However, the problem doesn’t only occur in high schools. Many American universities have computer science curricula that never cover functional programming. Graduates of these programs are likely to have difficulty if they ever encounter anything like Scheme. The usual response, out in the wild, is to say “Scheme sucks” and dismiss it.

Then again, those who finally “get” Scheme but didn’t see it during their education are likely to become those annoying, smarmy Lisp zealots.

It kind of sounds like your teacher might have tried her best to have some sort of a “computer” class, given her lacking qualifications. Yeah, it went off on a wild tangent, but that’s not the worst that I have heard.

The thing about the Computer Science curriculum is that it’s very vague, simplistic, and unenforced. It might say things like “data structure”, and it would be up to a teacher to interpret that as a binary tree, or a simple array (and both would satisfy the “requirement”).

Good luck in your upcoming studies

I am a current Gr.12 Ontario student (going into CS in the fall) who has been been through this messy high school system. My particular situation was so ridiculous, it’s almost laughable.
My first experience with CS was at the Gr.10 level with an introductory course (TIK20). I attend a full year system, so things progress at a slower rate. Our particular CS teacher decided to retire in November, we had less than 1/4 of the material covered.

The replacement teacher was a extremely nice teacher who was a science teacher. Our old CS teacher stayed for two weeks to guide her on what to do with our class, we all assumed that she knew what she was doing because she was apparently qualified to replace our old teacher in all of his current classes (Science, Math AND CS).

However, that was not the case.
It wasn’t that she was not advanced with the field, she couldn’t even point out where the motherboard was in the opened case. I must repeat that she is a wonderful person and an excellent science and mathematics teacher, but she was no where NEAR qualified to teach our CS class.

I guess I should blame this problem on school administration and the way the way our school board policy on who should be hired. But the problem does not end there. Due to her lack of knowledge in the field, she decides to come up with a plan so that we can at least get some work done.

Imagine the surprised look on our faces when we walked into the computer lab, to find a tutorial on how to apply makeup on a girl using Photoshop Elements! The rest of the course took a drastic turn. We edited images for the rest of the year. I often wondered if she is even allowed change the course curriculum as a teacher. I brought it up with one of our vice principals, but it was ignored and I really didn’t know who else to talk to.

I think the point of my long story is that (at least in my school board, the TDSB) it seems computer science is not in high demand outside the technical schools. And as a result, some teachers who are teaching cs may not even be qualified to teach it. I heard from one of my math teacher (who was originally a computer science teacher but switched into the math department) that it is not uncommon for a science or a math teacher with no experience and/or qualifications in computer science, to be teaching courses at the high school level, largely because the amount of staff a school can maintain, and it is unconventional to hire just a “computer science” teacher when the science or mathematics department of said school does not require more teachers.

Sure you can be taught badly and pick up bad habits but surely it is better to have a taster before you arrive at university. The whole point of a university course is to go in to a subject in great detail and this is the proper place to loose those bad habbits you have learnt.

As an undergraduate, I understand what you’re talking about. The “get it to work” idea is all too common. I find that lectures consist of mainly just getting a program to work, and not teaching the workings of the program.
This has left many people behind in my course.