, because I finally realised that I am actually better at *explaining* than actually coding.
I still fly pretty high above my students, even fourth year students, thanks to my experience. But I definitely know that I am not as good as I could be if I were in a company, coding all day long.

What you have to understand is that being a lecturer doenst mean that you are necessarily good at what you are teaching. Rather it means that you are good at transmitting knowledge. Preferably stuff that you *know*. But believe me, I have found myself teaching how to use the fucking office software (Word, Excel, Access), to fourth year business students that couldnt do a Powerpoint presentation to save their lives. How come ? Because I know how to learn stuff *quickly* and as quickly can I transmit it to other people.
I won''t fool a specialist, but heck, I am not here to teach specialists, I am here to teach people that *don''t know*.

If you know more than your lecturer, well, why do you go to class ? And please, keep in mind that there are OTHER PEOPLE around you that don''t necessarily know about computing. Consider yourself lucky, and why don''t you help your lecturer if you can ?

(did I mention I am in an IT, or university, whatever you call it where you are. Maybe my experience is a bit different from that of high school lecturers).

And all I wanted to do was Fine Arts ... go figure !


youpla :-P

----------------------------------------
"-Where did you get that guy !?
-He is French !" - Godzilla

I used to have the same views on high school teachers as most of you do. I thought they were completely useless. Classes went from a simple keyboard lesson to finally printing the numbers 1 to 100 in a loop.

But now that I am older (29), I look back and think about what was really going on. Sure I was bored with the class. I was one out of 3 people who actually coded for fun. The rest of the class were kids who never used a computer for anything more than letter writing and game playing.

Most of them didn''t give a damn about computers. The class (and I suspect most high school courses today) was intended as an introduction to programming to give students an opportunity to explore an interest in computers.

If the teacher had attempted to teach material that was at my level, most of the class would have failed the course. The reason is simple, high school teachers need to instruct courses based on the level of their students. Classes are made to be challenging to the "average" student, not to the top 5% of the class. However, once you enter college, it appears to be the opposite. Classes are geared to weed out the people who will never make it in the field.

The material is important, but not as important as weeding out the weak students and building up the strong. I graduated in 1994 and they were still teaching me COBOL. I have never written a line of COBOL code outside of school. I do however have a very successful programming career because of the following things:

1. Determination
2. Learning new languages on my own time
3. Listening to others (make sure they know what they are talking about first though).
4. My education

So next time you are sitting in your high school programming class, take a look around and look at the other students. Are they whipping through the material like you are? Or are they struggling with a simple if...else statement?

borngamer

I ended up doing all of my year 11-12 teachers debugging because he wasn''t quite capable of using the upgraded Turbo Pascal 5.5 over the old Pascal 3... So I aced the class while coding some gaming projects instead of doing any of the work.

Except with my assignment, which basically was me showing off a better menu system that allowed mouse, scrolling, searching for options etc where everyone else just had 1., 2., 3.. etc. or A. B. etc..

Ahhh... those were the days

Hehe... I coded really messily occasionally, and I got my partner to go through and comment what I didn''t and write out all of the design charts ... (hehe... We never did anything in the proper order, and always finished on the first day we got the assignments, weeks before everyone else )

-Chris Bennett of Dwarfsoft - The future of RPGs
Thanks to all the goblins over in our little Game Design Corner niche

ahw:
Good for you for wanting to be a teacher! Don''t listen to that "Those than can..." crap (whether they''re kidding or not). It takes much more talent than knowing the material to be able to teach it.

atcdevil:
Be careful what you wish for. You''ll find out that having professors "well above" the students is not always better. Try explaining addition to a 6-year-old some time. It''s hard to remember what it was like when you learned it and then use that to explain to someone else. You''ll be bored to death or ready to strangle the kid. I guess that has nothing to do with your high school teacher - just take a nap during class and learn on your own. And try not to piss off the teacher by showing her how much better you are. How many "My CS teacher is out to get me for no good reason!" threads have there been here?

OK, done rambling.

-Rob G.