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Re: Can a non-programmer teach Perl?

by theorbtwo (Prior)
on Aug 17, 2002 at 01:34 UTC ( [id://190805]=note: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??


in reply to Can a non-programmer teach Perl?

many of the students will have trouble figuring out how to turn the computer on.

I suspect this class will end up terribly, for both the teacher and the students. It's my sugguestion that the class be recast as an introduction to computers, and the students who are signed up for it be told as soon as possible so they have time to reschedule.

Now I'm going to tell you why I think this. This is going to be a fairly long story of what happened during a Computer Science class I took my seinor year of high school.

Now, I should note there are some important differences between the situation Ovid's friend is in, and the situation Mr. E (protecting the innocent) was in. Township (mildly protecting the guilty), where I went to HS, was (and is) a very well-to-do district. Class sizes, purticularly in higher-end classes (which this was cast as), were decent (20-ish in this class). He was a recent math/teaching double-major grad, who had taken a decent bit of CS -- he'd done a major project, but only as the writing/orginization guy on a team, not as a programmer. He was a good teacher, but didn't have a good idea school politics or how to keep out of trouble. Perhaps the most important difference is that he'd lobbied hard to get to teach and create this course, in his second year out in the Real World.

I heard about the class from one of the people who kept the Writing and Technology center, and went to see him near the end of my seinor year. He told me that the course was designed to prepare students to take the Computer Science AP test after two semesters, and wasn't called AP CS, but rather CS I and II, for mostly political reasons -- apparently, teachers of AP courses get paid more at Township. I was interested, though I'd been through the school's old Programming II (I skipped I) course, and had been very disapointed -- it didn't teach me anything I hadn't already known, and I had taught the teacher about QB's dialect of BASIC -- he hadn't even known it had real subroutines. I signed up for the course. Time passes...

It's now the beginning of my seinor year. Third period, and I get to the CS class. Some farmilar faces, lots of younger kids. Shrug, whatever. He has us fill out the normal questionaires -- what's your name, your home address, your phone number, your email (not a usual question, and a good sign), your background in the subject(ditto, strangely this isn't an often asked question)... when he reads mine he tells me I'm probably a better-qalified teacher then he is. This speaks poorly of his programming experince, and well of his teaching ability -- those who are not prepared to learn from their students make bad teachers.

The biggest, and worst, surprise, however, is the tentitive outline he gives us. We won't be doing anything with programming for several months. Well, that isn't too horrible -- one of the most common teaching mistakes seems to be starting slow, and assuming you can speed up later. You can, but I think it makes for poor coverage, and less time to teach harder things.

Well, more time passes. It becomes clear that half the class is chalenged, while the other half is bored mindless. Some of the bored students try to help the challenged ones, some of them try to help the teacher, some of them surf the internet, some of them make trouble.

He eventualy splits the class in half, teaching half, giving the other half the final project of the "chapter" and telling them once it's done they can do whatever they want.

This half ends up mostly playing Quake. Most of the time, I die a lot, but I love the last level, esp. when I end up with the rocket launcher.

Eventualy, Mr. E decides that the class would be better being four semesters long. Too late for me; I'll only get halfway there. It's now far to late for me to change my schedule. I could take study halls... or get easy As here.

In good time, it comes to the ears of the administrators that students are playing games during class time. Mr. E gets in trouble, and our quake-playing fun is over.

So what do we do? Well, we play with the computers, of course. We can't install sw on the machines without breaking security, so we put it on the server instead. The server admins don't like this, so repeatedly lower our quotas. This causes problems, because we no longer have enough space to compile simple programs (MSVC likes lots of room). We can therefore get nothing done. We break security, and get in lots of trouble.

The class teaches nothing, because the initial expectations of the two groups of students are too disseperate. You can't teach people who know nothing about computers how to program in 9 months, much less 12 weeks. If you try to teach people who already know how to use computers from "press the button marked 0/1" for 12 weeks, they will end up bored and dissatisified.

Next time, realisticly plan what you're going to teach before students sign up for the class.


Confession: It does an Immortal Body good.

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