US Dept. of Ed: English, History, and Civics Teachers Good Enough For CS Class 242
theodp writes: In A New Chapter for Computer Science Education, the U.S. Department of Education explained earlier this month that the federal STEM Education Act of 2015 'provides an unprecedented opportunity to fully leverage federal resources' to address large gaps in students' participation in Advanced Placement (AP) computer science classes based on gender and race. "In three states," lamented the DOE, "not a single female student took the AP computer science exam" (that only 8 boys took the AP CS exam in those same 3 states was apparently not a concern). And the DOE has good news for those hoping to tap Title I and II funds for CS, but don't have any computer science teachers. "A background in math or science isn't necessarily a requirement to teach CS," explains the Dept. of Ed, "as disciplines like English, history and civics can also provide a solid foundation for teaching CS concepts."
Duh (Score:4, Insightful)
And people wonder why so many jobs are outsourced?
Re: Duh (Score:2, Interesting)
This is a major problem here in upstate NY. At my kids' school nearly half of the teachers aren't qualified to teach the subjects they currently teach. We a have science teacher teaching math, an English teacher teaching science, and a math teacher that teaching english. Meanwhile, the principle has 14 administrative assistants and is the most abusive, sexist woman I have ever seen. Racism is through the roof as well (though that is district wide, not just from her).
Re: Duh (Score:2)
The US has decided teachers are overpaid unionized swine, and have created a new paradigm of minimum wage private corporate schools to pauperize them. At the same time, they're blamed for everything wrong with education, even to the point of blaming them for bring stretched too thin. And idiots have decided they will install testing and useless grinding work over their objections. Who the HELL would want to be a teacher?
Re: Duh (Score:5, Insightful)
The US has decided teachers are overpaid unionized swine, and have created a new paradigm of minimum wage private corporate schools to pauperize them
I work in education. The "US" hasn't decided anything. Schools hiring teachers are limited to paying UNION wages for far too many subpar teachers, who whine and complain about having to take continuing education without being paid a stipend. The biggest problem IMHO to the problem with Teachers is that there is NO competition for good teachers. Teachers live where they can get a job, and there is very little (if any) incentive to have teachers improve their skill sets.
And due to the complete lack of competition, and the inability for any district to hire "the best, at whatever cost" they are left wanting bodies to fill positions.
And to be very clear, every school district has some really fine and outstanding teachers, most good teachers. What I am talking about are the hanger ons that would otherwise be unemployable without a teacher's credential, who are there to fill seats in chairs in front of students. The problem is, you cannot dodge all the raindrops, and there are enough of them to matter.
And to my point about teachers who won't take basic skills classes (where they need them) to learn how to properly use Technology in the classroom, without getting paid stipend, it really does matter. I simply look at it this way, teachers who don't want to learn, for learning sake aren't good teachers. Period. And this is proven by a recent training a colleague of mine did, training 2nd Grade kids, and Teachers/staff the exact same "introduction to Chromebooks", and the 2nd Graders fared much better than the adults. They paid attention, didn't talk, and learned how to log in (barely able to write) to Google/Chrome with much more ease. So even being paid to learn 2nd Graders were able to out compete the teachers.
When teachers don't want to (or can't) learn, it is a sign they shouldn't be teaching. Best teachers I know, all of them have a singular quality, thirst for knowledge and a passion for learning. Far too many teachers basically said "I don't want to learn anymore, I'm done" and that translates directly into the passion they have in the classroom.
Do you feel the same about IT workers? (Score:2, Interesting)
far too many subpar teachers, who whine and complain about having to take continuing education without being paid a stipend.
It's an ongoing refrain (like for years) here about how horrible employers are for expecting IT people to spend their own time and money constantly training themselves on new technologies, new languages or new frameworks or else get laid off for some cheap new graduate who happened to see those things in college classes.
If new knowledge training is required for your job and directly benefits your employer, why the hell shouldn't the employer be expected to pay for either your training hours or the training
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My employer expects me (part of my job description) to keep up with the latest trends in technology. I have to learn. I generally don't get paid to expand my skill set. On rare occasion, I have been sent off to additional training, but it is only because the Director insisted on it as part of expanding the department's capability.
And we're not talking day long trainings here, we're talking about 1-2 hours class on occasion, so that teachers can be more effective in their classes. We've offered training for
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Really?
It is the stated agenda of the GOP to break unions, on any level. Search using "GOP Union Break." Basically, billionaires like the Koche's, and Brood's can make a whole lot of money treating teachers like minimum wage youth earners. Educators as a group are public confrontation avoiders, and are thus prime victims of financial "leveraging." As for the "Hangers On," name one industry that doesn't have them
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So says the chicken AC. I don't post AC, so my views are easily traced. And simply because you disagree with my assessment, and hiding (chicken) behind AC status, you feel you can say anything and that it matters. Coward.
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Well, I don't find it hard to believe that you're in education, but I suspect you're an administrator or some other non-teaching role. And you clearly expect teachers to not be the prime wage earner for their family.
I *do* agree that there are too many inadequate teachers, but OTOH there aren't enough teachers, and class sizes are too large. And schools don't give proper support, at least in the inner cities. My wife reports one teacher who had to supply her class with toilet paper, because the school re
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Re: Duh (Score:2)
Actually in India they are taught network subnetting, node.js, mcse Windows troubleshooting skills, and not just mathematics and theory with stale old languages that is American and European CS.
So no wonder corporations LOVE what they see for entry level employees. It is not just price you know why business loved India contrary to comments here.
The argument is as old as Slashdot itself. Theory important YES! But is that what is needed in the 21st century for EVERY use case? Don't give me the bs that is what
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CS is obsolete and needs a medium. English teachers yes would not be qualified but part of the problem is CS itself
CS is not obsolete. The problem is that the scope of CS has been expanded too much to include low-level skills that require training rather than education. So instead of learning good principles, students are expected to learn specific applications of those principles. Which works for the short term, as students taught to be MS Windows experts become MS Windows experts, but ultimately disastrous when the next IT technology shift comes around, like the current rage about apps and the mobile web.
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Re: Duh (Score:2)
The US famously has no history. It makes it up to suit itself. Now: outsourcing happened because we're greedy, stipid and lazy. It was always thus, five minutes ago. Nothing to do with corporate greed.
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Would you rather have Xena the princess warrior
Yes.
what was the question?
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Would you rather have Xena the princess warrior and her butch sidekick teaching your kidz computer science?
Shit yeah, motherfucker. Did you see her in Ash vs. Evil Dead? She's still hot as hell.
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She can fix my dangling pointer any time she likes.
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Re:The DoE is, and has always been useless. (Score:5, Interesting)
They have no students. They operate no schools.
And worst of all, they have no clue what CS is. They think CS is writing a document in Word, creating an Excel spreadsheet and googling.
Hey, English teachers can do that, so English teachers can teach CS!
I'm just wondering where the folks at the DoE got their educations . . . ?
Creationism (Score:3, Interesting)
I live in a county where a few years ago, we had to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars because some Christian Fundie wanted "Intelligent Design" and the "controversy of Evolution" taught in our biology classes.
Our CS budget went to lawyers.
Local control of schools isn't such a good thing.
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Louisiana?
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Doe != Department of Education (Score:2)
They have no students. They operate no schools.
That's true because DoE [energy.gov] is the Department of Energy which has nothing to do with education.
They piss away billions of dollars and damage education by imposing bullshit federal regulations on local schools.
What specific "bullshit federal regulations" are you referring to? The Department of Education by far the smallest cabinet department and with the exception of the No Child Left Behind act (mandated by CONGRESS) they really don't have much involvement in the day to day running of schools in the US. The ED coordinates federal assistance, enforces civil rights, and collects data. They are not heavily involved in dete
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Facts have no place in a discussion about education!
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They have no students. They operate no schools.
That's true because DoE [energy.gov] is the Department of Energy which has nothing to do with education.
They piss away billions of dollars and damage education by imposing bullshit federal regulations on local schools.
What specific "bullshit federal regulations" are you referring to?
Anything - We have us here, a true Teabagger, who thinks the only thing the Government should do is pay for his hoveround, and his medicine - but not anyone elses, cuz thatz socialism! -
They have no idea about anything, but they are very enthusiastic about hating everything else as long as they get theirs.
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It actually isn't an acronym. It is an "initialism"
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yes, well, thank you for proving that you don't truly have any idea what the DOE actually does.
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They have no students. They operate no schools. They piss away billions of dollars and damage education by imposing bullshit federal regulations on local schools.
-jcr
Not only that, it's a federal agency that clearly and unquestionably falls outside the Constitutional (read: legal) boundaries of the federal government. The DoE was established in the late 1970s, so it's not even been around that long. Shutting it down would do a lot of good and would be a good start toward returning the federal government to a more legal size.
The DoE is illegal (Score:2)
No it isn't. The legal authority to create an agency isn't limited by the constitution. You are a moron.
The constitution limits the authority to pass laws. The federal department of education does not enforce any laws and is therefore entirely legal.
Have you read the constitution?
Bullshit Regulations (Score:2)
You mean education standards based on the expert recommendations of pedagogy experts and researchers?
You mean science standards that aren't based on religion or mythology?
Why doesn't it make sense to have a federal standard for education? Because we wind up with "common core"? You realize that common core was a wildly successful and heavily endorsed set of standards that almost everyone in education circles thought was a great idea? The only reason you hate it is because you are too stupid to understand how
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Re: The DoE is, and has always been useless. (Score:2)
Organization didn't do it. The US has a growing, baby-rich core of know-nothing racists, religious fundies and Randites that took the steering wheel (literally with SD cars!) out of our hands. Trump is their Messiah.
Unconvinced... (Score:5, Insightful)
Back in the mid 1990s, my (otherwise extremely good) private school found itself caught off-guard by the need to provide IT teaching. With no existing staff with computer science experience, it went about trying to rectify the situation in fairly horrible ways. First, it recruited what it thought was an IT specialist from industry, only to find he was a chemical engineer with no more than a basic level of computing literacy (and no teaching qualifications). He lasted a year.
Then it decided to use non-specialists to teach IT classes, having basically bought a bunch of mail-order courses. I'll emphasise that this was a private fee-paying school with high academic standards that would never have considered this approach for any other subject.
Anyway, the level of teaching was predictably disastrous. The teachers drafted in to cover the subject (including a number of elderly Catholic Priests) lacked any kind of background in it. Not only couldn't they teach the subject, but they couldn't convey why they were even trying to teach the subject. They would spend each lesson reading from one of those mail-order worksheets, with no idea how to either advise a pupil who was having problems, or how to recover the lesson if something went wrong.
The fact that the school's computer lab functioned at all was basically down to the volunteer efforts of a few of the more IT literate students (self-included), who would fix things after the latest balls-up and be called on during free-periods to get an IT lesson back on track after a teacher encountered an error message he hadn't seen before. I didn't particularly mind at the time; I wasn't taking any qualifications in IT, so the quality of the teaching didn't matter to me and helping out earned me a few perks. In particular, it got me out of the compulsory (but non-academic) religious education classes from ages 16-18.
But for those who were actually taking the subject formally (admittedly only a tiny handful in my year-group) it was a pretty catastrophic situation. In any other subject (including the practical ones such as design and technology), my school expected its teachers to be in command of their area. IT was just seen as being different somehow.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Start with "fun" programming, not CS (Score:2)
And yes, the better developers are self-taught and this includes those who went through a formal university program. If one goes to
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Hobbyists can teach ... (Score:3)
My high school's CS-type class was the electrical shop class. Yes, the shop class where you normally learn electrician type stuff, wiring up a light and switch for example. Our cranky old not far from retirement shop teacher said on day one that he wasn't going to teach us electrician stuff, well he would if someone asked but he decided to teach us digital electronics because he thought that would be more useful. His background
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It's not necessarily an easy position to get teach
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Believe me, it was nothing like as sophisticated as "we can't tell the difference between IT/CS/Computer Literacy". It was more "all of a sudden these computer things are everywhere, there are qualifications in them, universities are offering courses in them and fee-paying parents are starting to expect us to teach them".
As a private school, they tend to recruit from outside of the usual teacher-training pathways (though they were never above poaching good state-school teachers who wanted to spend more time
Re: Unconvinced... (Score:2)
how many of you CS types want to quit your 100k plus jobs and go work for a lot cal school for 25k? See the problem? Those who can have no desire to teach, and anyway, the whole point of this is to flood the market with state-paid-for CS trained kids at as cal se to minimum wagecas possible. The "emergency" is that CS people are paid too well.
Re: Unconvinced... (Score:2)
Damned autocorrect!!!!
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The really sad thing is 100k/year is actually not so much, not compared to the wealth we have. School pay has taken a beating in recent years, but a high school principal is still earning on average about 85k. School administrator pay varies widely, sometimes being as little as 40k. Some of these charter schools are more for lining the pockets of top officials than educating students, and there the pay can be well over 100k. Sometimes the most overpaid person is the football coach. College football is c
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At the same time, your story really emphasizes what I believe is the central reality to programming: those who are good at it are mostly self-taught or can be self-taught. Put another way, the kids who didn't learn from the priest weren't going to learn anyway, and you learned it without someone like that helping you.
My wife is an RN. She said that when she was in university in the late 1980s she was considering either IT or nursing, both of which were tickets to America. She thankfully chose nursing or
tail wag the dog again (Score:3)
If English teachers are good enough to teach CS... (Score:2)
1337 H@xorz pwn teaching U english 2!
In Italy it is worse (Score:2)
In accounting secondary school, old typewriting teachers were converted to CS teachers.
https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] (sorry, only Italian)
Why? (Score:2)
Why no interest?
It's a boring subject.
Requires math that breaks the mind, and is mostly not used anyway.
It is largely a male, nerdy profession.
It's socially isolating.
It's full of hardcore Ayn Randite bosses.
Big one: you are, if you haven't become an executive or started your own compamy by the age of 30-35, in for a a VERY short career. One of those businesses where a 22 year old is always superior to a 30 year old come startup or promotion time.
So, we say goodbye and good riddance to Dilbert land, and go
Re: Why? (Score:2)
And, oh yes, other posters are spot on: you fired us all and replaced us with H1Bs. Or shipped the jobs out overseas. And are jamming all channels with desperate measures to generate scads of new CS grads so you all can drive wages down with a massive oversupply of coders that speak local English.
"Always" is a powerful word (Score:2)
"Always" is a powerful word. "Often", perhaps, but I'm over 30, work at a software company, have worked there since I graduated with an undergrad cs degree, have no interest in becoming an executive, and got a pretty nice raise last year, and another one this year. And my boss, who is at least as talented a developer as I am, is female, and is married with a a kid, so presumably sex is being had (with other people) by at least one other member of my team (I obviously don't ask about my coworkers' sex lives,
History, and Civics Teachers should talk about H1b (Score:3)
History, and Civics Teachers should talk about H1b and how they are used to bypass labor laws / make them be locked into the job.
This isn't just at the Federal Level (Score:5, Interesting)
In my home state of Minnesota, they allow anyone with either a business licensure or a mathematics licensure to teach computer science. In college, I majored in Computer Science and Secondary Mathematics Education. I found it ironic that it was my math licensure that allowed me to teach computer science and not my computer science degree. I found it just as silly that I was not allowed to teach keyboarding; mathematics teachers are not qualified for that. Also, just as amusing, anyone in the state with an English licensure is licensed to teach web page design.
It's a complete joke that our government advocates for increased computer science education, while in the same breath says that anyone can teach it. By that same perverse logic, I should be fully qualified to become a law professor. Right? Computer science is very logical...very layered...very structured...lots of inheritances...sounds like a good foundation of law to me.
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i majored in secodary ed at toledo, with minors in cs and math. did my first year of student teaching and said fuck this bullshit.
This is new? (Score:2)
Because many school districts pay a premium to teachers of STEM subjects (and more for AP and Honors courses) the teaching slots for those classes are highly sought-after. The result is that they go to the teachers who have clout (seniority, connections, etc.) regardless of their actual ability to even understand the material.
Example: my kids' high school AP calculus class was taught by someone who had never taken a college-level math class, while another teach with a math PhD was stuck with remedial class
How crapware is created (Score:2)
And that, boys and girls, is where crapware comes from.
Teach how to restore from backup (Score:2)
I think kids need to feel comfortable experimenting with computers, that means being ok with messing it up.
So if schools were to teach how to set up and roll their computer system back to a restore point (I don't care which OS), that would be a good start.
Then again, I use a Chromebook, I do system restores periodically just for fun.
serious question about "CS" (Score:2)
I always differentiated between programming, development, software engineering, and Computer Science myself as different things, all computer related.
Now, seems like CS is the catch-all term. Am I just behind?
This is why so much software is shit (Score:2)
Saying "A background in math or science isn't necessarily a requirement to teach CS," explains the Dept. of Ed, "as disciplines like English, history and civics can also provide a solid foundation for teaching CS concepts." is akin to saying I can teach medicine because I'm dating a nurse. CS is fundamentally linked to math (logic). English, history and civics are studies of humans, and humans by nature are illogical.
Sports (Score:2)
When I was in high school, there were plenty of teachers who taught subjects that they weren't necessarily trained in. Unfortunately, they happened to be the coaches for the sports teams:
Civics = Football Defensive Line Coach
General Science = Baseball Coach
History = Football Offensive Line Coach
Free Enterprise = Men's Basketball Coach
Physical Education = Track Coach (this one actually makes sense)
Geography = Women's Basketball Coach
This isn't even the entire list.
Most of these people didn't have degrees in
Re:Wh3r3f0r3 @r7 7h0u R0m30! (Score:5, Insightful)
Not just the USA. My partner is Australia is a Science teacher. She has a Bachelor of Science and a Diploma in education, but is criticised by idiots for not instead having a Bachelor of Education without any formal training in the subjects she's supposed to teach.
That is becoming the norm. Idiots who "know how to teach" but don't actually "know what they teach".
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Especi
Subject matter experts vs teachers (Score:5, Interesting)
There are some subject-matter-experts who are a genuine menace in the classroom(I suspect that most of us probably took at least one course in college from the TAs they shoved all the actual work of teaching the course onto.
I've had more that a few full tenure professors who had NO business lecturing to a classroom. In many of these cases I was actually glad when they handed off to a TA. I want the best teachers and could not care less if they are subject matter experts beyond the level of the class. The research most professors do has little or nothing to do with what they are teaching most of the time. Even when it is related the classroom stuff is so far below their research that it becomes irrelevant. I don't need a Nobel prize winner to teach me physics 101. I just want someone who is a very good lecturer and has an solid grasp of the material being taught at the level it is being taught.
That said, the notion that teaching theory is somehow a substitute for actually knowing the subject is an absurd and dangerous notion. Learning about driving in a classroom is no substitute for actually having spent time driving. I cannot fathom how anyone would thing a background in civics could possibly qualify someone to teach computer science no matter how good they are at the mechanics of teaching.
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Not much related to CS, of course; but that's the best
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College level CS skills is one thing, but most people have essentially NO IDEA of how computers work. NONE. To them it might as well be magic. And these people should not be teaching CS at any level.
That said, there's a big question in my mind as to what CS is doing in an elementary curriculum anyway. Basic Computer Use is one thing, but that's so removed from CS that there's almost no connection. (The only connection is at the level in user interface design.)
If they're actually talking about basic com
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I find that being too good at subject can sometimes hinder teaching it, especially to not so gifted students. When you have picked it up easily, then it is hard to understand why someone doesn't get it. On the other hand subjects I find hard like English, I can see the massive inconsistencies in it, and can understand why people find it hard read words like "indict". I have developed strategies to deal with these problems for me. For example all though school I was told to write X word essays. This would le
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Not just the USA. My partner is Australia is a Science teacher. She has a Bachelor of Science and a Diploma in education, but is criticised by idiots for not instead having a Bachelor of Education without any formal training in the subjects she's supposed to teach.
That is becoming the norm. Idiots who "know how to teach" but don't actually "know what they teach".
Around here, they also get a pay raise for getting advanced degrees. Every single one that I've seen go all the way to getting a doctorate get an EdD rather than a degree in whatever field they're teaching. My kids have had some good teachers but I simply haven't seen any correlation between quality of teaching and higher "education" degrees held by the teacher. Thanks to the unions, though, that's the only way to make more money other than getting older.
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My partner is Australia is a Science teacher.
You know you've got programming on the mind when you read that as
(My partner is Australian) is a Science teacher.
and then I was trying to figure out what sort of return value (My partner is Australian) would return and whether it would be a string or if there would be a compiler error. I think learning Python has ruined me ;)
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We seem to have a lot of young people familiar with computers in the US, but with no English skills. Maybe this will work out after all?
Scale back Department of Education ... (Score:2)
I honestly despair for the future of the US. We basically are now getting education by idiots for idiots.
And stuff like this is why many think the Department of Education should be eliminated or severely scaled back. Perhaps set national standards but not get into the day-to-day operations of a school.
Once upon a time, well 1960, there was a Presidential Debate where candidates discussed societal issues (imagine that). One topic that came up was the nature of federal support for local schools. Both candidates, Kennedy (D) and Nixon (R), were concerned that federal support (funding) would lead to federal med
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There may be good reasons for keeping control over schools away from local authorities:
https://boingboing.net/2015/12... [boingboing.net]
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There may be good reasons for keeping control over schools away from local authorities:
https://boingboing.net/2015/12... [boingboing.net]
Whoa! My reply to states rights guy shows exactly what happens when you get an asshat like her involved. Short versions - I grew up in a town where creationists ruled. They meddle for very large values of meddling.
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Idiots are present at all levels of delegation :P
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Idiots are present at all levels of delegation :P
100 percent correct. Idiots also abound where people decide the guvmint is the source of all problems.
And it isn't even a socialistic attitude that tells me this is an idiotic notion. Lots of things should be left to the marketplace.
It's things like Enron.
First learn what the Dept of Education does (Score:5, Interesting)
And stuff like this is why many think the Department of Education should be eliminated or severely scaled back. Perhaps set national standards but not get into the day-to-day operations of a school.
Aside from No Child Left Behind which was mandated by CONGRESS, the Dept of Education has very little to do with the day to day operations of schools. In fact the Dept of Ed is by a wide margin the least involved ministerial level department for education in the civilized world. The US education system is hugely decentralized and demonstrably NOT controlled from Washington. People calling for the Dept of Ed to be eliminated or scaled back invariably have no idea what it does. Any meddling it does with regard to operations of schools is because it was instructed to do so by Congress. All it would take to change that is another act of Congress and in fact such a law was just passed [wikipedia.org]. Repeal NCLB and ESSA and the Dept of Education would have almost no direct interaction with most school systems.
Once upon a time, well 1960, there was a Presidential Debate where candidates discussed societal issues (imagine that). One topic that came up was the nature of federal support for local schools. Both candidates, Kennedy (D) and Nixon (R), were concerned that federal support (funding) would lead to federal meddling.
And very little has changed. There is very little funding and for the most part very little meddling.
I think we are now seeing the wisdom of their shared concerns regarding centralizing too much control and authority in Washington DC.
"Wisdom"? No. That is ideology, not wisdom. Virtually every other country in the civilized world has FAR more centralized control over education than we do in the US and many of them get measurably better results. If you think decentralized schooling is good I'd invite you to visit the school districts in places like Detroit or Cleveland or Los Angeles. They get terrible results and no one holds them accountable or gives them any substantial help. Federal control has problems to be sure but so does local control.
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While local control is not perfect it does afford parents a much greater opportunity to exert pressure to fix things.
And no, things are not the same as in 1960. We have seen enormous growth in the amount of administration in the educational syste
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One idea that came up in the debate was to have federal funds only be used for one time costs, like building the school, and not operational costs, like teacher salaries. That way there would be less opportunity for ongoing meddling. I think we are now seeing the wisdom of their shared concerns regarding centralizing too much control and authority in Washington DC.
Because all evilz come from teh guvmint, eh?
I came from a locally controlled school system - which by your standards would be turning out the best and brightest, untainted by socialist concepts like big federal government and the always present corruption that government entails.
Pardon me while I guffaw.
Guffaw!
Man, I got the whole way through the school system without hearing the word dinosaur. The curriculum was scrubbed clean of anything that suggested the universe was older than 6000 some years o
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Because all evilz come from teh guvmint, eh?
Of course not, there are plenty of other large, dangerous concentrations of power.
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Because all evilz come from teh guvmint, eh?
Of course not, there are plenty of other large, dangerous concentrations of power.
Well it should be obvious, but the sizable contingent of libertariand here, who manage to have the dual concpt of Guvmint is evil, and that the free market is the cure for all that ails society, and the tea baggers, who are simply consumed by hatred, appear to think otherwise.
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You need to grow up in a town run by Catholic creationists to fully understand true meddling in the education process.
The stated teaching of the Catholic Church has been evolution for a long time. Go troll somebody else, hater.
Do you think that time did not start or there were no people around until the Catholic church accepted evolution?
I graduated High School in 1972. Pope John Paul noted in 1996 that the theory of evolution was acceptable:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Even now however, there are highly placed Catholic figures like Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]önborn who deny it
So anyhow dear low information coward, my experience deals with a time before the Catholic Chu
Re: Wh3r3f0r3 @r7 7h0u R0m30! (Score:2)
Seems the anti-teacher religion spread through the US/UK/Australian/NZ, starting with the anti-intellectual US. The infection is complete; it is second gen and permanent.
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Don't get me wrong. I respect teachers and the jobs they're underpaid (like a motherfucker) to do.
But your average English/Civics/History teacher has NO business trying to teach a comp-sci course. Even today, 40+ years on since the general inception of personal computers in schools.
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What schools had personal computers in 1975?
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They aren't saying "Yeah, you can fire those uppity CS people and replace them with guidance counselors who will
Dept of Education lacks authority (Score:3)
I wouldn't have modded it 'flamebait'; but it does fall into the relatively unhelpful category of being overbroad(if you go state-by-state, the degree to which US education is totally fucked varies quite widely); and it also ignores the important fact that the DOE isn't actively changing the state of CS education here; but merely signalling an unwillingness to get tough on trying to improve it.
That presumes the ED (DoE is the Dept of Energy) has the statutory authority to dictate CS education requirements. In all likelihood it doesn't have any such authority delegated to it by Congress. While I don't pretend to be an expert I do know that the Dept of Education has very little to do with and almost no authority regarding determining curriculum outside of No Child Left Behind the recently passed Every Student Succeeds Act.
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While I don't pretend to be an expert I do know that the Dept of Education has very little to do with and almost no authority regarding determining curriculum outside of No Child Left Behind the recently passed Every Student Succeeds Act.
Just those program titles show a glaring problem with our concept of educating children. Rosy feelgood titles that sound like Garrison Keillor's "Lake Wobegone, where all the women are strong, the men are good looking, and all the children are above average."
Problem is, he was making a joke, and America seems to have taken it seriously.
There will be children left behind. There will be students who don't succeed.
There are people who are doing well if they get their shoes tied in the morning
But we ac
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It's not that I don't think a civics teacher COULD NOT teach CS.
I'm sure there are civics teachers out there who actually know their way around the basics of programming.
But most civics teachers are at the "Computers run on magic smoke" level of computer literacy.
Which is NOT what you want to be teaching kids.
Re:Wh3r3f0r3 @r7 7h0u R0m30! (Score:4, Insightful)
It seems really odd to me that a culture which considers college degrees as superfluous and promotes experience and self-teaching would deride someone teaching pre-college programming because of their non-STEM background.
A good educator knows how to educate themselves as well as students. You can have a brilliant computer programmer and they can be the shittiest teacher in the world.
The best programming instructor I ever had pre-college was, I believe, originally a band teacher. He ended up teaching AP CS for at least a couple of decades and when I had him we had a lot of fun going to college hosted programming competitions and doing USACO challenges online.
One of my first programming "teachers" in middle school didn't know anything about programming (this was Pascal.) It was her first year and she had no experience but she had the coursework and managed to use the brightest students to teach the rest of the class.
Yes, she was terrible.
Yes, we didn't build good habits.
But it was still better than nothing as it exposed a lot of students to programming concepts and enabled them to start doing things themselves.
A summer class I took in middle school at a local university was taught by a hobbyist programmer who, I believe, mostly taught arts and crafts classes.
She was great and proficient. We had a ton of fun learning QBasic and the final project was to create a tiny video game.
I ended up staying after class to finish a simple space invaders clone because the class was so fun.
(As an aside: one could hate on Basic and GOTO here and yet I found it interesting that the guy who always won programming competitions used Basic while the rest of us mostly used C/C++)
So, anyone motivated can learn basic concepts and data structures like loops and arrays and recursion and teach them to others.
From what I read in the article they were basically saying you can use federal funds to educate non-traditional STEM teachers in CS so that they can teach students.
In that context I think a civics teacher can be fit for teaching CS, as long the civics teacher is motivated and uses the funds to become certified in CS in some form.
It's not like the AP CS curriculum is rocket science. The math requirement for students is fairly low iirc.
And DICE just wants us angry at the headline so that we'll give them more eyeballs on ads that we don't actually see. Or something.
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I honestly despair for the future of the US.
We basically are now getting education by idiots for idiots.
Why is this flamebait? Which part of "A civics teacher is fit for teaching CS" doesn't seem idiotic enough to the modpoint distributor? Which is more idiotic, the department or the by-it-educated masses?
Because the teachers are not necessarily idiots - they just might not be qualified.
Because the students are not idiots just because they don't know about computer science.
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Hex is not math/science. It's just computer literacy.
There's no such thing as "business-focused math". It's just dumbed-down crap. The math is what makes CS exist and interesting.
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Hex is not math/science. It's just computer literacy.
If you use it enough, you'll memorize it. I don't need to be able to convert binary to hex to dec because the calculator does it for me and because it comes up so rarely. If I'm trying to save every byte because I'm writing something for the Arduino or similar then I care, but I only care for a few seconds while I'm writing the relevant code. The computer does the conversions for me, so I don't have to. I don't need to know the dec value of a bit I'm twiddling to twiddle it.
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Every time some 'button pressing in MS Office' tutorial gets a 'CS' course code, a turing machine's tape snaps; but it is also the case that there are many useful things to be done with computers, some requiring nontri
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No offense, but if you need to spend hours learning and memorizing hexadecimal (I presume you meant that instead of a base-6 system?) and binary math, CS is probably not for you.
They teach non-decimal (i.e. binary) math in elementary school in my country. Not because of CS, but because it teaches kids abstract math, and not a bunch of magic tricks that only work with the 10 holy symbols.
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How many people have really used hex and binary math, in a professional position, to the extent that you need to have spend hours learning and memorizing it?
Anyone who has spend hours memorising hex and binary has missed the point. Once you understand number bases, which is really basic stuff, you can use any positive integer-based number system without having to learn anything.
Re: Good. (Score:2)
DeVry, basically. Graduates of which are reviled in the business.
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Agreed. While I actually had an amazing civics teacher, he certainly wouldn't be suited to teaching this. The history teachers would fare even worse: of all the teachers I had, the most irrational and ridiculous teaching methods came from US History and World History. In one class, we spent 50 minutes copying notes verbatim from the overhead and if we used shorthand we'd end up losing 10% of our grade on the notebook test.