Do CS Teachers Need To Know CS? (github.io) 168
"I'll say it over and over until I retire — CS teachers really do need to know CS," says Mike Zamansky, a coordinator of CS teacher certifications. He was criticizing groups that instead provide teachers with scripted content and short-form "training".
Long-term Slashdot reader theodp summarizes the issue: A problem with out-of-the-box scripted solutions, Zamansky explains, is that "teachers are less and less expected as much to know their subjects, their students, and how to teach but rather to follow the script. This approach might get those students past the standardized exam but in the long run it's not giving students what they need nor deserve.
"I've seen this every year in my undergraduate CS classes. Since APCS Principles was launched many of my students have come in having taken the classes and 'passed' the exam. Truth be told, the majority of them come in basically knowing nothing. This wouldn't be a problem if they didn't come in thinking they knew quite a bit. [...] School supervisors don't know any better so they see that they can check off the computer science box. Many teachers probably don't know better because their short term training is focusing on how easy CS is and how you don't have to learn anything to teach it rather than the truth — it's just like anything else, it takes time and effort to really master."
Long-term Slashdot reader theodp summarizes the issue: A problem with out-of-the-box scripted solutions, Zamansky explains, is that "teachers are less and less expected as much to know their subjects, their students, and how to teach but rather to follow the script. This approach might get those students past the standardized exam but in the long run it's not giving students what they need nor deserve.
"I've seen this every year in my undergraduate CS classes. Since APCS Principles was launched many of my students have come in having taken the classes and 'passed' the exam. Truth be told, the majority of them come in basically knowing nothing. This wouldn't be a problem if they didn't come in thinking they knew quite a bit. [...] School supervisors don't know any better so they see that they can check off the computer science box. Many teachers probably don't know better because their short term training is focusing on how easy CS is and how you don't have to learn anything to teach it rather than the truth — it's just like anything else, it takes time and effort to really master."
AP is only the test (Score:2)
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As degree credit. For instance, if I pass the AP physics test, I might be advance to a honors freshman class for my physics major, but no responsible school would use it credit for the physics freshman class.
I think AP might actually be used as credit towards general ed classes, not core classes. The required general ed English class, general ed History class, etc. A class actual majors in those fields may not be required to take as their core classes will cover the topics of the general ed. But the STEM major might get out of a single quarter of general ed English or History by taking a year of AP in HS.
Special Ed (Score:2)
But can a student get credit for Special Ed?
A Rousounding Yes! (Score:5, Insightful)
This is one of the dumber questions asked on Slashdot lately.
Scripting an education from a bunch know nothings should be a felony.
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It's such a dumb question that none the less is not obvious in the American education system. We still live in a world where teachers in America do not need to know or understand the subject which they are teaching. Compare that to many other countries in the world, e.g. my wife (a fully qualified teacher from Australia) when we moved to Europe was given a 3 year provisional license to tech the lower years in mathematics. By the end of those 3 years (or earlier) she had to present a masters degree in mathem
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It's called a typo. Do you see an edit button? Chill with the name calling or else I will break out my old skills and get us both banned.
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Re: A Resounding Yes! (Score:2)
So you should have fixed the problem. More useful than your reply to some newbie wannabe flaming troll. (Nothing clever enough to approach Funny.)
As regards your Subjective answer to the actual story (and not withstanding Betteridge's Law as it should apply to the clickbait headline), there is more to the story.
When I was young I thought there were only two things to teaching. (1) Knowing the subject matter (which is where your Subject tells part of the story) and (2) Knowing how to teach. Since I had the f
Re: A Resounding Yes! (Score:2)
The Marge Simpson approach (Score:5, Insightful)
“I can give piano lessons” – Marge
“But you can’t play the piano” – Lisa
“I just have to stay one class ahead of the kid!” – Marge
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Re:The [Fukuzawa Yukichi] approach (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually I think that 'joke' may have come from Richard Feynman, and he actually was brilliant.
Lower down in the discussion there was some mention of English teachers in Japan who can't speak English. The topics intersect here with a famous story about Fukuzawa, the founder of Keio University. When he was teaching English, he would often get questions that he couldn't answer, so he would just fake something as a quick response. Then he would go to the toilet (not to be confused with the separate bathroom in Japan) and check with a dictionary he had concealed in his kimono. After he returned to the classroom, he would "suddenly remember" a better answer. He justified the tactic as necessary to give the students more confidence in their teacher and thus to motivate their studies. Most accounts agree that he was a great teacher.
Maybe the corresponding tactic in CS would be to implement and test an algorithm on a waterproof smartphone while in the actual bath?
(Yeah, running for Funny, but not very fast.)
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That's actually brilliant.
You laugh but "one week ahead" is how honest-to-god college professors handle classes they are assigned in which they have no experience. When giving it to a grad student isn't possible for some reason.
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I actually knew a piano teacher who couldn't play the piano. She surprisingly did a reasonable job teaching her students up to the intermediate level.
Re: The Marge Simpson approach (Score:2)
I had a university level programming teacher who was literally doing that.
I had to teach him because he was useless.
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I sure many people on this board are self-taught, if not completely as a programmer then at least in terms of staying up-to-date or picking up a new language. I see no reason why teachers can't study pedagogy and then teach anything given good supporting materials. Or rather, teach the kids to teach themselves and then have CS experts deliver appropriate material to allow the teacher and the class to know what they need to learn.
I know it's an engineering disease to think we know everything but it is reason
Welcome to school (Score:3)
There's a reason that we call it "school" and not "education".
My 46-year old beloved wants to get one of those kits to make a volcano, because she doesn't remember a) how they work; b) what she learned in school; nor c) that we have a fully-stocked laboratory called a kitchen, and therefore don't need a $50 kit for children.
Of course, as a "perfect student", she aced all of her classes, science included, from kindergarten right through law-school.
You can be told anything by anybody -- teachers included. But if you can't ask a question, then it might as well be any outsourced tech-support call centre.
The caption of my education? "That's outside the scope of this course.
Go ahead, ask me what I do for a living. I dare you.
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You're either a teacher or Batman.
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Favourite Mark Twain quote:
"I never let my schooling interfere with my education."
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Of course, as a "perfect student", she aced all of her classes, science included, from kindergarten right through law-school.
And she probably committed to memory what was important for her life and relegated the rest to the recycling bin of history. There's little point in remembering how to build a model volcano unless you intend to pursue a career that leans heavily on foundational chemistry. I remember acing geography, science and humanities. I couldn't for the life of me tell you how tectonic plate interaction works though I remember I was taught it. On the flip side I had built many electronics projects before taking intro t
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Well, it would be nice to remember some thing that you don't need, for the sake of conversing with others who do. It's also the basis of cross-disciplinary thinking, and hence, problem solving and innovation. Calling a pregnancy a parasite was blasphemy, then it instantly fed each industry with the entire solution-set of the other.
But my point here is something very much else. If one (in this case, she) can earn the A+, and then promptly dismiss the knowledge in its entirety...well then the A+ has absolu
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If one (in this case, she) can earn the A+, and then promptly dismiss the knowledge in its entirety...well then the A+ has absolutely zero meaning.
That I partially agree with. I think the deeper issue is that in much of America (and Australia for that matter) the core curriculum itself is what is lacking meaning rather than the A+.
The question is: should you need to be able to know how to make a volcano? And why the fuck did I have to learn Macbeth, no one speaks like that. I'm bitter about that too since I went through school without being taught proper grammar. The only reason I know my past participles from my perfect past is because I learnt anoth
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You SHOULD have learned Macbeth, like any other literature, to better understand the human nature and historical context that leads to why things are as they are and where we must tread carefully to not repeat certain mistakes (although we keep repeating them... we are coming up to this century's 30s...)
However, that would require a teacher interested in these things, knowledgeable in these things be given the time to teach these things.
And then we would have to start testing our young'uns by having an actu
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The reason you ought to have learned Macbeth is because 90% of modern movies are based on Shakespearean story-lines.
5 points if you can tell me which Shakespeare story is the template for the first Iron Man.
My thoughts as a high school CS teacher (Score:5, Insightful)
I have a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering, and a master's in computing (that was an interdisciplinary program which in my case focused mostly on graduate work in analytics and databases). Generally in education in the United States, the presumption is that teachers in a discipline are one-level-above their students. High school teachers typically have an undergraduate degree in the subject they teach; sometimes, if a teacher has multiple licenses, one of they may only have a minor in the subject. Undergraduate instructors have a master's degree in the subject they teach; and (ideally) graduate instructors have a PhD (this one is often violated, I've had lots of graduate courses taught by people with just master's degrees).
Speaking as a department head, it's hard to find people with undergraduate degrees in CS who are willing to teach. That's why there's so much non-degree professional development aimed at creating CS teachers (many of these programs try to recruit math teachers because math teachers are generally analytical thinkers and many have had one programming course). Some of this PD is good, some of it is too dumbed-down, in my opinion.
Based on the limited availability of candidates, my criteria for someone who wants to teach high school computer science is that they should at least have a course in object-oriented programming and a course in data structures. If they want to teach something above AP CS A (some schools teach data structures to their students as a follow-up to AP CS A) they should have an undergraduate degree in CS. This ensures that intelligent students who ask deeper questions about the material can be served appropriately. Last week I taught recursion to my students, and I was able to talk about some topics (like memoization) that many books omit. Having been to many training sessions with AP CS A teachers, I doubt even the ones who have a lot of industry experience (which doesn't mean they have a degree in CS, incidentally) can give a good explanation of those topics.
More importantly, though, the teacher should like to write code; he or she should be passionate about the subject. I do a lot of recreational programming, like Advent of Code and Project Euler (I'm also a math teacher), and I enjoy solving problems.
Re:My thoughts as a high school CS teacher (Score:5, Insightful)
Speaking as a department head, it's hard to find people with undergraduate degrees in CS who are willing to be paid very littleto teach.
ftfy
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Speaking as a department head, it's hard to find people with undergraduate degrees in CS who are willing to be paid very littleto teach.
ftfy
Exactly. Anyone who has any qualifications at all to teach math, science or CS can probably get a job paying a lot more and not have to deal with students, parents and administrators.
Paying teachers is a waste of money (Score:2)
Much cheaper to just import the talent that you need. They come fully formed at a fraction of the cost.
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graduate instructors have a PhD
And PhD instructors have ...
The farther up the degree ladder you get, the smaller the knowledge gap will be between the instructor and the student. PhD candidates may be doing original research beyond the experience of any available instructors. What those instructors have (more often called supervisors) is experience with planning and executing research projects.
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PhD candidates may be doing original research beyond the experience of any available instructors.
That is actually the definition of a PhD. At least in my country.
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However there is a reason why we focus on pedagogy and not just content qualification. That is because we are teaching kids not adults, and part of the process is helping kids develop into adult humans. In lower grades, like ages 6-10 , it is thought that d
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There is a considerable middle ground between someone with a CS degree and someone depending on scripts and an answer key.
Schools may need to develop a little flexibility to utilize that middle ground. Perhaps it could try recruiting retired developers who just got tired of the usual office BS, but that would require keeping administrative BS to a minimum in the school setting. It might require a co-education approach where there is a career teacher running the class with a sort of long-term guest expert in
Rephrased (Score:3)
Should a math teacher know math?
Should a physics teacher know physics?
Should an English teacher be literate?
Sound pretty ridiculous when you substitute any other subject.. I think this article is just trying to disprove Betteridge's Law of Headlines.
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> Should an English teacher be literate?
In Japan, it is common that English teachers don't know English. They are simply unable to communicate in English at all. This might be one reason why the whole population in Japan is really bad at English.
But the first years in English (as a foreign language) are just about memorizing words. So you don't really need any skill at that point. In fact the whole thing should be just automated with a simple javascript. Actually same is true at the start of math and rea
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At early grades, it's not necessary to have specialist instructors. You have generalists that have broad but shallow knowledge, and that's enough for teaching the basics. As you said, you don't need specialists when you're just doing memorization or covering very basic foundational material.
But when I use the term "math teacher" or "English teacher", I'm assuming at least high school level (and the article is discussing college intro courses at least part of the time), where teachers and classes are more
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But the first years in English (as a foreign language) are just about memorizing words.
Depends what you mean by that. English as a foreign language? Then you have to work on Grammar. While the english grammar is relatively easy, it is different from French and German, which are related, and a complete nightmare for a Thai or Japanese. They would not get far with only memorizing words.
English for english kids, I would say reading is the most important, and by that they stumble over new words.
Japanese English Teachers (Score:2)
My understanding is that they are expert at grammar rules. Know far more than most native difference. The difference between a past participle and a split infinitive.
They just cannot put three words together and pronounce them in an intelligible sentence.
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They know the theory behind the grammar rules, but not when to apply them.
Native speakers just know how things should be phrased, but do not necessarily know the specific reason why - just that "it sounds right".
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So you're saying that all non-English teachers are illiterate.
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So you're saying that all non-English teachers are illiterate.
If you were as literate as your parent, you would not come to this silly conclusion. Or did you mix up the question mark at the end with a period?
English Teachers may have Ph.D.s in English (Score:2)
Teaching is the only job you can get with one of those.
But only saints or sinners teach STEM at any level.
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It's more common these days for a K-12 teacher to have a degree in Education, with a possible minor in something specific. While that can be beneficial for being a teacher in general, and may allow them to teach a variety of courses, it doesn't really help with content knowledge for specific courses.
My wife was an English (and later Gifted Education) teacher with a BA and MA in English -- and working on a PhD in Education. (She died in Jan 2006, see below) Over her years as a public school teacher, sh
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The last thing they want is a History teacher who knows history.
WHY? (Score:2)
History teachers don't appear to know history . . .
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The only thing you need to remember about history is to clear it after late night browsing sessions.
Re:WHY? (Score:4, Informative)
History teachers don't appear to know history . . .
They know history, it's just that Republicans won't let them teach history. For example, the reason Texas has such an odd shape is because of slavery. That little sliver of Oklahoma used to be part of Texas, but when the Compormise of 1850 was reached (the successor to the Missouri Compromise), rather than give up slavery, Texas gave up land.
It's a similar reason for the fight at the Alamo. Mexico renouced slavery a decade earlier and resused to return any slaves who escaped into Mexico. With the hordes of illegals in Mexican territory not assimilating into the culture*, Mexico forced the issue when talk of secession went round. Jim Bowie was a well known slave owner and proponent of slavery so his stand at the Alamo was about maintainng slavery. Which Texas did.
Meanwhile, 200 years earlier in the East, Roger Williams created the first democratic society on the continent as well as separating Church and State from one another. However, this was only after his fellow Christians attacked him (both physically and in public), altered official deeds and proclamations from the Crown pertaining to Williams' land rights, and even considered having him arrested for having the temerity to not follow their religous doctrine. More disturbing, he let women vote in elections and gave them near equal rights to men.
And let us not forget the civil rights movement of the 50s and 60s. Can't let our children know about how white people were lynching blacks who dared to look at a white woman, or why the National Guard was needed to escort black children to school. It might make those white kids feel bad about their race [cnn.com]. And we wouldn't want that to happen, now would we?
Considering the embracing of fascist policies and Nazi propaganda technigues by Republicans, this is spot on [9cache.com].
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"All that hate is gonna eat you up, kid."
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I think you vastly over-estimate how much detail kids learn in school.
History teaching is not so much political (Score:2)
as just plain incompetent.
It is all about the process of writing history assignments and not about the knowledge itself. So my Australian kids learn about the Incas, while only having a very vague idea of the Second World war.
Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day. Teach him to fish and he feeds for a lifetime.
Nonsense.
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Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day. Teach him to fish and he feeds for a lifetime.
That is a really good point. The purpose of teaching history in elementary school should be to teach kids to love history. Then they will continue to teach themselves.
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Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day. Teach him to fish and he feeds for a lifetime.
That is a really good point. The purpose of teaching history in elementary school should be to teach kids to love history. Then they will continue to teach themselves.
It was meant as sarcasm. That the purpose of teaching history should be largely about learning relevant history. Most people learn most of their history from Hollywood which shamelessly lies in order to make a "true" story.
Things like the Munich agreement simply did not happen as far as most Australians know, and that affects opinions in cur
wtf kind of question is this? (Score:5, Insightful)
"Do CS teachers need to know CS?"
How did we get to the point where we are asking these sorts of questions? Am I the only one who thinks the very nature of this question is non-sensical?
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It's just yet another proof that Idiocracy was a documentary about the future.
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It's just yet another proof that Idiocracy was a documentary about the future.
Bullshit. In idiocracy they listened to the smartest people and made the smartest their leader. Reality most closely resembles “don’t look up” where no one listens to the scientists and intelligent people, they fight over trying to monetize an imminent disaster instead of fixing it, and actively sabotage the efforts of the rest of the sane world when they try to fix the problem unilaterally.
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Bullshit. In idiocracy they listened to the smartest people and made the smartest their leader.
They were also desperate. Ever see a diversity-hire team of neurotypicals before? They achieve nothing and fail 100% of the time, wasting huge sums of money, only to be replaced by whichever autists they can get at twice the cost. The fact is: execs despise having to pay some filthy (often actually) peasants the same or more than they make while being dependent enough on them they can't just hot-swap them for other peasants over perceived slights without destroying their own livelihoods in the process.
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While I certainly agree it is, at first blush, nonsensical but I suspect many of those who would be academics in this field work in industry for a much larger paycheck leaving many students who want instruction and a deficiency of those who can provide it.
Further, realistically, many of those who study it will become, whether or not they have capable professors, mediocre programmers given the inherent finite amount of intelligence in this world
So, from an economic perspective, can middling schools get away
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I have virtually zero formal CS training (nor do I even work in a CS field) yet I can frequently find errors in code/scripts provided by those with that formal training so I generally suspect that most formal CS training is not too helpful short of pretty technical things...
CS training has not much to do with such things. I had a girlfriend who was a linguist/germanist and worked in a software company writing documentary for software. Without knowing any HTML and ASP (that was before ASP.net), she fixed qui
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she was probably smarter than many of the programmers - especially those working on the webpage
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"Do CS teachers need to know CS?"
How did we get to the point where we are asking these sorts of questions? Am I the only one who thinks the very nature of this question is non-sensical?
To be fair, this question comes up because we've answered incorrectly to "Do teenagers need to know CS?"
We have an unfortunate tendency to imagine that we can force-feed high-level knowledge to younger kids and accelerate success. It upsets me that they have "AP Calculus" and the like in high schools. If you want to go to college in a math-heavy major, take Calculus at your college, where the instructors relied on to teach the Calculus classes will have history with the instructors relying on the Calculus
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We have an unfortunate tendency to imagine that we can force-feed high-level knowledge to younger kids and accelerate success.
The problem is the force feeding.
And another problem is what we define as "success".
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You forgot that in capitalism, the drive is to make everything always cheaper and that includes teachers. Clearly a CS teacher that does not know CS is "cheaper than possible", but the bean-counters will celebrate that as a big win nonetheless because they are incapable of understanding how much damage they do.
This is a trick question? (Score:2)
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Indeed. I don't see why Computer Science teachers should know anything about the Credit Suisse.
It's time to abandon that old saw... (Score:2)
... that goes "Those who can't do, teach."
It's not just CS. We seem to, nowadays, hold teachers in such low regard that we think that anyone pulled off the street can be an effective educator after a brief training session.
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It might help if the teachers themselves quit reinforcing that impression.
Learn C (Score:2)
Learn how the machine thinks. Your (fill in your favorite language) programs will thank you for it.
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If you really want to learn how the machine thinks, don't fuck around with C, learn assembly. When was the last time you saw a class offered in that?
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What was the last processor you could program manually in assembly and it made sense?
You could write reasonable assembly for SPARK, Power and Mips, but why would you?
Assembly in our days is basically the niche for obscure 50+ year old micro controllers where you need to be a masochist to learn/use it. But some people love that.
There is nothing wrong to skip assembly, unless you want to teach it on an old school computer like an Apple ][/C64 etc. General Data comes to mind, or an 68k powered computer, or an
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Nice. I actually started a (very minor) ruckus. With my tongue firmly in cheek, I offer the following:
In order to use assembly, you have to start with a pretty good understanding of what is actually happening down at the bare metal level, starting with CPU instruction sets, before you even start. A few days with K&R should give today's programmers using high level languages a better idea of what's going on in the lower levels without having to gain that knowledge. Very time and cost effective.
And of cou
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It's not until you learn assembly that the "magic" in the computer disappears. Until then (even when using C), there's some hand-wavy explanations that you have to take on faith. When you learn assembly, you are grounded in reality.
When I was a lad (Score:2)
We learned to program with switches and a soldering iron.
Then people started using Octal, and the rot set in. Octal should have been banned! Don't get me started about symbolic assemblers. Symbols are the work of the devil.
Young people today, not wanting to learn how to track down a memory corruption by using a modern programming language. It must be purged!
CS is not part of the basic curriculum from Day 1 (Score:2)
Reading, writing and arithmetic (the "3 R's") is the basic curriculum taught from day 1. Computer science - programming - is not part of that. Thus, in order to teach it, teachers would need extra courses to learn it at a basic level, before they could teach it. It is a completely new mental model
To be a commercial programmer, one needs several things: understanding language syntax; understand the mental models associated with languages (variables, assignments, loops, conditionals, classes, objects (see Jav
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Does a teacher need to know all that? No IMO.
Actually yes.
What would teachers need to know? Language syntax and language mental model; what the compiler/interpreter is doing (generating instructions); what is an instruction; how are instructions executed. That would describe a teacher for programming. Nothing wrong with that. But IMHO that is not a computer science class.
In Germany a CS teacher has aa CS degree, minimum comparable with a Master. (A bit difficult to explain, as Germany partly switched to t
Kind of hard at that pay (Score:2)
The best teachers end up being the retired CS workers that do it more as a hobby than a career, but even then they're good at fundamentals and bad at emerging tech. This is also why bootcamps are relevant, they do pay their teachers much better than colleges do.
Can have Proctors, not Teachers, Workable (Score:2)
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We can hire Proctors whose job is to make sure students do the course curriculum and take tests. The students are self-taught based on the course material . This is workable, but the people doing this job do not deserve the title of "teacher"
As long as teachers are rated on how well students score on standardized tests they’ll teach to the test.
Those who can't do, teach (Score:2)
Everybody knows that.
Too valuable (Score:2)
The issue is someone who knows CS right now is worth north of 100k minimum and 200k+ TC jobs are now a dime a dozen.
Just part of the relentless push for cost-cutting. (Score:2)
Efficiency of course is good to prioritize, but some things you just can't cut. Human interaction. Education so the teachers are good at actually teaching.
As long as we allow the wealthy to have their private schools, there will always be a push to sabotage, privatize, and dow
There WILL NOT be enough teachers so... (Score:2)
Some other model is needed.
Many Slashdotters are self-taught and effective. How would you design an interactive computerized CS course to limit or remove the need for human teachers? It's not such a stretch.
BTW not everyone has the intelligence to learn CS so inflicting it on the whole student body is cruel.
We have specialization for good reasons, including placing people where they can be effective. Everyone is not the same.
You can't teach CS (Score:2)
Teachers need to know what they teach! (Score:2)
Take this out of CS, I had to teach my daughter's primary school teachers about Sex-Ed and Cannabis! Scripted teaching isn't ju
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Take this out of CS, I had to teach my daughter's primary school teachers about Sex-Ed and Cannabis
So you got them high and slept with them?
We've become complacence in accepting a lack of qualification, and when we do that, everyone is on the loosing end.
Until we are willing to pay for qualifications at a market rate we will get what we paid for.
My CS teacher was a home econmics teacher (Score:2)
I will admit, this is going back a few years but I went to two different high schools. At both, the CS teacher was really a home economics (teaches cooking etc) teacher.
A few things I remember:
* They would parrot the information in the text book, which was often not quite correct. Even when you brought evidence to them that showed it was wrong they didn't care.
* When a student had a question for the teacher, the teacher would often ask me if the answer they provided was correct
* One of the computers stopped
The real question should be (Score:2)
"How can teachers teach CS when they don't know it... because the people who know it can't or won't".
We as a society have decided that learning CS is an important thing, at least for some subset of our children. So how do we do that? There are a few issues to consider:
1) there aren't enough people how "know CS" who are willing and able to teach it for what we're willing to pay
2) teaching is a distinct set of knowledge and skills itself, and there's no guarantee that someone who "knows CS" will be a good
Teaching, or imparting knowledge? (Score:2)
Because I'm old, my first college exposure to computers was on a Xerox Sigma mainframe.
She was a beautiful machine.
Our advisor, and head of the math department, encouraged us to dumpster dive to find and
examine printouts discarded by the keepers of the mainframe, looking for unknown admin
accounts and utilities. We did, and we did. When we found how to flip the PRIV bit from user mode,
we were congratulated warmly for the knowledge and experience gained.
I don't think they teach like that any more,
Fun fact (Score:2)
Exacrlty why I quit teaching CS (Score:2)
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> A great example is the computation space (O, o, theta), of a tree, linked list, or a tree of linked list.
Which framework is that?
What an insane question... (Score:3)
Imagine a math teacher saying "if x + y = 8 and x = 3, then, y is 5". A kid asks "why?" and the teacher has to answer "no idea, that's what's in the script". That's not a teacher. The kids would be better off watching YouTube tutorials.
The fundamental problem with the US education system is lack of qualifications. Above elementary (primary) school, teachers should have degrees in their subjects, with a couple of courses in education. But the US does it backwards: teaching degrees are required, and supplemented by a couple of courses in the subject taught. Of course, people with actual degrees in their fields will expect (a) to be paid accordingly, and (b) won't put up with education bureaucrats dictating their curricula.
I attended US public schools for a few years, back in the dark ages - like, 50 years ago. Even then, they were horrible. As a fast learner, I was bored, bored, bored - the classes went at the pace of the slowest students. To avoid falling asleep, I sat in the back and quietly swapped notes with another bored student. That was apparently disruptive, so we were separated. Actually giving us something to do, like "here's a more advanced book, work on it"? Nah...
I had a math teacher who regularly made mistakes on the chalkboard. Pointing out the mistakes was *not* appreciated. I don't recall being impolite - just saying "Um...shouldn't that be x instead of y?" Apparently, it was better to spare the teacher's dignity, while confusing the hell out of the rest of the students.
From what I read, things have only gotten worse. In Corona times, many US school systems were not allowed to fail anyone - so you now have 3rd and 4th grade teachers sounding out letters of the alphabet with students who should never have left first grade. Which - and this is the problem - prevents them from educating the rest of their students. The good old "NCLB" philosophy, carried to an extreme.
Once you reach a certain mass of institutional incompetence, the only solution is to burn it down and start over. Maybe the suggested voucher system would work: let parents decide where to spend the educational money allocated to their kids.
The US has tried this before (Score:3)
In the 50's, post-Sputnik, there was a big push to get more science and technology students out of American high schools.
They had the same problem we now have with CS - major shortage of teachers.
They tried to solve it the same way - canned multi-media lessons.
Of course, in that era they were film strips with audio on LP records ("BEEP - move to slide 6"), or if you were really high tech, 16mm movies.
This worked as well as you would expect:
* Smart kids got the material, and got frustrated when the material was misleading or wrong and the teacher could not understand the questions
* Average kids got the material sometimes, and floundered sometimes
* Not-smart kids were lost and bored
(*) No, I'm not THAT old - my high school had the old media lying around when I encountered it in the early 1970's.
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Back in 2009. my kid took AP Comp Sci in high school. The class was a literal joke. Most of the exercises were comprised of:
Here is an example of a for loop that counts from 1 to 100. Modify this loop so it counts to 100 by 10's. Car and parking lot examples where most of the code is written and you need to modify only a few variables or the car object to add a trait or two (manual vs automatic transmission).
Kid scored A in the class, with nearly 100%. The AP test was a disaster, with a score of 1. Reto
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Kid had no ability to write code from scratch, only patch existing code.
Well that sounds like preparation for the job market. A vocational test not a college test.
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What is the motivation for AC brain farts? (Score:2)
'Nuff said, especially since I don't really care about the farters with the answers.
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I personally have no respect for any educator who can't do a 360 no-scope.