The problem is that the teachers (and the students by extension) don't know that they are learning helpessly outdated things. Nothing would be lost if they were instead learning today's coding styles & paradigms and they could be actually much more creative by using modern practices where the compiler can infer a lot instead of trying to fight with older compilers and doing that: https://github.com/vibhoothiiaanand/CNotepad/blob/dlevel/CNo...
How many security issues will be caused because that student hasn't been taught about global variable issues, std::string, etc... ? I'm not hopeful.
If you want to be "creative", you can do the same thing than this: https://github.com/vibhoothiiaanand/CNotepad/blob/dlevel/CNo... but in much prettier, portable, useful and much less lines of code with e.g. OpenFrameworks: https://openframeworks.cc/ofBook/chapters/lines.html - and at least the tutorial gives you an idea of non-one-letter variable names.
Dear student: please send that to your teachers please : https://github.com/jcelerier/cpp-teaching-manifesto