Slashdot Mirror
Any Teachers on Slashdot?
Traxton1 asks: "I am a student in a community college, and I spent all day in a hiring committee for a new Computer Science faculty member. I was wondering if there are many teachers who hang around on Slashdot. One of the people we interviewed had a power point presentation that didn't display correctly, and he said it was because he was using Star Office. I was shocked that someone who wasn't in the tech sector used anything beside Windows. My C++ teacher actually said that if we used anything beside Visual C++ he wouldn't even try to help us compile.I was just curious to know if people who really are very tech-savvy desire to be teachers at all. Oh, one more thing: they tried hiring for this position 2 years ago and got 3 applicants, and none of them qualified for the job." They say teaching is an "honorable profession" and I believe every word if it. If only they got paid more, maybe there would be more quality applicants across all subjects.
One of the things that discourage teachers from experimenting with alternitive operating systems is that what they do for work must be able to be taken in and work with generally little trouble, and most schools use MS based Products, so it is a waste of time for some of it to come in and have to do such things as fix their powerpoint or redo formatting, and time is something many of them are short on. Also, they don't need to know two different systems, one they use at home and the other at work. Some of them might dabble in it, but most will keep all work related work on the same system as they use in work.
(Score:0, Interesting)
So let me get this straight, you're interviewing for a Computer Science faculty position, and you're surprised that they don't use a Microsoft product?
No wonder I found "school" to be such a complete waste of time.
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
Uh, you're wondering why a programming instructor ad a community college won't help you compile on a non-Microsoft system? I know you're looking for Linux geek teachers but that is a silly assumption. Community colleges in most cases are a step above a trade school and in some fields are little better than a trade school. Computer Science is one of these fields. Most of your instructors are going to have adjuct positions which means they need to hold a regular job as well as teach at your CC. They teach you Microsoft because that is what 99% of CS students exiting a community college work with when they're out of school. They might like or even use Linux personally but unless your course is "not quite Unix operating systems" don't expect a heavy dosage of Linux in a community college outside of the ACM club.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Twitter.com/TrentonHyatt
I am not currently a teacher, but I do plan on being one after my Masters. I got the "teaching bug" after being a Marine Corps marksmanship instructor. Now that I am getting my masters in Telecommunications I am looking at teaching as a field. Not all teachers do it because they can't get a real job, some actually like it. At my college a lot of the professors are there because they wanted to take a break from the tech sector, and they plan on going back in a few years. Some of them actually like it so much they never go back.
I really think teaching is like any other career out there, you are going to find some people who actually like it even though they could do "better".
iRepairIT - iPhone, Mac, & PC Repair
Also, there isn't any curriculum for learning to use Linux or something beside MS Office, and while I do use Windows and MS Office most of the time (MS Works at home), I would enjoy being able to take a class involving something else. True that most business positions use MS Office, but the percentage of people who use something else in the tech sector itself is probably quite a bit higher (Of course it is! That's why were at /. :) I think it would probably benefit me pretty well to be adept at more than just what a casual user uses.
Twitter.com/TrentonHyatt
I've in the past been teaching Computer Studies part time and also providing extra tuition to what we call high school over here (about 8th to 12th grade / year of school - similar to British system). Of course this was done for the love of it since any salary couldn't come close to what I earn at my day time job. I'm currently involved in writing textbook material for the same audience, to be used in a distance learning/home schooling environment. I don't hold any teaching qualifications, only a CS degree. Which is apparently quite fine with the people I answer/ed to.
With this background in mind, the following points need mentioning:
1. Having been through the academic mill and having worked in industry, I'm quite amazed at the utter crap some of the local teachers/textbooks dish up to the kids. Also, these same people need to make policy descisions on what needs to be examined at year-end, what programming environments need to be used, etc. The result is very much hype-oriented which ties the kids very much into a certain tool/methodolody. I'd rather have students who know the underlying concepts and are exposed to many different tools so that they can choose and experiment for themselves, and choose the tool that suits the job at hand the best.
2. With the local currency nosediving against the Dollar and Euro (lost 40% in 2001) software is becoming prohibitively expensive. Free stuff like StarOffice, Virtual Pascal, Cygwin or Linux (including all the nice programming languages) is a REAL lifesaver.
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
My experience is that quite a few Slashdot readers are teachers of some flavor, from junior high through top universities. I'm a professor at a very good undergraduate institution. Windows is almost nonexistent in the CS department. We use it mostly under duress. :-)
I was just curious to know if people who really are very tech-savvy desire to be teachers at all.
Before I decided that teaching would be a lot more fun than the dot-com butterfly chase, I spent 15 years in industry. I won't bore you with my resume, but I have to say that the people I have encountered in academia are generally just as "savvy" as those outside, if not more so. However, the savviness is of a different sort, because the needs are different. If you want to know which video card works best on a PCI bus, don't ask me. I don't have a clue. The time that someone else spends learning that information, I spend learning about the latest research in schedulers or file systems.
I make no value judgments here. Both types of knowledge are useful. Just don't make the error of assuming that because another person's knowledge isn't a precise superset of your own, he is ignorant.
What makes you think using StarOffice makes you tech savy? On a teachers salary how are you supposed to afford Microsoft Office.
...but around London a teacher has no hope over ever affording a house on the salaries they receive.
My sister is teaching at a school in Reading, and has to live with my parents.
Simple maths:
If teachers salary == 20000 pounds (which my sisters does not - its less)
Bank will loan 3.5 - 4 times the salary for a house, ie 70000 - 80000 pounds.
Average house price for the UK is now 98000 pounds, the average house price for Reading is far higher.
Steve.
Name one teacher who was teaching at the time that they made the discovery that earned them a Nobel Prize. They teach afterwards but not before.
SO, teachers, by the nature of passing on information that is already known CAN NOT be cutting edge.
The top 10% might be capable of advancing their fields. 90% cannot advance their field so they end up teaching. If they could advance their field, they would be doing it. Keep in mind, only 3% of all teachers are professors. The rest rule their petty domains, classrooms in primary and secondary schools across the nation.
They are teachers because of the perceived sense of power they derive because they know something their students do not. They seek that power because the real movers and shakers in their fields know something the teachers don't, and never will.
If you had a masters in business, why would you become an officer? To pay off student loans in return for 6 years of service minimum? If you can't make $130,000 in 6 years as an MBA, you must be incredibly bad in your field. Keep in mind only 1% of Officers are fighter pilots. The rest are simply inferior in their field.
The typical manager has no grasp of the technology the people he manages are using. If he had a grasp of technology, he would not seek to move into management. The term has been labeled "fuck up, move up." put the unskilled person in a place where they can do the least damage. Contrary to popular belief, even the worst manager cannot hinder a technical person who really shines. A manager can certainly ride on the success of his team, and will seek to do so, lacking the competence to shine themselves.
SO, as a 90% true rule, people incompetent in their fields, end up as teachers, military officers and managers.
90% is more than enough for me to make a blanket statement. Unlike the your "hey, I know this guy who is a complete renaissance man who is brilliant beyond measure and is an fighter pilot and has a ten inch penis". He represents a tiny fraction, of the population. There may be only 1000 people on the entire planet of 6 billion people with that kind of resume.
I will further guess that there may be perhaps 1000 people capable of writing a textbook on programming that is as revered as "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" putting Hal Abelson and Jerry Sussman also outside the scope of my blanket statement.
In other words, you picked the worst examples imaginable. Meaning, you too are inadequate. Since you are defending teachers and have shown yourself inadequate in a way that teachers often are, citing poor examples, you must be a teacher, and therefore biased.
Your opinion means nothing in this discussion.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
No, it doesn't.
Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
I can understand you not wanting to plunk down the 100$ for Visual Studio and it being crappy your professor won't help you with your compiler. However on the converse if you decided you wanted a different text book than the one required for the class would you expect the professor to find problems in it for you to do that were comparable to the standard book? For a computer class the software is part of the course materials.
I think a lot of schools would like to offer non-Windows courses but you've got to remember community colleges aren't exactly getting the same sort of endowments as a university. You also don't have resident professors that need to fullfil a quota of classroom hours so come out with some elective course that is more fun than work. I don't think Linux would make sense to your school's Board of Trustees either. They'd ask your CS department chair next to Windows is the next most likely environment which they'd probably reply with Macintosh and then proceed to mention Solaris, AIX, and HP-UX. I don't mention Novell because most CS departments have Novell classes already. Linux would probably not be mentioned in actuality. For Office alternatives the next option would be Lotus Smart Suite and MAYBE if you were lucky StarOffice.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
My wife is a teacher, so I'll try and convey the general feeling about teaching. She's not "under qualified" or crap at her field. She was probably one of the brightest students at her University. She simply decided she did not want a job sitting behind a desk all day long.
The problem with teaching is not the money. There are many teachers who don't care about the poor pay. The problem is the non-teaching crap you have to put up with - governments who want you to have all the i's dotted and the t's crossed by making sure you follow the exact strict rules laid down by them, and fill in a dozen forms so they can check you're doing things right. The problem that arises from that is that you end up working 3, 4 or sometimes 5 hours into every evening doing paperwork and marking. So teachers end up over tired and stressed out.
However teaching is still probably one of the more rewarding proffessions out there. My job seems incredibly minor (stopping spam) in comparison to training young minds to think for themselves, and often dealing with their social education too.
So often it's not about the quality of applications, but more about the constant drain on their sensibilities that leads those who are top in their field to eventually leave teaching, not because they don't love it, but because they need to maintain their sanity.
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
Where would you guess that I have met the people that I mention? Consider the possibility that I learned the SICP in this class and that my teachers have been the very best in their fields. My perspective may be skewed, but your personal attack and supposition that I am a teacher is misguided at best.
You can get back to stewing in bitterness now.
I post anonymously only out of laziness. My screen name is Aix.
While I will agree that there are a significant number of people in these fields that meet your description, your assumption of 90% is way off base.
Perhaps the biggest mistake you make is in the assumption that anyone who teaches or manages or serves in the military (or serves others period) is somehow inferior because they could be making more on the outside. Bzzzt! Wrong!
Bear in mind that some people (thankfully enough people, and apparently not you) are interested in serving something more than themselves and are happy, yes happy to do it for less money and power than they could earn by serving themselves.
Mellow out for a moment and meditate on that one.
Regards,
Justin McMichael
If only they got paid more...
See, that's the majority assumption, that they're underpaid.
In a lot of places, they're not.
Think about it - they're paid 12 months of the year, but many don't work that. The school year isn't a full year.
Many are under-educated. However, the job security is extremely high after you've put in your dues. The salaries are low when you start, but once you're vested, your salary is pretty good and your unionized (for lack of a better word) if you're in some of the larger districts. Pretty good job security!
And don't even mention those with tenor at the universities, some of those idiots really abuse the position they're in. (and yes, obviously there are those who busted their asses to get their, have student loans out the wazzu and fully deserve to be where they are).
I think for most teachers, it's not about the money - they have a talent for teaching, or a love, and that's what they do.
And besides, I think for most teachers, its the BS that drives them off - the paperwork, lack of good tools of the trade, the regulations, the *teaching to get the kids past the proficiencies tests* instead of teaching them the information.
http://slashdot.org/~tf23/journal
It would have nice to have a poll here, since the said topic is not covered.
This is a particularly ugly troll. It's not funny in any way. Your maliciousness only shows your own perversity. Too bad I don't have mod points.
i'm currently a software engineer, but i wouldn't mind teaching computer courses at a local college or even high school later on in my life...
problem is, the money isn't even close....my parents are both elementray school teachers, and they make a lot of money, but that's because they've been teaching for 30+ years...i know what teachers of 3 or 4 years in their school district are making and even if you adjust for them only working 10 months, it's still not near what i make, and i'm less then a year out of college...
of course they do get other benefits, like the aforementioned 2 months off in the summer, and a pension...so i dunno, maybe it balances out...
maybe i'll consider that if/when i get burned out from my job....
"Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true." - Homer Simpson
They say teaching is an "honorable profession" and I believe every word if it. If only they got paid more, maybe there would be more quality applicants across all subjects.
Swings and roundabouts, my friend. The salary in teaching isn't great, but that's not the only form of remuneration. Remember all the stories of dotcom employees getting laid off, their erstwhile employers bankrupt? Now when did you ever hear of teachers being laid off? There's always a demand for them too, and teachers can work anywhere, again that's something that can't be claimed for most high-tech jobs. In Britain at the moment, there is a lot of worry that private pensions (what Americans call the 401k) won't be enough for people to retire on - but teachers have their pensions guaranteed as a percentage of their final salaries by the taxpayer. Hi-tech workers are notorious for the long hours they put in, everyone reading this has probably experienced a >24hr coding session, but teachers work 9 am to 3:30 pm every day and get 10 weeks vacation a year.
If you want to attract people into teaching, don't focus so much on the salaries, focus on the job security and quality of life aspects. It should be easy for you to attract idealistic open-source types who don't care about Manhattan lofts and SUVs but do care about a stress-free environment with lots of time for coding, and the opportunity to shape the minds of the young.
I teach programming at a professional college, and more pay would be nice, but find me someone in any profession who's not going to tell you that.
The majority of people I've seen teaching in our school campuses up here (I work for one campus on a chain) treat the teaching as a stepping-stone to something else. That's probably going to have a bit to do with some of the general apathy you might be experiencing. It's not that they don't care, it's just that they want to do what they have to do to get a decent reference and move on. For some people that intrinsically means going above and beyond, for others that means doing strictly what they're told and nothing more.
I was a Linux freak before I started my job here, so it's no effort to talk about it with the students, even though we teach mostly Visual Studio. However, I remember what it was like learning about makefiles and dependencies and linker paths and I would hate to be in the position of having to learn these things at the same time that I'm supposed to be doing my regular job that has nothing to do with that stuff.
Also, don't forget that a lot of the tech politics hit us hard as well. Both our C++ and Java courses have switched from other (and better, IMO) books to Deitel & Deitel books, and our particular schools are investing in those books long-term. Now, every student I've talked to has had huge problems with these books, and it might have to do with any number of reasons: the inherent complexity of C++/Java vs VB, the fact that my suspicions are true and the books are terrible, the fact that the course itself doesn't allot enough time for the breadth of material, the fact that our school's support material on the subjects is non-existent. Likely, it's a combination of several of the above. The thing is, though, no amount of whining or complaining over it is going to change their mind, and they recently upgraded the material to go with the latest editions of the books. Not much one can do. I've voiced my concerns to management but after that it's going after the big boys in the corporation and I have to tell you, change is slow. And it's not even a case of being lazy or aloof about it, sometimes you're going to be in a situation where you have a strict goal and you have to deal with the limited resources that you have. Plus, if students resign themselves to the course material, just the course material and nothing but the course material, in ANY subject, they're fucked, and no teacher from any after-school special is going to be able to save them.
My point is, if a teacher won't help you on a pet project, there's one of several possible reasons -- he or she is a disaffected asshole, he or she just doesn't get the area that you want to explore and can't take the time away from the rest of the job to learn it, or the corporate vision actually wants a set curriculum and no deviation from it.
It's a tough gig. It's nice to see what happens when a student starts getting the material and runs ahead on their own with it.
Why be surprised by the non use of a microsoft product. Heck, in highschool while we had had microsoft office, more use was goten out of the corel suite.
Netscape was installed as the default browser Corel Word Perfect was the most commonly used word processing program, Lotus 1-2-3 was the spreadsheet of choice.
It's true that Microsoft OS's were used (MS DOS, Windows 3.1, 3.11, 95 and NT...outdated by many's standards, bute still in use as of 2001), it was done mainly as a comfort level thing for most students and teachers. Linux hadn't exploded the way it has now, and for us, Net acess was limited so little knowledge was there.
Over my 30-year professional career, I have been a guest instructor at a couple of universities and community colleges. Each venue lasted less than a year, because in every single case the school would pass a rule while I was in the middle of a course requiring all instructors be degreed.
Like another famous person in the computing industry, I am a high school graduate with some college. No degree.
My reason for not having a degree is long and boring, so I won't go into it. That didn't stop me from working in what is now called IT at universities -- they weren't so picky about having sheepskins when skill was necessary to actually get the job done. That included the ARPAnet; indeed, the Center for Advanced Computation welcomed my work with open arms (and paybook).
The academic myopia hasn't stopped me from teaching, though. I did my "teaching" in the pages of magazines like InfoWorld, Byte, ComputerWorld, Computer Shopper, Federal Computer Week, and others. I did my teaching on CompuServe on IBMNET and other forums. I did my teaching on BIX as conference moderator in telecom and, for a while, as an Exchange Editor. And I tutor today on Internet principles for more money than I ever recieved as a guest instructor.
I'm a tech guy who teaches, not a teacher trying to teach tech. (Say that three times fast.)
Just because the guy was using StarOffice doesn't mean he was doing so to support OSS. StarOffice comes installed by default on eMachines PCs, and if this guy was either currently employed as a teacher, or unemployed, then its quite possible he was using StarOffice because the only PC/Office combination he could afford to buy to update his resume' was an eMachine running StarOffice.
Knowing quite few teachers (including my spouse, and my best friend) and through them other teachers, I would have to say that there are very few tech-savvy teachers out there. Many are computer literate to the extent of using Office aps, but given that my best friend is this most tech savvy teacher in his school, and he relies on me for anything more complicated than installing a modem in his PC, I'd have to say that finding one qualified to teach a Community College CS course would be a challenge.
Your best bet might be to find a Grad student in CS at a nearby university who can work teaching the courses at your school into his/her schedule.
Work for Change & GET PAID!
yeah , i am a lecturer , sometimes it's a requirement of the course that certain guidelines are followed to complete the module. also many syllabuses are deliberately slanted towards a certain vendor (usually M$) it can't be helped. people want to learn skills that are used commonly in industry.learn the stuff you want to know (perl, EMACS, compiling under whatever) when you leave in industry or in your own time. I do and i'm still learning (i make a point "If you know what your doing your not learning anything").
some of the newer courses like CIW are platform independent (I teach building both IIS and ZEUS webservers, i like to show alternatives, some websites use *nix ) personally i'd like to teach what students want to know (and sometimes i'll indulge myself and will teach what people want)but more often course contents are governed by the syllabus and examination body.
perl -MIO::Socket -e 'IO::Socket::INET-new(PeerAddr="some.windoze.box:1
I think it's reasonable to say that there are some people who can do CS-related stuff very will in an industry environment, but couldn't ever teach it to someone, let alone carry a class for an entire semester of engaging lectures.
;p
/., and I always appreciate them. It does seem to be hard work. It's probably not as easy as some might think it is.
Just the same, there are some who have an enormous capacity for learning CS theory, and are inclined toward teaching. It would make sense for them to do so.
And then there are some who just want to do reasearch, and are forced to lecture twice a week.
I've seen CS instructors' comments on
I teach at the John's Hopkins Center For Talented Youth every summer, which hosts some of the brightest 8th and 9th graders in the nation participating in enrichment classes. I use open source software exclusively for my courses, and by the end every one of them can use a linux machine proficiently as well as working moderately profficiently in several languages, ruby being the new one i'm going to introduce this summer. If any of you have kids, send them to this program if they have an aptitude for computing. Its not a "computer camp" but rather something where they actually learn!
After spending the '80s as a programmer / DP manager in healthcare, I decided that there were better things to do with my life than sit in the bowels of buildings staring at computer screens. I had taken some education courses in college, so I went back and got my teaching degree and have been teaching at the HS level since '94. I'm currently finishing up a Masters in educational technology. My focus is helping teachers use technology for their own learning / professional development.
Money is an issue. Before becoming a teacher, I had decided that a sane life was more important than money. But then I discovered the overworked side of the equation. My first year teaching I virtually never got to bed before 2 AM. Summers off are nice, but very few teachers actually take more than a few weeks off. Instead they teach summer school, participate in curriculum development or take courses to work their way up the pay-scale.
It was a good career change, but I look forward to being a technology coordinator / teacher trainer / technology consultant. I'd like to be able to use technology to make teaching a more humane, more relational, more respected profession.
Not at schools with real computer science departments, it's not.
A post that started well, then failed miserably...
> Now when did you ever hear of teachers being laid off?
Both of my parents are teachers, and my grandfather was shocked to find how little they made. You see, he lived through the great depression, and he could remember when teachers were the ones who had things, because they had jobs. His best tip as a paper carrier came from a teacher. So when he found out that my parents make the same or less than he did (he was a farmer) he was quite surprised. In fact, I'm about to graduate, and in a couple of years, I can expect to be making nearly as much a year as my father, who has more than 25 years experience teaching.
> but teachers work 9 am to 3:30 pm every day and get
> 10 weeks vacation a year.
I hear this a lot, and let me tell you, it's not true. At least not here in the USA. I live in Iowa, which is supposed to have one of the best k-12 education systems in the nation, and my parents work their butts off. During the school year, they generally have to supervise students in one form or another for 7 out of the 8 hours (8 am to 4 pm) they are required to be there. That one hour isn't nearly enough to grade all the tests, quizzes, and papers that they need to grade, as well as prepare the ones to be used in the future, as well as prepare lesson plans for the school board/government/parents to view to see what will be happening in the next two weeks, as well as help any students who come in asking for help.
Above and beyond those 8 hours a day they are supposed to work, they are also expected to alternate being faculty advisors for a grade; so when, say, they sophomore class wants to make some money for their class by holding a car wash, if my dad is one of their advisors, he is expected to be at that car was as well to supervise. As well as any other class-related activity, such as whatever the class ends up using that money for.
Now, beyond this even, the teachers are expected to show up and support the various extracurricular activities that students participate in, such as sports, band, etc. Additionally, when the sports games are hosted at the school, the teachers alternate in manning the concession area, so they absolutely have to be there for those times. At least for those times, they aren't charged admission as well.
So, from my experience, my parents usually end up working 9-10 hours a day. And it can be a stressfull job, too. My mom started teaching full time a couple of years ago, when I was in college, and she went from mostly blond when I left for college in Augest to completely silver when I got back for Thanksgiving, in November. It was a startling change.
I know, I know, you (and most people) still think that teachers get the summer off, at least, right? Well, that's not exactly true either. Granted, they can usually find a week or two to take off for themselves, in addition to the couple of weeks that they get at Christmastime, so maybe they do get a bit more vacation than most jobs. However, teachers are never considered "good enough" in our teaching system. Once every three summers, my parents have to take classes themselves, to make sure that they are keeping up on all the latest teaching techniques. Some teachers take a class or two every summer. Again, and this is a newer law I believe, once every three summers a teacher is required to work in a job related to what they are teaching. So my father, for instance, teaches Spanish, and once every three summers he has to look around and find a job that allows him to use spanish on the job, and do whatever he can to be able to work at that job. It usually means working for a very reduced salary, because most companies either have someone there already, or don't want to hire someone for just the summer. That leaves one summer every three years. For that summer, my dad looks around and finds a summer job to try and supplement the money that he actually makes teaching, so that my parents can have silly things like running cars to take them to work and back. (Carpools are a possiblity, but no other form of alternative transportation exists.) And whatever is left over from that usually goes into repairing the house they live in. They don't really have much time for luxeries, although I've found that they have more now that all of us kids are on our own, and not draining them completely dry.
So no, teachers may have a lot of things, but they don't have the cush hours that most people think. At least, not basic-education teachers. College/University professors may be different, but from my experience, they're pressured pretty hard to work on research when they aren't teaching classes, so they don't seem to have a life of luxery either.
The teachers here get huge salaries, as the teachers' union runs the state.
Almost didn't see this question because it's not on the main page.
I teach three years of high school Computer Science and will add a webmastering course next year. Currently CS is taught in C++, though we'll be moving to Scheme and Java in the future. Webmastering will cover HTML, CSS, SQL, Perl and maybe PHP.
I use Linux as my primary OS at home, but the kids use Windows 95 and Borland C++ because that's what we bought licenses for 5 years ago. I keep hoping to move to Linux in the lab, but the biggest holdup has been a NetWare client for Linux so the kids can access their home directories.
I do have a degree in CS from a top-ten CS university and was among the top few in many of my classes. I can say that money is definitely an issue for many. I started at $24K five years ago and am now up to $32K in Austin, TX. I have friends with comparable skill levels that graduated with me who are making double to three times that amount in industry.
Teachers should be the best and brightest but often aren't because the pay is so much less than they could get in industry. If teacher salary were only 10% less than industry (rather than 50% or more), you'd see a lot more qualified people looking into teaching.
Oh, and to those who say that teachers only work 8:00-3:30... keep in mind that is only the lecture times. In addition, teachers must deal with parents, grade student work (and we don't have grunt TAs like college professors) and generate new assignments/lecture material. And any teacher who can get all that done during a single "planning period" probably isn't doing a very good job.
I know one industry person that left a job at places like IBM because she wanted to work "shorter hours". She lasted one year as a teacher.
Obligatory self-promotion: you can see what my classes are doing right now, and also find out more than you ever wanted to know about me.
Graham "Teach" Mitchell, computer science teacher, Leander HS
After a stint as network admin at a University, I've taught Networking for the past 5 years at a local community college. A few observations:
Most full-time Instructors have little to no industry experience. Part-timers are the ones with active computing jobs. The education field is very centered around the concept that you can teach anything; direct experience is not necessary with a good curriculum. Perhaps for some fields (especially ones which are relatively static) that might be true, but the small tidbits, workarounds, and hints that accrue from real world projects make the difference between a class and a learning experience. There is no way to maintain current knowledge in this field without have hands-on work experience. Return to Industry is underutilized in many community colleges.
Teachers with associates in business become depressed with they see salaries double, triple, or higher for similar knowledge sets.
A lot of tech-savvy folks don't consider teaching for a few reasons, including low pay and fear of public speaking.
Remember that teaching is s stability position. Many folks who are willing to sacrifice pay for security are often corncerned more with maintenance than discovery.
NB: Since becoming full-time, I have maintained at least 10 hours/week in outside or contract work. Without that, I'd still be teaching Netware 3.12.
I can just imagine, "That operating systems class is cake, but my NetWare class is killing me."
From my experience, REAL CS programs will accept anything that compiles with gcc once you get beyound the CS 100 intro classes. That is, if the assignments are meant to be written in C or C++. I doubt that doing my ML assignments in C would have gone over very well with Prof. Ullman.
Lasers Controlled Games!
Unless the person was going to be teaching Power Point, I wouldn't be worried about a lack of skills with that program. How were his other technical skills, like in the areas he would be teaching? How was his professional demeanor - would he interact well with students? That's what you were really bringing him there for anyway, not for his Power Point expertise. Using Star Office or not, I wonder why he would bring a non-working, sub-par presentation along in the first place though.
:) One of them has strong industry related experience, the other two have been teachers for quite some time. And when you teach the same classes every year, where do you find time to learn and keep up with new technologies?
As for tech savvy people being teachers, I agree with many below that its probably not even a consideration for those who are more interested in salary than job satisfaction. I work at a college and think that our CS/MIS teachers might be working here because of a shortage of tech related jobs in our area of the country. That's why I'm here.
That may also be why you got so many unqualified applicants. Do you have a shortage of tech related jobs where you live? People tend to look for anything even close to the field they want to work in, rather than move to a new industry.
Most people would die sooner than think; in fact, they do.
at a community college in Texas. I taught mostly Cisco 1 and 2 classes (out of the 4, although I can teach all 4). I'm not a huge fan of teaching. I like being the student more, taking information in, as opposed to spewing it out. Being the youngest person in the room did NOT help with my position on teaching. The course material was online so it didn't matter what OS you used as long as you could connect to the net and read a few webpages. Also, being that CC's don't get alot of funding, I was stuck with 30+ when I was suppose to be maxed at 24. CC's look at demand, and hire accordingly. If there's a demand for Novell, there will be classes, if VisualC++, there will be those classes, etc. This local CC only has 1, maybe 2 Unix/Linux based classes. So, either all the linux/unix guys/gals out there are taking classes elsewhere, or...nobody wants to learn Linux/Unix at this CC :(. I might go back into teaching, but i'd rather support Linux instead of Cisco.
;)
--Just waiting on oodles of people to want linux courses.
Here in Alberta, the teachers went on strike recently..
for two months before the strike, all I heard from the teacher's union was "Others got more money, so we want more money too!" They wanted more than a 20% raise.
The government offered them 6% - enough money to make them the highest paid teachers in the country, and the union turned it down because it wasn't enough.
Two days before the strike, the teachers change their tune - they want "better classroom conditions".. a TV interview with the head of the union keeps repeating this over and over.. then the interviewer asks the last question: "Is there anything that could be done that would avert the strike?"
And the answer was "the government could give us the 20% we asked for."
It IS about the money.
I once had a teacher that told us he read Slashdot. So they are out there...
If only they got paid more, maybe there would be more quality applicants across all subjects.
It amazes me that people actually believe this. It's sort of like all those folks who believed that one could throw a bunch of VC at a bad idea and all the sudden get a great product (And now we observe the fallout).
The problem with education is not that teachers do not get paid enough, but that the entire education system is geared to mediocrity. Students are not encouraged to excel, but encourage to simply complete the assigned work.
Likewise, teachers are held down tightly by the government and their own union so that they simply could not teach students well.
To speak strictly of the relation between money and quality, the best means to increase the quality of teachers would be to eliminate the teachers union and allow teachers to be paid according to merit. Why should a teacher strive to do their job well when they get paid the same either way? Teaching is one of the few professions were there is absolutely no accountability.
Even if schools were de-unionized, that would not solve the problem. The students who could truely excel are constantly discouraged, the students who do not belong in school are forced to remain in it, and then the rest of the students simply learn to perform the kind of mondane work that will be a part of the rest of their lives.
If we really care about educating youth, then lets actually educate them. I, for one, would absolutely engage in the equivalent of a start-up school. Unfortunately, there is no way to do such a thing since the name of a school more important than the school itself so the students who attended would have no chance of getting into a decent college.
int func(int a);
func((b += 3, b));
Twitter.com/TrentonHyatt
Call me old fashioned but if I were applying for a CS teaching job that required me to make a presentation, I'd DAMNED sure want to use a product that didn't leave me looking like a ninny to the people I wanted to hire me!
Is it just possible that Microsoft Office has reached a position of dominance because for the most part it works and is pretty easy to use? Nah, must be some conspiracy...
Say what you will, but Word and Excel were the first really good products for Windows. Ami Pro was OK, but WordPerfect for Windows sucked (once it came out MUCH later than Word) and Lotus 123 just never kept up with Excel in usability or features. Under DOS, WordPerfect and 123 dominated (although I liked Quattro Pro better than 123...).
Don't forget that until Microsoft bundled Word/Excel/Powerpoint together as Office, each one could cost hundreds of dollars (as did their competitors). Granted it was a strategy to kill off the competition, but so far they haven't spiked the price after the demise of the competition. The whole XP licensing scheme could be the first sign they are about to drop that hammer, but I doubt it.
I personally use Microsoft products for the same reason I chose a VHS VCR instead of a Beta: compatibility. Yeah, if you work at it you can usually get Star Office (etc.) files to transfer back and forth with Office, but with MS Office, I don't have to screw around because 98%+ of the people I'll ever need to share files with are using MS Office...
If anyone wants to knock off MS (open source or otherwise), they'll have to do it by making a product that is dramatically better than MS Office. Being almost as good will simply not win the battle.
I find MS just as distasteful as anyone, but I am also a realist. Simply believing with all your heart that the enemy shouldn't have any bullets will not keep him from turning you into Swiss cheese.
The fellow who chose to prepare his presentation with a product other than the defacto standard (MS Office) did so at his own peril. His choice made a statement, but the software didn't back him up and left him looking like a chump... If he had used MS Office and the same thing happened, I suspect the hiring committee would have likely have been more understanding. If I were a betting sort of person, I'd bet he didn't get the job...
George A. Akerlof, an economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley. This took me 1 minute to find. And I could find another 10 in 10 minutes. But it is easier for you to just make things up than to actually do a bit of research first.
SO, teachers, by the nature of passing on information that is already known CAN NOT be cutting edge.
Are you really that ignorant about university research that you are unaware of the hundreds of nobel laureates that are professors. It is the research that they pursue in addition to their minor teaching responsibilites that is cutting edge nobel material, and if you are in a good graduate program, you will be studying cutting-edge research--the only places in the corporate world that can compare are places like Xerox PARC, and they are anomolies. Truthfully, there are a lot of bad teachers, but as you go higher, the quality changes radically. University professors in a good program are just about as intelligent as they come--which is not to say that they can teach, 'cause they often can't and don't care.
If you only mean to say that teachers through community cutting edge are not cutting edge, then no shit. Who would argue otherwise? How many of the millions of programmers of the world actually do anything cutting edge? less than .01% I would estimate. If the commercial world is so cutting edge, why are commercial OSs so far behind research OSs. Compare any extant commercial operating system of today to the Mach OS of ten years ago.
I think that probably you are trolling, so I won't respond any more. But look at a list of physics nobel laureates and see how many of them were professors when they did the work that led to the nobel.
There are a number of groups of teachers invovled in OSS and Linux. Theyu have banded together recently to form the schoolforge project at http://www.schoolforge.net
Also see http://www.seul.org/edu which is one of the groups that began the schoolforge alliance.
A lot of the teachers involved have been doing some great things with Linux on very small budgets, both in the US and around the world.
Send lawyers, guns, and money. Dad, get me out of this.
those who can do. those who cant teach.
i use it as a backup job. if i cant get a job in industry, go to the college and teach.
I teach middle school math at a school in South Carolina. My previous experience was as a math and computer science student, system administrator, and programmer. I also have quite a background in web design.
/.'er to spend time at a school. See what things are like. Let's see the /. effect applied on the physical plane!
Prior to becoming a teacher, I spent a lot of time around schools and youth-assistance nonprofits. I was appalled by the state of technology, particularly in the schools.
There are many problems with the technology itself -- the kinds of computers, network connections, management and administration, etc.
There are also enormous problems in the *use* of technology -- teacher training, student training, availability, emphasis, etc. In the end, I find that many educational uses of technology are extremely shallow -- instructors either let the computer do the teaching, or use the computers as glorified pen-and-pencil.
Teachers are required to take technology courses for recertification credit in most states, but most of those courses are abysmal, as they do nothing to build fundamental understandings or relate new concepts to possibilities for real student learning.
I strongly encourage every
If you have a shred of social conscience and know a NIC from a NACK, the educational world can use your help. Bring your deep understanding, your vision, and your willingness to help to your nearest school. You might spec and build a new lab, or help a teacher to understand how the web *really* works. You may just save the school from making a big investment in something they do not understand and which will not be used. Whatever happens, you'll find it very rewarding.
Dustin
Then why the FUCK are you complaining? My god, what a jackass.
Not so in every case. The first computer science course at our university is taught in Windows, but the rest afterward (except for special cases, like when AutoCAD is being used), everything else is Linux, including the distributed computing lab. New students are even given a printout of several pages on basic commands, usage of Emacs and VI, a number of other important things.
U-N-I-V-E-R-S-I-T-Y. This guy is talking community college like I was. CS courses in CCs are going to be much more focused on what people are going to see after leaving school rather than focusing on true CS theories or some such. Universities teaching CS theory can easily make Unix centric courses because they are supposed to be spittingo ut people with BS degrees rather than merely spitting out people with some sort of application certification. There's a big difference between a BS in computer science and getting an MCSE or CNA.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
I teach in the MBA program at DeSales University in Allentown, Pennsylvania. I teach the introductory concentration course for E-Commerce majors in the program--I'm a software developer by trade, and I'm an adjunct lecturer.
"Adjunct" is an adjective derived from the Latin word for "doesn't rate a faculty parking sticker"--and in a lot of institutions the adjuncts are regarded as lower than dirt. Our program is a bit different: practically all of the MBA faculty are adjuncts--we're (mostly) teaching at night what we do during the day. The balding guy teaching FN503--Financial Accounting for Decision Makers? He's the Director of Corporate Financial Services for the largest corporation in the area. The guy teaching the E-Business Models class? He's the CEO of a venture capital group in suburban Philadelphia. The nut job standing on the chair shouting at his EC506 class about the importance of XML and distributed processing as a means to eliminate friction in business? (Uh...that would be me.)
We're not here for the money
The money is essentially a joke. I get a few bucks each month--most of my check I simply have withheld to pay my quarterly estimated tax payments (I'm self-employed). Sure--there are a couple of benefits: the biggest being faculty discounts on everything from software to my subscription to the Wall St. Journal. But the reason I teach for 3-1/2 hours every Wednesday night is because it is a lot of fun to preach technology to a group of business managers over the course of a term. There is a kind of jazz that comes when a sales manager takes ownership of a particular area: for example, a young woman who is just starting graduate school with a background in Finance. She works for a consumer products company, she's advancing rapidly in the corporation, and she fits much of the "tall, good looking, with really good hair" stereotype of the MBA. (Well--she's short. But she's pretty, and she has terrific hair.)
She had to write a paper on DNS that was due three weeks ago, and defend her paper in online discussion with the rest of the class. She's just turned in a paper on VOIP--how it works, who the players are, and the prospects for the technology--night before last. She nailed both subjects--drilled them. Zippo tech background when she walked into my classroom, and now she's scaring the daylights out of her employer's IT staff because she understands how DNS works. Sure--I'll take the bucks, I'll appreciate the U. paying most of my taxes, and I'll cheerfully come to the faculty dinners. But seeing the lightbulb come on over Barb's head is why I teach.
What makes our program work
In two words, "Mohamed Latib." He's the dean of the program, and all of the faculty regard him as a personal friend. We're all deeply enthusiastic about the guy--and we have all bought his vision of what an MBA program ought to be. He's fully aware that the stipend is chump change to each of us--and he constantly demonstrates his appreciation for what we bring to the program. He works, hard, for our personal loyalty. That's a lot different from the typical teacher's situation. (Quick quiz: does your community college president know any professor's preference in beer? Has he ever called a new faculty member to ask if he or she has a preference for a particular brand of Scotch, in order to be sure its on the bar at the cocktail reception?) He describes the MBA faculty as a family, and he means it. He works at cultivating personal and business relationships among us.
The key to Mohamed's success is that he's interested in finding people who have something to say--experts in their fields who want to talk about what they do. Yup--there's a textbook. But for each of us, there is a wealth of practical experience that we bring to the class.
Find the enthusiasts, and hire 'em
Imitate Mohamed's success: don't look for academics who understand technology. They're all trying to get jobs at better-paying (or more prestigious) schools. Look for geeks who can teach. Find the consultant, find the reseller, find the IT guy at a local corporation. Find somebody who can express enthusiasm about the subject--find somebody who does programming for a living, who understands why source code control matters, who understands why documentation is important. Offer the guy an adjunct role, pay him a couple of bucks, and show him that he's appreciated. Give him a soapbox to stand on, and let him rant away--he may well be the best teacher your students ever have.
Relevant points:
Or perhaps that's the only place where it does.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
I seen one the other day, am I halucinating? or has /. totally sold out now?
I'm not talking a banner ad, but a big-ass box right under the story, but before the comments...
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
I think it's great to see someone willing to stand-up and support market place diversity. If you saw someone shoot themselves in the street you'd probably think they were pretty foolish in giving up their right to live. Yet as consumers we're actively pursuing an assault on our right to product choice everyday. Not only do we have people excusing their support of inferior products (M$ Windows) or services with weak excuses such as, "they're more compatible." But then we have dim-witted individuals like Traxton actually criticising those who try to support diversity and competition in the market place. Yeh I use M$ products (Office X and IE 5.1) - I weighed up the competition and they were the best for me, but that doesn't mean I'd berate those who don't use M$ stuff, in fact I praise them for allowing the survival of a competitive market place. I don't want to live in a world where McDonald's, Microsoft and Nike ruthlessly dominate. That's why I limit my support of all of those companies. Remember "absolute power corrupts absolutely." As for the "pretty rare" comment, my Uni has a pretty good split of Linux, Macs and Windows machines and I don't use Windows (why would I want to use an inferior OS that makes computing a torturous experience?). Finally, don't underestimate the virtues of having a broad-based understanding, let's face it Microsoft's doing pretty well at the moment, so well I reckon it'd be far easier to fall from that position than climb.
John Nash (if the movie was right).
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman
and while I do use Windows and MS Office most of the time (MS Works at home)
;-)
No, it doesn't.
Or perhaps that's the only place where it does.
Could you pleasy forward ca copy of your particular working instalation to billg@micrsoft.com, perhaps they can diff it to an "official" binary and find out whats going on
As an ECE faculty member, I can offer some observations of my own about the topics of faculty hiring and retention.
To begin with, faculty hiring in electrical and computer engineering is -damned- difficult right now, and won't be getting better anytime soon. Ten years ago you could advertise a faculty position and get hundreds of resumes, with at least half a dozen outstanding candidates in the pile. Nowadays you're lucky to get a dozen resumes, and typically most of them are a complete joke. Most ECE departments have had open positions for -years-, with little prospect for filling them.
The tech sector boom of the 90's, coupled with stagnant faculty salaries and declining budgets, has been the direct cause. Many CS and CE departments suffered enormous attrition during the dot-com boom. Unfortunately, the current recession did almost nothing to improve the situation, since (a) the really bright, good people have remained employed rather than return to university positions, and (b) the CS and CE departments are no longer cranking out Ph.D. candidates in significant numbers. Graduate enrollment by U.S. citizens in Ph.D. programs has simply collapsed. You can barely get domestic students to hang around for an M.S. nowdays, much less a doctorate. Industry money is just too good, even now.
So how do universities fill in the gaps? Adjunct positions are one way, but take my word for it - an adjunct professor is the lowest of the low at most schools. Rotten pay, long hours, and the best you can hope for is that you're left alone by the tenure-track faculty.
However (and this is the part many people do not realize), adjunct and part-time teaching help is politically and economically undesirable at most schools. Parents do not want to hear that their kids are being taught by part-time hired help. Furthermore, schools want full-time faculty who can pursue research grants and bring in the big government bucks. Adjunt professors are a necessary evil, but one we'd rather not have to deal with.
So what's the future of CS, EE, and CE faculties? IMHO, I think faculty hiring is going to go the way of graduate student enrollments over the next ten years. Nowadays the majority of graduate students in our department are international students. This is the norm even at the top universities in the U.S. My guess is that eventually U.S. schools will have to recruit most tenure-track faculty overseas, and sponsor their visas just as companies do. Granted, this is politically even more undesirable than hiring adjuncts, but you're not going to find qualified full-time professors who are able to pursue research funds otherwise.
Think about it. A community college decides to start teaching computer or networking classes/programs. So which software do we want to start with? Microsoft. That's a no brainer. But where do we go from there?
Start teaching Novel? Cisco? Unix? C?
At my school the program is very well organized. It has been around for awhile and many other schools try to replicate our program.
Here is a list of what the students do in our program:
Cisco NetAcademy (Net Basics, Routers, Switches, LANs & WANs) A+ Novell Netware 5.0 Windows NT/2000 Pro/Server (+ active directory) C and Visual Basic (C++ is an option) Fiber optics Network Security Documentation and this year we've added the new Cisco UNIX course. (Solaris)
After graduation most students get jobs, others get certifications.
Our main objective is to make a very well-round Network Technician\administrator. We hope to get more UNIX training in as well.
Iowa Central Community College: CNT
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
"I was just curious to know if people who really are very tech-savvy desire to be teachers at all."
The answer is yes, although in most circumstances the most tech-savvy that are teaching are going to be involved in technical training. From my expierences in the workforce, this includes teaching at a vocational college, and teaching for a company, normally the requirements and freedoms very wildly between what looks like the same idea in adult education.
For example, if you are a technical trainer, you probably have very flexable hours, you deal with a group of stundents for one or two weeks max. Any personality conflicts will be at a minimum between you and your students because all parties are expected to act professionally.
When you are teaching in a college environment you have eight weeks to teach your course, this includes thinking of lectures, labs, homework, and tests for each course you are involved with. College instructors also see thier students for eight weeks out of the year and are looked at as a mentor by those students. This makes it really hard at times to be objective since you know that what grade they recieve in class could hurt thier future, or it causes stress because you see a student that needs help, and the student doesn't take it. At times, college instructors have to use lesson plans and matierials that are unsutible for the course due to buisness practice reasons or budget. Most college instructors are also at the mercy of the college IT department, who most of the time, do not know or want to know the requirements of the course so as a result, you have the instructor and the IT department clashing since the instructor does not have the resources he needs to teach the course.
I guess what it boils down to from what I have expierenced, is that most of the people who are technically gifted and gifted in teaching will move to corporate training positions. Why? The answer is simple, better pay, better working conditions, less stress, a support system to help the instructor with time/matierials, and you can still teach.
Do I miss teaching at a vocational college? Yes. However, when you are teaching new technologies to your peers rather than kids out of high school,the rewards are still there.