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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.
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.
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.
The answer is probably a little more prosaic, it's that it prevents students from using the "but it compiled fine on my PC" excuse, and it means the teacher can concentrate on the language rather than the quirks of any of a dozen different tools. You will find even that the best CS schools, if it won't compile on the professor's PC/Sun/whatever it won't get you a good grade no matter if it was fine on the Linux box in your dorm, so it makes sense to pick an environment and encourage everyone to stick to it.
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
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.
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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.