Hacker News Reader

Comment by aspiringhacker | Hacker News Reader

"I think I can speak for most of my generation in saying that computer classes in high schools, colleges, and community centers are universally worthless. Courses for young people are usually taught by out-of-touch adults with a much less advanced understanding of the things they're teaching than their students. The only kind of teacher likely to be more incompetent than a computer teacher is a gym teacher. But that's not the problem."

Our computer classes were actually given by our gym teacher...

View on HN

When I was in middle school we had these awful typing classes. What I would do is copy paste lines of 0's and 1's to make a page of "binary code" then I'd print a few copies from a random printer in the room. The teacher would see it, think the printer was malfunctioning and turn it off. I'd do this throughout the class until every printer was switched off. Because printing the page of what we typed was part of the lesson once all the printers 'stopped working', the lesson was over and the only thing we could do was sit around and play Stunt Copter until the end of class.

You are my hero. We hated typing class, particularly because they had these silly keyboard blockers that forced you to touch type.

In our typing class, the teacher would give us each a floppy that stored our progress, averages, and what typing tests we were working on. I got tired of doing the tests (I was practicing typing at home on my own), and I wanted to streamline the process. So I looked on the floppy, and found that while the file with your progress and average scores was stored in some kind of program specific encoding, the files that contained the typing tests chosen by the teacher for that day were text files. So before each test, I would quickly open the file in notepad and change the text to be just the letter "j" and nothing else. The program would start timing you when you typed the first letter and stop timing when you reached the last letter, so as soon as I hit "j" it would instantly register 120 words per minute, since that was the fastest it could measure.

Needless to say, the teacher was curious as to why I started getting 120 wpm on every test, so when she asked me I figure I'd just tell her the truth, and explained how I editted the file. She thought it was funny and creative, and (after I demonstrated that I really was learning how to type anyway) just gave me an A in the class.

I actually learned the most about programming in an optional class about electronic and magnetic fields.

We simulated magnetic or/and electric fields which behave correctly and to accomplish that we actually had to write code. Only a few lines, but all the basic concepts were there.

If not for the enthusiastic physics teacher that class would have never happened. All other (non-optional) computer classes were pretty dull. The teachers were either incompetent (not much knowledge) or lousy teachers (unable to teach their knowledge).

Interesting. As a contrast in Germany the gym teachers are usually quite competent and have to pass physical exams. (The computer science teachers less so..)

My middle-school computer class was "taught" (for sufficiently small values of the term) by the typewriting teacher. Because, you know, typewriters have keyboards and so do computers.

To her credit, she did not try to hide this fact from us.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com