Highschool Computer Science Teachers and why they can suck.

[pyrnight]

I have heard a lot of bad stories of students that have taken computer science, and came out with bad habbits, poor code, and very little understanding of programming and how computers really work. The problem of course is the teachers, many of them have never coded before, and have been forced into this because they are a new teacher, or the only person the school board could find for the job. I know this has happened, and know a few people who taught themselves turing in grade 10 using only the reference. The teacher they were with had never programmed in her life, and I don't blame her for not being able to teach the class properly. Imagine if you had to teach a class of 25 students, of varying experiance with computers, with little general computing experience of your own, never mind not even knowing what a variable, or a loop is.

I started this topic because I saw wtd and some others ripping on somebody in the Submissions thread for poor programming, saying he repeated to much code and what not. It was the sudoku program. No offence but the people in that topic were being assholes, imagine if you had never coded, and were taught by somebody forced into a situation that had to teach you.

Anyways, I think I'm lucky because my computer science teacher is very knowledgable, and very helpful, he gives me and another student extra projects and what not to do because we know our stuff and that class is kind of a joke to us. I know in the case that he retires, theres also another guy around here from beamsville who can replace him, so I'm not worried.

Have you had a good teacher, bad teacher, whats your experience in computer science (or engineering) in highschool?

Discuss:

[r691175002]

I consider myself relatively lucky in that we have a dedicated comsci teacher (Who doubles as school tech guy), and is a competent programmer. That being said, I think we focus on the wrong things.

Here is a copy-paste of our Computer Science 20 outline:

C++ Basics
Looping and Branching
Functions
Arrays and Structs
Classes

Worth noting is that it includes recursion in the functions unit (Before arrays?) and it ends with a 1 month team final project that is moderately large.

Computer Science 30:

Introduction to Graphics
Searching and Sorting Algorithms
Templates and Inheritance
File Streaming
Data Structures (Linked Lists)
Binary Trees, Stacks and Queues
Introduction to Java

Not bad in itself, however most of the units are pretty shallow. Same deal with a team final project.

I feel like we spend too much time learning the language and not enough learning to program. Taking the CCC only further reinforced my opinion. Knowing how to use a crappy graphics library is all well and good, but if you are scoring 15-30 on the senior test I think you should rearrange your priorities.

While we get taught the syntax of OOP, nothing much gets said on how to properly take advantage of it, and despite the sorting and data structures unit, not much time goes into how to develop and adapt algorithms. We have a bunch of kids who know how to program only superficially. The number of teams that coded their 3k line final project in a single ugly file was painful.

[HeavenAgain]

teachers are teachers... if they are teachers, they for sure KNOWS more than you, or else how did they become a teacher in the first place?

if they have no knowledge in what they are teaching, then the question is "how did they get the job?", and "how long can this teacher last at the school"

and another factor is depending on the students, i know a lot of students in grade 10/11/12 who is not even interested in the course at all, they are taking it just because it is "easy marks", "play games, go online", and times comes to assignments, they just come here for "help" without knowing what they are doing and blame on the teachers for not teaching (teacher doesnt teach or students dont want to learn??)

the only reason people are "ripping on somebody" is because we want them to improve and show them what is good style and what is bad, because they are knowledgeable to criticize it, or else (errr...)

but all in all, this is life, its never fair, and yes there are bad and good teachers, but there are also good and bad students, what can you do, right?

[StealthArcher]

Learn what you can, when you can, as good as you can. If you aint learnin you're dead.

[Tony]

That particular sudoku submission was for a grade 11 final project. Teacher aside, simply having the student willing to type up 4600 lines of redundant code should be questioned.

Though that's not the topic of the discussion.

To be fair, there are good and bad teachers in every subject. For example, I've had a Physics teacher incompetent enough to be voted off by the class half-way into the year, and he was replaced by a really awesome guy. I know of a bunch of other really good teachers in the CS field. Though I've also heard horror stories.

It's really all over the place, throughout the entire education system.

[r691175002]

HeavenAgain @ Mon Mar 03, 2008 10:29 pm wrote:

teachers are teachers... if they are teachers, they for sure KNOWS more than you, or else how did they become a teacher in the first place?
The question is "how did they get the job?"

I get the feeling that computer science isn't a priority for a lot of schools, its more of something that they throw in because they have a teacher with some extra time.

[iluvchairs112]

my comp sci teacher has another job (not exactly sure what, but it includes programming & CS)
but the problem is he can't teach. he can't control a classroom and does not know how to help us learn. he will give us things to do and basically say "go to it". a couple of us will do it but the rest will spend time playing games. usually it is a one or two day project that he'll give us a couple of weeks on. the few of us who actually care about the class will pretty much just use the program and see what we can do, find online resources and do some other stuff.

[nastynika]

i know how it feels to havve a crappy compsci teacher my teacher has no idea wut she is doing and it is hard to figure out alot of this stuff by yourself

[McKenzie]

I agree with the intent of the original poster, which if I have you correctly is "try to be respectful of people's situations." If the teacher is no good there may be a number of valid reasons. If the student is no good, there may be valid reasons. If the goal of this site is to promote Computer Science then I think it should do so one person at a time. You don't have much control over how good your teacher is but you do have some influence over how good students become. If anyone here thinks that the best way to help someone become a better programmer is to insult and ridicule their first submission they need to think again. People submit their programs because they are proud of them. If you want to help them improve it takes a gentle guiding hand. Something like "that's good for a first submission. In the future though you may want to try to tighten up the code. You have a lot of cut and paste." instead of: "Shame, shame on you! There is so much cut and paste in there that you could open a glue factory! Take your computer to your backyard right now. Dig a whole and throw it in. Trust me, you'll do us all a favour"

[wtd]

Quote:

I started this topic because I saw wtd and some others ripping on somebody in the Submissions thread for poor programming, saying he repeated to much code and what not. It was the sudoku program. No offence but the people in that topic were being assholes, imagine if you had never coded, and were taught by somebody forced into a situation that had to teach you.

Please cite an example where I was not constructive in my criticism.

[Nick]

My compsci teacher is amazing, he has worked in the field, can control a classroom, helps everyone out without doing their work, and since I breeze through the course I get harder assignments that I enjoy (sitting in the class doing nothing is boring, I'd rather program)

[Mackie]

My CompSci teacher can be boring. But next year, I'm taking CompSci again, and doing a coop with the grade 10's.

[jinjin]

I'm in Grade 10 CS (Year 1 with Turing) and my CompSci teacher is alright, but a lot of people don't understand his explanations. It's mostly self-learning in our classes using our reference package and the people who can't learn from that that usually don't succeed in the class. So, basically, people in the class (myself included) usually team up with each other to try solving the problems in their programs together. However, the fault with that is that when we get home, we sometimes have no idea what we are doing. Therefore, CompSci.ca helps a lot when problems arise because, like in the class, creating the program becomes a team effort.

[octopi]

Who's this teacher from beamsville? I gaurantee you they are no good.

[McKenzie]

Now, don't start naming names or places. I understand if you have a sub-standard program and you want to complain about. That's fine, it's just blowing off steam. If you start naming names of teachers or schools you are engaging in harmful gossip.