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.
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.
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
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.
...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.
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.
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.
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!
And don't even mention those with tenor at the universities, some of those idiots really abuse the position they're in.
They sure do. Every time I go by the music department I just can't escape that constant singing. Do they really think that people actually like opera? Even if I did, I'd much prefer a bass over a tenor any day.
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
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.
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.
Heh, chalk up one more reason for a built in spell checker for slash ;)
http://slashdot.org/~tf23/journal
I almost participated in that some years ago but didn't because they only taught Scheme whereas I was coding pretty hard core at the time in C. Scheme didn't really seem like a useful language to me and I couldn't justify spending so much time (especially in a course tailored to non-programmers) to learn a language that a) I could learn on my own b) didn't seem really useful.
In retrospect, I wish I would have taken as I didn't understand at the time how important connections are but perhaps if you have any say in the program you may consider adjusting the program to suit the desires of those who truely want to learn. Understand that my choice was spending a few weeks writing scheme or spending a few weeks writing C. Being the geek that I am, I choose C.
I do know someone who took the course and they still couldn't code their way out of a paper bag so I definitely felt vindicated.
int func(int a);
func((b += 3, b));
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));
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.
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
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.
Or perhaps that's the only place where it does.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
That doesn't seem like much, given that I'm assuming LA's costofliving index is probably quite high.
The one thing I did notice - it looks like if a person's language skills are very good they have the chance to receive a lot more cash then for advanced degrees!
http://slashdot.org/~tf23/journal
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