On Friday, 31 August 2018 at 23:47:40 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
The are plenty of cases where the teachers actually do an excellent job teaching the material that the courses cover. It's just that the material is often about theoretical computer science - and this is actually stuff that can be very beneficial to becoming an excellent programmer. However, many teachers really aren't great programmers. They aren't necessarily bad programmers, but unless they spent a bunch of time in industry before teaching, odds are that they don't have all of the software engineering skills that the students are going to need once they get into the field. And most courses aren't designed to teach students the practical skills.
Imagine getting a Industrial Engineer that switched over to become a teacher, showing up to teach Visual Basic and Database normalization.
That same teacher used one of those red little VB books for his study material ( been 20+ years ago, not sure if they still exist ).
The students ended up helping each other fixing issues because the teacher was useless. It was even so bad, he took examples out of the book, little bit reformatted the questions and used that for tests. Of course one of our fellow students figure this out, he got his hands on the book and voila, every test answer.
Worst was that the teacher was so BORING, that nobody wanted to sit in the front of the class, because his database class was so bad, people literally needed to keep each other up from falling asleep. I am not joking!
You can guess that i never learned database normalization in school and ended up doing it on my own. So yea, first hand experience with bad teachers.
The guy that did C++ was way better and you actually learned from him. A bit scary guy but knew his stuff. Teachers make all the difference for children/students to learn anything.
If they are boring, burned out or just doing it to earn money, it shows in the lacking responds and score of the students. A good teacher draws in the students and helps them focus. A good teacher does not make things over complicated and does not assume that everybody understand. Seen brilliant teachers that are horrible at teaching because they are so smart ( or repeated the same material so much ), they assume everybody understands everything as they do.
Teacher make all the difference in teaching but a lot is so politicizes/internal power games, ... that good teachers tend to leave and bad ones just end up doing the job, because its a good government/public servant job with nice vacation perks ( here in the EU ).
