Slashdot Mirror
UK Computing Teachers Concerned That Pupils Know More Than Them
mikejuk (1801200) writes A survey of UK schools carried out by Microsoft and Computing at School reveals some worrying statistics that are probably more widely applicable. The survey revealed that (68%) of primary and secondary teachers are concerned that their pupils have a better understanding of computing than they do. Moreover, the pupils reinforced this finding with 47% claiming that their teachers need more training. Again to push the point home, 41% of pupils admitted to regularly helping their teachers with technology. This isn't all due to the teachers being new at the task — 76% had taught computing before the new curriculum was introduced. It seems that switching from an approach that emphasised computer literacy to one that actually wants students to do more difficult things is the reason for the problem.
I'm pretty sure I knew math, science and sometimes English better than my teachers through high school. Experienced teachers know how to deal with students like us - how would this be any different?
Even back in the 80s, I had a teacher fail me on a programming assignment because I was using things she hadn't taught yet. This isn't a 'new' problem. It's difficult for teachers to stay on top of the required curriculum and still have time to be continually training.
Solving Unix problems since 1989...
Technology funding in school districts (in my area these are tax levies) is already insanely high; mostly because we're pushing for tablet devices in schools driven, behind the scenes, by extremely lucrative vendor deals.
Without adequate training, the related curricula are severely limited and thus the added benefits when compared to related cost are low, if at all positive.
Now, this research, as well as the districts, are rightly saying the teachers need more training in order to leverage the technology effectively; however, what really needs to be understood is just how much training is really necessary and whether the tech gap between teachers and their students can really be mitigated.
It is my unfounded opinion that it will never be mitigated enough as teachers are not usually well enough equipped at their own subject matter, let alone keeping up with the taxing knowledge demands of technology.
What we need to do is take a step back and ensure that these additional tax investments in technology are actually doing anything to further student development and because they aren't, think about what we can do to actually concentrate on doing that instead of buying the new and shiny and letting it, effectively, collect dust in the corner while levy after levy is passed to support it.
It's one thing for a teacher, like my computer science teacher in high school, to be expected to understand computer SCIENCE. It's another to expect them to know a bunch of software packages. That's one of the big problems with computer education in schools; the idiots putting together the curriculum don't understand the difference between conceptual learning and facility with using systems.
If the kids already know enough of the subject matter, that's a good indication that the class can be dropped, and replaced with something that they don't know much about.
Is that standard knowing what the mouse buttons do? Because I wouldn't call that literacy. That is about as much literacy as knowing what vowels are is english literacy.
Raise the bar.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Everyone talks about how today's young people are computer geniuses, but I'm a college physics professor, and I can tell you that kids coming up from high school are as clueless about tech as their grandparents. They just know how to Twitter and Instagram, but they have no idea how computers or the Internet work.
This isn't new, of course, nobody understands the technology their world is based on. My father and grandfather lived in an era where most people knew how a car worked and how to fix it, but in my generation that's a mystery. I understand how computers work and how to fix them, but the next generation treats them as black boxes. And so on.
I was misdiagnosed as a mentally retarded in the first grade due to an undiagnosed hearing problem in one ear. My teachers were routinely surprised when I blew out the annual evaluation exam on the genius side, calling it a stastical fluke. Nothing was more prized in the special ed classes than a well-behaved idiot who brings in 3X funding.
Last time I was in school, I had a better grasp of "modern technology" than most of my professors. This was in a computer science program. It's not a problem, because my CS professors didn't need to teach me how to use Facebook or make a slideshow shiny enough to woo investors. They still understood algorithms better than I did, and that was the knowledge they were passing on.
In today's shocking news story, we find that older people are familiar with an older generation of tools. For most "primary and secondary teachers", their job is to teach the basic skills and concepts that are elemental for the more advanced intellectual tasks encountered in a professional career. Sure, technology can assist in that endeavor, but it's not the whole solution. Teachers only need enough technology knowledge to use the technology needed for their classes. Anything more is gratuitous.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Teachers already work 70 hours a week during the school year with a Salary that is hard to get by on. I agree they should keep up on tech but lets be realistic. Anyone who can learn tech is not going to be okay with working 70 hours a week for nothing.
And as this survey states: kids know tech, we do not need to teach them it. We need to teach them the real stuff like math, history, science, literacy, problem solving, taxes, balancing your finances, wood craft, music, engineering and the other things we are all too quickly pushing aside.
I don't know where you live, but the teachers that I know personally, here in Florida, have to take workshops & continuing education courses for the majority of their summer.
There is a war going on for your mind.
You might get by when you're teaching English, it ain't like Shakespeare will write anything new
There are new writers all the time - even in english. Some of them get nobel prizes and such - surely a few of them are good enough to get into the curriculum. A slower process than in CS, but a lot has happened since Shakespeare. Tolkien springs to mind . . .
My teacher regularly hated me for going above and beyond tasks set in the class. (not even praised, HATED)
It's not like I never carried out the task given to me, I did it, but equally I also did it better/other ways.
You'd think a teacher would be like, "oh Kris, that is marvellous, keep it up!", none of that from my computing teacher. (the guy even lied to me in the last year about a mandatory part of the course by saying it was optional, he was lucky I got in to my course or else I would have ruined him)
Then the student teacher came in to teach beside him for a while, now HE was good, he actually made that class fun again.
Not only that, with his help, our class help set up some after-school computing study classes, which spread over to Maths and Admin, up to languages, up further still to social studies and art (which usually only had a few odd people staying behind to do extra work, but this increased to like half the class staying in)
It was a major success in all the classes. Everyone helping each other. Grades went up sharply within the space of a year.
Few years after I left school, it was knocked down.
The major issue is older teachers are stuck in their ways and they like to think that their ways are what is best, and they aren't, not even slightly.
In fact, even more these days in the UK, US and many others, the education systems are pretty god damn shit to be perfectly honest with you.
They waste time, they assume all people are stupid, which is the exact opposite, children are KNOWLEDGE sponges, it is how we learn so quickly at a young age yet TAKE an age to learn things as we get older, our brains have a stupidly higher number of connections between neurons that get pruned as we age. This isn't exactly new science, this has been well-known for decades.
The ones that are having problems just need a little extra help, not be damned and punished, that doesn't help anyone.
My old school and a few other random schools around the country trialled a method of dealing with problem children and it worked very well. Violent incidences dropped considerably.
Yet most of our education systems still do the same bullshit teaching and punishment methods that quite literally make people dumber. Sure, they might know things, might being the keyword, but knowing isn't the same as being intelligent.
Only those with the determination to ignore shitty teaching and DIY their own education are the ones that go anywhere well, the ones that go far, the ones that do the entire exercise book before they even touch it in school, the ones that had their thirst for knowledge shielded before school could beat it to within an inch of its life.
The question is, do we want a society of geniuses? Just think of the entitlement!
What really needs to change is the entire job industry to accommodate such a future. That won't happen any time soon.
But it will need to happen, as more and more automation happens, the work force will rebel, society will get more angry and depressed, and more violence will stem from this.
"Microsoft and CAS recently launched QuickStart Computing. With funding from Microsoft and the Department for Education, Computing At School produced the training toolkit for teachers" ref.
.NET Fundamentals" ref
"Software Development – MTA EXAM
Web Development Fundamentals – MTA EXAM
Working with XML, Data Objects, and WCF
C# Fundamentals: Development for Absolute
Microsoft.NET Fundamentals: MTA EXAM
Microsoft
" What is MTA,?: Microsoft Technology Associate (MTA) is an introductory Microsoft certification for individuals considering a career in technology" ref
... aged 11, 13 and 15, I can assure you that the Minecraft experiences of even the youngest of them comfortably outweigh my own 25 years of software development experience. In their heads.
That only works for the cases where the teachers are paid for that time in the summer.
Often, that is not the case, and instead they are working another job to replace the paycheck that stops coming during that period.
It's easy to blame the teachers for this, but I try not expect people to spend a quarter of the unpaid time I see teachers already spending doing class prep, let alone more.
(I'm sure that there are teachers that don't spend that time. I'm also sure that there are teachers, somewhere, that actually get paid for that time. But the ones I know personally already spend huge amounts of completely unpaid time on class prep, and often are just left out in the cold entirely during the summer unless they are teaching summer classes.)
My father and grandfather lived in an era where most people knew how a car worked and how to fix it, but in my generation that's a mystery.
I assure you that at no time in history did "most people" know how cars worked or how to fix them. Perhaps a higher percentage of the population than now but it never was "most". Not ever.
Most people have always been clueless to varying degrees about many technologies they depend on. Furthermore, while the basic principles of how cars work hasn't really changed much, there is a LOT more technology involved these days so there is much more to learn. I have owned cars where you could almost literally stand in the engine compartment with the engine still in the vehicle. You could do that because they were very simple compared to today's vehicles. Now you have to deal with a myriad of sensors, ECUs, emissions control equipment, electronics and other stuff that simply didn't even exist 40+ years ago. An engine compartment is packed very tightly now and there is a lot more to know about.
I understand how computers work and how to fix them, but the next generation treats them as black boxes.
No more than they ever did. However the same thing applies. When I was younger it was actually possible to have a fairly complete understanding of how the 8088 computer on your desk worked. The technology now is quite a bit more complex "under the hood" (so to speak) and it's a lot harder to understand more than basic principles. It can still be done but there is more to learn than there once was.
I seriously doubt these kids (or even the teachers) *understand* computers. They know how to use them, check e-mail, tweet, instragram and update facebook. That's about it.
68% of primary and secondary teachers are concerned that their pupils have a better understanding of computing than they do. Moreover, the pupils reinforced this finding with 47% claiming that their teachers need more training...
Polls are great, but just imagine what it would be like if we lived in a world where there was actually a way to measure who knows what...
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Seriously how pathetic could you possibly be as a teacher to be worse at technology THAN CHILDREN??
Why on earth would ANYONE without a masters degree in computing, be teaching kids in the first place?? I needed one just to have a freekin' job at a tire company.
I can foresee some classes in Pascal, Fortran, Cobol, or even a newer yet obscure language like Erlang. This way the teachers will feel that they are superior to the students. I program C++ every day, yet some whiz could probably write small amounts of template code that I simply could not parse in my head. But good luck finding an under 20 whiz in Powerbuilder.
The other thing I foresee are a whole lot of frustrated kids who write far better code than was asked for yet will be told that their code is "wrong" because it doesn't match what was expected. For instance a "while" loop being insisted on with a "for" loop being rejected. Especially if it is newer C++ for loop that can iterate through something like a vector.
Then just to piss everyone off I can foresee many teachers being grammar nazis. So if(x==2) would lose you marks because it wasn't if( x==2 ) which would be considered better by that teacher than if( x == 2) but still not as good as if ( x == 2 ). But the same student might as well quit the course if they thought that using the magic number 2 instead of a const or a #define was actually a problem. I suspect that following strict formatting guidelines for some teachers will be more important than having the code even compile.
That's not supposed to mean you get 20 weeks of vacation each year.
That's a myth. Teachers will often have to be working several weeks after students are no longer in the classroom, as well as return several weeks before students do. Further, depending on the school those teachers may have to find seasonal work for the summer in order to keep their income high enough to pay the bills over the summer break.
Just saying, summer vacation is not necessarily very much of a vacation for teachers.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
It really does depend on the state. Our teachers just have off, for the most part, though a few weeks before school restarted, they'd have some prep work. . My wife used to teach, my sister-in-law is a teacher.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
OH, now THAT is a good point. Teachers would harp on the useless points of grammar when called to the task.
Then stop teaching.
Seriously, I work in schools - I'm an IT Manager for independent (private) schools. The good teachers are the ones that have knowledge to impart to the kids, the other type generally do not know anything until they have to teach it and then they learn it badly and, thus, teach it badly. Can you imagine being a science or maths teacher and never having done "chemical reactions" or "simultaneous equations"? Sure, there's always an answer that even the teacher won't know but it shouldn't be something so far out of your reach that you can't a) take an educated guess on the spot and b) come back the next day with the properly researched answer.
With the best IT teachers, I can discuss electronics, computer science and mathematics at a level where neither of us need explain ourselves. They've probably done my job in the past, for the most part, too. And, very deliberately, they will refer to themselves as IT teachers or CS teachers and not ICT teacher (which involves using a computer to do word processing, not anything the kids couldn't pick up on their own in ten minutes).
The last lot of students that went through the school I'm at were building drones running on Raspberry Pi's and .NET Gadgeteer, they were cobbling together Z80 and 6502 circuits in their lunch break, and they were programming in C#, C and assembler. Some of it wasn't stuff we'd done before, but we managed to teach them new stuff all the way through, based on extensive knowledge of the subject and actually SITTING AND LEARNING the stuff they wanted to learn in advance so they could be taught effectively. And, there, it's really more of a "I've never done C# but it's a programming language that I just need to learn the quirks and syntax of and all my old knowledge then comes back into play".
If you can't do this, as an IT teacher, then you probably should go back to school yourself. This is no more insulting than suggesting that a French teacher know French, or a Maths teacher know Maths.
If you're not the one teaching, why bother to have you there?
I still knew more than my teachers even at the postgraduate university level (in certain areas).
That's just a given in a field that is also a passion for the younger generations.
And by poor learners, I mean those who can only learn, if at all, by being taught. They don't learn on their own.
You just described the typical American who believes that graduating (or dropping out) from school ends their obligation to learn anything new about life. I always cringed when I hear a software engineer bitch and moan about learning something new to do his job better. He should have become a teacher instead.
Yeah, they will be much better educated than you.
Ignorance is bliss.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/aug/30/home-schooling-outstanding-results-national-tests/
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2011/09/study-of-the-day-home-schooled-children-score-higher-on-tests/245036/
And who's going to out you as an ignorant fool if you don't teach them? You could always claim that those are flavor of the month artists while only the old tomes nobody can read anymore are the classics of literature and nobody could dare to stand up against you because, well, they ARE the classics.
No such luck with IT. Yes, Cobol might be a classic programming language but you better teach my kid something he can actually USE!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I remember in high school history class, we were assigned a project to draw a map of the middle east (this was '84-'85 or so), and label all the major cities. I had an Apple II at home and spent days drawing the map in a rudimentary drawing program, and entering the text to label the cities. I printed it out, and the instructor would not accept it, because he thought computers were way more connected than they really were at the time, and had thought that I had simply downloaded the map from some other source. I was made to re-draw the map by hand for a grade.
"Sucks to be your kid."
He said that he and his wife HOMESCHOOLED their child.
We should all be so fortunate!
Political correctness is really just herd psychology pushed by insecure people who desperately seek social conformity.
For me, it happened in 1968. I had just started a 3 year curriculum for computers. Started out with FORTRAN 44 on a teletype connected to an IBM 360. Within a month all of us (students) had outpaced the teacher's knowledge. From there it was a matter of reading the manuals we could get our hands on and as much lab time as we could fit in.
I thought they were supposed to use that time to work on the land and bring in the harvest.
Let me be frank.
When I was a kid, teachers used grade books. I saw my teacher record grades. It took him a few minutes.
Today my wife is a teacher and it takes a lot longer. Technology is not a solution. It is often a waste of time. I write down shopping lists because it is simple and fast. No one needs a smartphone to do this. If they are, it is slower.
I can not stand how everyone thinks computers always make life better. I'm a software engineer and will be the first to admit that many times, the products do not improve quality of life. But people using them are so happy with the shiny apps that they fail to realize that they often suck.
In the area I live, we have something referred to as "tenure" for unionized public elementary and high school teachers.
What this roughly means is that once a teacher is past their probationary period (something around two years I think), they can only be let go for gross misconduct (like showing up drunk too often and swearing at their students in a drunken slur) and only after a lengthy and costly hearing process (during which they collect their pay but are assigned duties that don't put them in contact with students or simply do not come to work).
During probation, they can be fired for incompetence, but once they make tenure that's extremely difficult.
Teachers can still be laid off if staffing needs decline - but then seniority rules. The most recently hired is the first laid off. I think this is within classification - if a decline in students results in the need for one less Science teacher, I think the least senior Science teacher goes even though there is a less senior Art teacher at the same school/district.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
I'd hardly call fingerpainting on an iDevice advanced knowledge. That's the problem with studies like this. They boil down to subjective opinions.
Most kids are pretty decent at operating technology. In years past, kids who were good at that usually understood it too. Unfortunately, we've regressed to where understanding is not required (hence, iDevices).
So someone can say someone else is good at computers and be totally utterly wrong.
there are many English teachers (at all levels, even collegiate) that cannot do even basic sentence diagraming, or know that "he or she" is not grammatically correct when trying to be "gender neutral" which should use the neutral gender (it for singular or they for plural).
"He or she" is animate gender; "it" is inanimate gender.
Very few people know subnetting inside and out unless they're an old school network admin and have been dealing with it for decades.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
There are new writers all the time - even in english.
But none of these new writers' works will enter the public domain where teachers and curriculum-setters are safe from publishers breathing down their necks as to the form and manner of teaching those works. A fair use defense works only if your school district can afford to defend a trial. So instead, the curriculum continues to emphasize works first published in 1922 or earlier.
Is it possible for someone to be in the top and bottom half at once because of security policies on the computer at home? Consider a student who understands word processing and JavaScript programming but doesn't know how to install software because the parents have always been there to do anything that requires elevation.
The best teachers aren't afraid of students who know something they don't. Teaching teachers all the knowledge is impossible. Teaching teachers humility is possible, though seldom seen.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
On top of that, the low pay and asshole students make teaching a very thankless profession. That's why most people who have an ounce of brains do something else. If we would treat our teachers better we'd probably get a better quality of people into the profession.
And then there's people like yourself who think it's the teacher's fault their spoiled kids aren't learning anything. I'm concluding this by your third sentence where you suggest that all of the existing teachers are of low quality. Your little snowflake couldn't possibly be at fault, could he/she....must be the teachers.
it is better to recognize that different kids have different levels, and send them to different schools.
And get them to and from these "different schools" how, while the parents are away at work? A lot of districts have been cutting school bus service to save costs in the face of declining tax revenue.
The 22yr old graduate that has done nothing but play with consoles all their life
When parents prefer to buy consoles and console games instead of PC games so that their kids don't have to hog the family PC, to what extent does this discourage the kids from learning basic concepts of computing?
You're not correct there - computer science is a serious subject, but if you took one of them you'd find it remarkable devoid of "computing" - you'd have a lot of maths and statistics instead.
When I was at university statistical job analysis, algorithms and mathematical modelling were the kind of modules you took, which at the time I thought was pointless, but when you start sizing networks you realise what its all about. For the majority of computing work, its all irrelevant, but fortunately for those of us who just "work in computers", someone else has done the hard work to make the underlying stuff work properly.
My mate did electrical engineering, he did a lot more "computing" than I did.
Who said what materials?
Whoever set the curriculum while I was growing up said what materials. Plays by William Shakespeare, specifically the tragedies, were overemphasized in every year of high school except the junior year, which was devoted to American literature. And do English teachers leave out nonfiction because they delegate it to science and history teachers?
At University in the 80s, I 'blew the mind' of one of my lecturers by pointing out to him that 'modern' computers stored their 'character set' data for VDU display (terminology of the time) in those then new-fangled ROM chips. He actually disappeared for ten minutes to confirm this 'astounding' piece of news?!
A few months later, he got a top job in 'electrical engineering' at New York's 'best' university-snigger. BTW his ancient 'knowledge' dated back to when hard-wired discrete logic 'solved' problems that today we'd always use memory storage for.
Mind you, long after the invention of the microprocessor (and the fact I'd built multiple kits for myself and others based around various microprocessors while still at what you Yanks call 'high' school), every university I visited in preparation for choosing one was still in the stone age of computing, and the one I eventually went to was still using punch cards in the first year. One of the senior professors was actually concerned that using a full-screen editor on the PDP-11 terminals would 'such all the life' out of the computer, and ordinary students should keep to the line-editor (I bet few of you even know what 'line editor' means).
The other lab did have a room full of z80 business class computers running CP/M and UCSD Pascal (god, remember that?), and one Apple 2 (upgraded with the card that saved the company- the z80 CP/M thingy).
At school, we- the smarter pupils- actually introduced the FIRST ever (self-taught) computer class (with many of us getting the highest grades in the Computer Science O-level). Our otherwise skilled physics teacher (this was the best non-fee school in one of the biggest cities) thought computer memory still involved wires and magnets (so-called 'core-memory'), a technology that had been obsolete for almost two decades (even if computers using this tech would still be operational at the time).
The 'brightest and best' ALWAYS know more about various topics than their teachers at school. With Computer Science it is WORSE, because those that can (code) do, and those that can't (code) teach. At school, I remember vividly being MOCKED by a mid-level beta fellow pupil because I and others coded various types of 'clever' visual output on our clunky obsolete line-printer, and his MOMMY- a dreadful lecturer in Computer Science at the local uni- HATED the "smart alec" students that suffered under her that were already computer whizzes. Her VITRIOL was focused on those whose coding, by having a visual dimension, couldn't be dismissed by the opinions of an 'expert'.
Interestingly, at my first-rate school, the ONLY teacher I encountered with a lousy attitude toward the naturally most gifted was a FEMALE maths teacher. She actually (for the few months the school tolerated her) graded us 'on a curve' , so 10-out-of-ten in a test became 8/10 (I'm not kidding). A second-rate beta trying to pretend the alpha pupils were something less than what they really were- just like that Computer Science Mommy- what a chip on their shoulder some of these losers carry.
And teachers' unions are home to 'CHIP ON THE SHOULDER' ingrained psychology. When the UK government finally accepted that beating kids in school was a serious sexual perversion, the paedophiles at the top of the British teachers unions fought tooth-and-nail to keep the right to inflict sado-masochistic rape on pupils (Victorian porn frequently described, in vivid detail, the exact same forms of beating young people in the name of 'sexual pleasure'). As a result of union power, banning this form of abuse was delayed by TWENTY YEARS. In most Scottish schools before abolition, just as in present day US schools in the Deep South, almost every pupil (from 5 to 18) could be expected to be beaten at least several times a month, with a significant proportion beaten close to daily.
It is a sad fact that teachers in general are such worthless individuals, no-one should listen to their opinions about teaching, or the people they teach. They exist mostly for social
Not so much in NJ, teachers have it made here. My kid has a 7th grade math "teacher" who's just riding his way out, he barely teaches or talks at all. He sits with his feet on the desk and does facebook, and tells the kids to just read their textbook.
I guess by doing nothing he can claim he's "doing no harm."
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
New Jersey also has some of the highest property taxes in the nation, and a majority of those taxes are to support the schools there. The state has a separate, independent school district for every single municipality (all 550 of them), because everyone wants "home rule" and no one wants to combine their school district with the poorer sections of their county. By contrast, other east coast states farther south usually have a separate school district for every county, not every single little town, so they end up having an order of magnitude fewer districts statewide, and consequently far lower administration costs. Every one of those 550 school districts in NJ has to support administrative staff, plus a superintendent who makes $250k/year, plus extremely generous retirement pensions for everyone.
My anecdata confirms this. I've supported my wife in leaving public education (though not a teacher per se) and we've seen every one of our friends except one who got an education degree leave the field over the past 10 years.
No, I haven't been to a school in the last 10 years. Haven't been to a school in the last 20 years. But the poor performance started long before I graduated. And even when I was in school they were blaming the teachers for the poor performance of students who had no interest in learning.
This is nothing new. My son is now 29 and at school was in this situation. He isn't even a techie, he's an artie, but had computer access at home from birth. I think the only answer is to have technical professionals teaching. At school (in the 60's) I learned metalwork and woodwork, not from graduates, but from tradesmen who been taught teaching skills.
The other thing I wondered about is the different expectations. If your instructor still thinks myspace is where the cool kids hangout....
Well having grown up in the UK and been to computer lessons in school (in the 1980s) I'd say that my expectations were that the teachers knew the subject material. When it came to maths, physics, chemistry etc. the teachers I had really knew their stuff and I learnt a heck of a lot from them but with computing it was far more variable.
I almost got into real trouble in one class using BBC Micros. We were told to write a program to add two numbers together which was incredibly trivial so, having the same computer at home, I thought I'd do the assignment in a more challenging way and teach myself assembly to add the numbers using the 'Advanced User Guide' which they had at school but I'd not got at home. I ran into some problems (you had to loop the assembly code through the parser twice to compile it) and when I asked for help and she saw the code she threw a fit. I was threatened with detention for not doing the assignment etc. etc. despite my protestations and explanation.
Fortunately the senior computing teacher walked in before anything got set in stone and she got him to come over to show him how badly I'd been behaving. His response was 'leave him to me' at which point he sat down and proceeded to show me what I was missing and then set me the challenge to figure out how to add two numbers which gave an answer greater than 255 (since it was an 8-bit machine) and how to store negative numbers using 2's complement. I learnt more computing in the 10 minutes he spent with me during one of his free periods than I learnt in the entire rest of the term with the idiot we had who was supposed to be teaching us.
So this is hardly a new problem. Teachers have a duty to make sure that the know what they are teaching and, worse, if their reaction to someone who may know more than they do is anger and hostility then they really have no business at all being a teacher at all. Who cares what they think about "fashion" - that's only relevant to education when it comes to engagement and sometimes being hopelessly out of date can be more engaging than being up to date.
Sorry, it got eaten while editing
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
The only thing is that good teachers are smart enough to realize it and take what steps they can to help superior students.
It is easy to see how it got this way. Schools deal with change very poorly if they ever deal with it at all and computing is the best example. 12 years of English literature and more in college for a subject no one will pay you to know. And that could be said about 70% of the curriculum. Schools don't teach any skills that will get you a job in the real world. They teach abstract and nearly worthless material that THEY want to teach, not what YOU want to make it in the job world.
As an instructor in programming and networking I only had 2 students who knew more than me: one was an absolute genius who was admitted to MIT. The other was a network admin for a huge corporation and had been for many years. If schools taught the things that would get people jobs the teachers would simply leave for higher paying positions once they got the skills themselves.
When I was a sysadmin in school districts, my concern wasn't that the kids know more than me (in general), but rather that they had a whole lot more time on their hands to find the little things I hadn't thought of, new exploits, etc.
My former co-worker setup network drives using NFS. Since the computers were bootloader-locked and the etherboot network was MAC-restricted he thought it was good enough. He wasn't very happy when I demonstrated my point with a pink "pony" background during his demo, but he still insisted "the kids will never figure that out."
When I think of the stuff we did in HS, it sometimes still amazes me. Rudimentary knowledge, lots of time for research and experimentation. Admins and teachers alike, beware!
I smell a new "No Teacher Left Behind" government project coming.
WTB [sig], PST!!!
Computing GCSE is basically very basic python programming. MS Office centric course.was the old ICT GCSE.
Well you have just hit upon an untouchable subject: school is simply not for everyone. The government herds everyone into the system including some they just want to keep off the streets and out of jail. The schools in America could be revolutionized simply by getting rid of the worst of the worst who aren't going to learn anything anyway and many of whom will eventually drop out regardless. The parents of the worst of the worst (bottom 5%) don't care about education either, they just want them out of the house
Without having to spend 80% of its time on the gang-bangers, thugs and other assorted riff-raff that disrupt class at best and commit crimes at worst the schools could actually focus on learning. They also would not have to waste time teaching ABCs to high-schoolers.
Newsmedia talk about how our schools are ranked 38th in the world compared to other nations but fail to realize that we try to educate everyone. In many places of the globe like China if you act up too much in school they don't just expel you, they arrest you and put you in jail. Not so here.This is a simple problem to fix and could be done tomorrow, IF politicians and the public actually believed that schools should be a place for learning.
...when (leading-edge) schools were just starting to get computers. I found it to be good motivation that I was at the same level as the teachers. We were all in it together, learning this stuff for the first time.
So if(x==2) would lose you marks because it wasn't if( x==2 ) which would be considered better by that teacher than if( x == 2)
Keep those constants on the left, my friend.
Isn't 'tenure' and 'unionized' redundant?
In some cases though (x==2) is completely different than ( x==2 ) it's one of the things that frequently trips me up when writing shell scripts.
This is like assuming that all Olympic coaches have to be better than the champions that they produce.
The trick isn't knowing more than the students, but knowing how to maximise the students learning experience with appropriate suggestions and directional guidance.
Obviously there is a minimum level of skill/knowledge required, but there is a very wide scope where knowledge/experience/wisdom may not overlap between the student and teacher. It is up to the teacher to leverage this differential to push the student forward.
Problems pop up when the kids get arrogant and think they know far more than they really do. This usually leads to a disrespect between the teach/student. And for teachers that take this personally, it ends up becoming a play for power and control.
A bit more humility (either real or faked/learned) can go a long way.
In years past, kids who were good at that usually understood it too. Unfortunately, we've regressed to where understanding is not required (hence, iDevices).
I grew up when 8-bit microcomputers were popular: C=64, Apple ][, etc. Yes, kids who were good at using these things did understand them well, however those kids were a small minority. We had computer classes in school back then (~1986) teaching kids how to use Apple ][ computers; most kids were able to turn them on and load a program on disk, and type in a BASIC program, but nothing terribly advanced. Usually, the regular kids ended up asking the computer-savvy kids how to do stuff when the step-by-step instructions the teacher gave failed to work. It did NOT produce whole classes full of kids who really knew how computers worked. It didn't even produce classes full of kids with any interest in computers; they just did enough to pass the class and that was it. When they got to college many years later and were required to buy a computer, this was a big deal for them because they usually didn't already have one.
I also grew up in that era and basically with no instruction a few of us learned to write BASIC, then decided that was too slow and moved to assembly language. Not long after that we were cracking software. To say our knowledge was far beyond that of the teachers is an understatement, but you are correct in that those of us that did have that knowledge were few. Still, I went to advanced computer camp one summer and the instructor was laughably years behind my brother and I in skills.
That's a ridiculous claim, that children are required to study English literature for 12 years. They aren't.
There's no reason why English usage proficiency would preclude computer literacy. There's plenty of time to learn both.
tempus fugit
I'm not in The UK, but my teenagers tell me that the IT teachers they have seem to be one chapter ahead of them in the text book, and are not terribly confident of their subject knowledge. For instance my year 12 son, (16 years old), helped the teacher set up a DHCP server for the class lab, as he had done it before at home with me, but the teacher had never actually done it, just read about it.
That is why some teachers teach summer schools and night classes. My friend does that.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Someone has to be mature in class, and that is the role of the teachers. They have to man up and suck it up that in life there are people who are more brilliant or more specialised in ares of subjects than yourselves. Instead of worrying about that, enlist their help. It would be more productive and less stressful and boring for both sides. Lets face it, the IT field is too vague and broad as it is nowadays, and often teachers/professors are also assigned subjects they are not prepared to teach. This is a situation that is bound to happen. It also does not help that experience outside academia for more than 5 years is not mandatory for such teaching positions. I was always one step ahead on many subjects, and refused to do assignments "copying the book" (not exaggerating, you have this assignment and the solution is in this book). In one particular case, the professor could not believe that in data structures I gave a far better and simpler solution than the book provided, and at least I knew that particular assignment was not given again for some years.
The problem here is that me and my wife, we have got a job and bills to pay.
That's not supposed to mean you get 20 weeks of vacation each year.
That's a myth. Teachers will often have to be working several weeks after students are no longer in the classroom, as well as return several weeks before students do. Further, depending on the school those teachers may have to find seasonal work for the summer in order to keep their income high enough to pay the bills over the summer break.
Just saying, summer vacation is not necessarily very much of a vacation for teachers.
Several weeks ? Try one week after and one week before .. My mother was a teacher for 35 years .. She was off pretty much all summer.
I've known a few teachers that had to start 4 weeks before students did; while others that only had to 1 week before. So it varies.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
The purpose of school is not to make people able to get a job, and it shouldn't be. It is to hopefully make them into a well-rounded person with enough fundamental knowledge to pursue most other things. If they want to train to be a plumber, go get an apprenticeship. If they want to learn networking, go to a trade school, preferably not Network Academy, because it will only teach you Cisco bullshit.
Teachers know computers. Everyone of them can point out where the modem is. Yes they point to the tower/case.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
In my area teachers get paid 190 day/year (180 teaching, I think the remaining 10 5 personal development and 5 split between grading and prep before the school year). Most spend another few days doing other things, the pay is paid out over 12 months, but earned at time of service (relevant if someone quits).
even at working 200 days, that's a lot of time off (normal work person is 260 days - 10 or 20 vacation - 5 holidays for 235, the teacher gets 7 extra weeks off).
I don't was to say teachers are over or under paid (it really does vary a lot), but it is pretty much the only career that gives you so much time off
If schools limit teachers to 3 preps (they're supposed to here, but don't), and give them a planning period (again they don't really do that as much as they're supposed to here), the amount of work outside of school is fairly minimal, especially keeping in mind a 7 hour official work day (7:30-3:00 with half hour lunch).
After a few years of teaching, the amount of time spent outside class drops dramatically as one has built up worksheets, lessons, etc, to share with the class.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Probably much moreso in public employee unions, not so much in private employee unions.
Surveyed ALL teachers, not just computing teachers, this covers 24yr old NQTs for Secondary School Computing Science to 65yr old Primary visitin Home Economics teachers. It is only the primary teachers that are panicking over teaching computing as the "IT" provision they previously provided was a joke. I have a number of friends who are Primary Teachers who should not be expected to be masters of everything. I as a Secondary School CS teacher am not expected to go down to English and lecture on the importance of Character X in Play Y, so expecting a general Primary Teacher to pass on anything other than the bare essentials of computer use is absurd. If this article actually said that 68% of specialist computing teachers were concerned the pupils knew more than them I would be seriously concerned for the subject, but that is not what it said. Also from a Scottish POV, this is all an English Shit Storm, please stop using the catch all UK, up here in Scotland our curriculum was changed a few years ago, we develop our own curriculum and testing strategies. The concept of state curriculum and standardised testing in anything other than certificated courses is pretty alien here.
Argle bargel, things were sooo much better when I was a kid. Fuck off AC. No one gives a shit about your opinion.
There is a war going on for your mind.