I agree with Ralph ... I once tutored two young women from a local community college with regards to a VB programming assignment. On reviewing their assignment I suggested an approach that was much better than that described by their teacher ... they said they had no choice but to conform ... imo, their teacher would rather mark one solution 30 times than 30 solutions once. This sacrifices creativity for conformity.
I have tutored university students who are totally lost because rather than be taught to program, they are taught to bake cakes. When they need to bake a pie, they are lost because they were never taught the general principles. Having taught community college myself, I have to admit that it takes far too much time to properly mark programming assignments when the teacher allows students the freedom to be creative. Ralph is correct that there are too few mentors to properly direct the majority of graduating students. I would add that there are too many incompetent teachers. For example, the vast majority of students in my advanced mainframe assembler course had somehow passed the prerequisite course without knowing anything about the program status register. Also, there is a great laziness that affects many teachers. In 1984 I was given a 1975 text for teaching business systems analysis. In some domains, a nine year old text might not be a problem. With computers, nine years frequently implies obsolesence. Regardless, too many people would would call themselves teachers would rather teach from out of date literature than take the considerable time necessary to prepare new, up to date material. Of course, many of the students must also share the blame. Many coast as much as they can, work as little as they can, and complain about the teaching staff when they get poor marks. gerry Oakville Ontario Canada ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
