US Dept. of Ed: English, History, and Civics Teachers Good Enough For CS Class

theodp writes: In A New Chapter for Computer Science Education, the U.S. Department of Education explained earlier this month that the federal STEM Education Act of 2015 'provides an unprecedented opportunity to fully leverage federal resources' to address large gaps in students' participation in Advanced Placement (AP) computer science classes based on gender and race. "In three states," lamented the DOE, "not a single female student took the AP computer science exam" (that only 8 boys took the AP CS exam in those same 3 states was apparently not a concern). And the DOE has good news for those hoping to tap Title I and II funds for CS, but don't have any computer science teachers. "A background in math or science isn't necessarily a requirement to teach CS," explains the Dept. of Ed, "as disciplines like English, history and civics can also provide a solid foundation for teaching CS concepts."

Comments

Duh

[Anonymous Coward]

And people wonder why so many jobs are outsourced?

Re: Duh

[Archangel Michael]

The US has decided teachers are overpaid unionized swine, and have created a new paradigm of minimum wage private corporate schools to pauperize them

I work in education. The "US" hasn't decided anything. Schools hiring teachers are limited to paying UNION wages for far too many subpar teachers, who whine and complain about having to take continuing education without being paid a stipend. The biggest problem IMHO to the problem with Teachers is that there is NO competition for good teachers. Teachers live where they can get a job, and there is very little (if any) incentive to have teachers improve their skill sets.

And due to the complete lack of competition, and the inability for any district to hire "the best, at whatever cost" they are left wanting bodies to fill positions.

And to be very clear, every school district has some really fine and outstanding teachers, most good teachers. What I am talking about are the hanger ons that would otherwise be unemployable without a teacher's credential, who are there to fill seats in chairs in front of students. The problem is, you cannot dodge all the raindrops, and there are enough of them to matter.

And to my point about teachers who won't take basic skills classes (where they need them) to learn how to properly use Technology in the classroom, without getting paid stipend, it really does matter. I simply look at it this way, teachers who don't want to learn, for learning sake aren't good teachers. Period. And this is proven by a recent training a colleague of mine did, training 2nd Grade kids, and Teachers/staff the exact same "introduction to Chromebooks", and the 2nd Graders fared much better than the adults. They paid attention, didn't talk, and learned how to log in (barely able to write) to Google/Chrome with much more ease. So even being paid to learn 2nd Graders were able to out compete the teachers.

When teachers don't want to (or can't) learn, it is a sign they shouldn't be teaching. Best teachers I know, all of them have a singular quality, thirst for knowledge and a passion for learning. Far too many teachers basically said "I don't want to learn anymore, I'm done" and that translates directly into the passion they have in the classroom.

Wh3r3f0r3 @r7 7h0u R0m30!

[Chas]

I honestly despair for the future of the US.

We basically are now getting education by idiots for idiots.

Re:Wh3r3f0r3 @r7 7h0u R0m30!

[thegarbz]

Not just the USA. My partner is Australia is a Science teacher. She has a Bachelor of Science and a Diploma in education, but is criticised by idiots for not instead having a Bachelor of Education without any formal training in the subjects she's supposed to teach.

That is becoming the norm. Idiots who "know how to teach" but don't actually "know what they teach".

Re:Wh3r3f0r3 @r7 7h0u R0m30!

[DarkTempes]

It seems really odd to me that a culture which considers college degrees as superfluous and promotes experience and self-teaching would deride someone teaching pre-college programming because of their non-STEM background.

A good educator knows how to educate themselves as well as students. You can have a brilliant computer programmer and they can be the shittiest teacher in the world.

The best programming instructor I ever had pre-college was, I believe, originally a band teacher. He ended up teaching AP CS for at least a couple of decades and when I had him we had a lot of fun going to college hosted programming competitions and doing USACO challenges online.

One of my first programming "teachers" in middle school didn't know anything about programming (this was Pascal.) It was her first year and she had no experience but she had the coursework and managed to use the brightest students to teach the rest of the class.
Yes, she was terrible.
Yes, we didn't build good habits.
But it was still better than nothing as it exposed a lot of students to programming concepts and enabled them to start doing things themselves.

A summer class I took in middle school at a local university was taught by a hobbyist programmer who, I believe, mostly taught arts and crafts classes.
She was great and proficient. We had a ton of fun learning QBasic and the final project was to create a tiny video game.
I ended up staying after class to finish a simple space invaders clone because the class was so fun.
(As an aside: one could hate on Basic and GOTO here and yet I found it interesting that the guy who always won programming competitions used Basic while the rest of us mostly used C/C++)

So, anyone motivated can learn basic concepts and data structures like loops and arrays and recursion and teach them to others.

From what I read in the article they were basically saying you can use federal funds to educate non-traditional STEM teachers in CS so that they can teach students.

In that context I think a civics teacher can be fit for teaching CS, as long the civics teacher is motivated and uses the funds to become certified in CS in some form.
It's not like the AP CS curriculum is rocket science. The math requirement for students is fairly low iirc.

And DICE just wants us angry at the headline so that we'll give them more eyeballs on ads that we don't actually see. Or something.

The DoE is, and has always been useless.

[jcr]

They have no students. They operate no schools. They piss away billions of dollars and damage education by imposing bullshit federal regulations on local schools.

-jcr

Unconvinced...

[RogueyWon]

Back in the mid 1990s, my (otherwise extremely good) private school found itself caught off-guard by the need to provide IT teaching. With no existing staff with computer science experience, it went about trying to rectify the situation in fairly horrible ways. First, it recruited what it thought was an IT specialist from industry, only to find he was a chemical engineer with no more than a basic level of computing literacy (and no teaching qualifications). He lasted a year.

Then it decided to use non-specialists to teach IT classes, having basically bought a bunch of mail-order courses. I'll emphasise that this was a private fee-paying school with high academic standards that would never have considered this approach for any other subject.

Anyway, the level of teaching was predictably disastrous. The teachers drafted in to cover the subject (including a number of elderly Catholic Priests) lacked any kind of background in it. Not only couldn't they teach the subject, but they couldn't convey why they were even trying to teach the subject. They would spend each lesson reading from one of those mail-order worksheets, with no idea how to either advise a pupil who was having problems, or how to recover the lesson if something went wrong.

The fact that the school's computer lab functioned at all was basically down to the volunteer efforts of a few of the more IT literate students (self-included), who would fix things after the latest balls-up and be called on during free-periods to get an IT lesson back on track after a teacher encountered an error message he hadn't seen before. I didn't particularly mind at the time; I wasn't taking any qualifications in IT, so the quality of the teaching didn't matter to me and helping out earned me a few perks. In particular, it got me out of the compulsory (but non-academic) religious education classes from ages 16-18.

But for those who were actually taking the subject formally (admittedly only a tiny handful in my year-group) it was a pretty catastrophic situation. In any other subject (including the practical ones such as design and technology), my school expected its teachers to be in command of their area. IT was just seen as being different somehow.

Re:Good.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hex is not math/science. It's just computer literacy.

There's no such thing as "business-focused math". It's just dumbed-down crap. The math is what makes CS exist and interesting.

Re:Scale back Department of Education ...

[PopeRatzo]

And stuff like this is why many think the Department of Education should be eliminated or severely scaled back. Perhaps set national standards but not get into the day-to-day operations of a school.

There may be good reasons for keeping control over schools away from local authorities:

https://boingboing.net/2015/12...