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Comment by jjice | Hacker News Reader

Anecdotal, but I had an intro to programming class in high school and the teacher was a wonderful woman, but not a programmer. She didn't know that this was a function declaration or its meaning, so she would just have us repeat out loud "public static void main string box args". I get a laugh whenever I think of that. I hope she's doing well.

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I had an Excel class 20-25 years ago where a teacher explained click and double click every class, and emphasising "DOUBLE CLICK" out loud every time she did the action... There were a few facepalms.

The next class was assembly programming, where the teacher didn't bother to show for 4 months and then resumed the class as if we "self-taught up until this point". We were utterly lost in that one.

I imagine things have changed greatly today but back then it was a complete roller coaster.

In elementary school we had a "class" with the "computer teacher" once a week. He was just one of the only adults on the school district payroll who knew how to turn on and off an Apple //e. Nice guy (he also volunteered at the same community theatre I did), but "computer class" was just letting us loose with copies of Fraction Munchers and helping us if we jammed the disk drive or whatever.

I remember being 10 and going to a computer lab full of power macintoshes and playing sim city 2000, kid pix, and Carmen San Diego. This was in between looking at a cd encyclopedia (encarta?), old computers were awesome ;)

Wow, you reminded me of two experiences at once.

I wasn't good at getting educated, but I ended up at a community college to "get my generals" - my first class of the day was computer something or other, and the class was led by a man in extremely thick glasses who said that our general approach in the course was going to be:

  * perform actions with the computer
  * take a screenshot
  * paste the screenshot into mspaint
  * print out the screenshot as proof that we had completed the thing
  * put that in a folder
  * he would review the folder for completion

(for anyone paying attention, anyone could just print out multiple copies)

While it was a significantly younger and less experienced me who quit this bullshit in an absolute huff, I don't know if I could go through it today.

Fast forward a few years later, and I was training folks on tech support(a random reversal) and I had a lady who should have taken his class... every time I told them to click on something she asked "is that right click or a left click?" and each time I would respond "its a left click unless I tell you otherwise" (she didn't last long.)

A lot of Java professors did that in the past, because the "not hello world" parts of "hello world" require a bit more understanding, and in the spirit of getting people started, the idea is to just say "hey memorize this boilerplate stuff, eventually you'll understand what it means."

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