# re: Weed them out or teach better @ Thursday, December 29, 2005 4:10 PM

I can say that I saw this first hand in college and it was very depressing. In one of my senior courses we had a teacher who would show up, read off the power point slides and leave. He cared so much for our education (feel the sarcasm) that he made all the tests/quizzes open book and open notes (which he provided for us). This course was Operating Systems, which while it was nice to have a course I didn't have to worry about, it was also a class I felt had alot of potential to be great. This was a feeling spread across the department, because the university wanted more phd level teachers, but they didn't want to teach, just do research, leaving the students behind and wanting more.

So you are definitely not cynical, some of the best programmers I met in college couldn't hack it in their first couple of courses because of the way they were taught, but given a good teacher and time to learn it in a way that made sense to them they excelled.

jalt1

# re: Weed them out or teach better @ Thursday, December 29, 2005 7:17 PM

"Weed out" courses are a good idea, but only if they are taught by good teachers. The problem is, way too many 100 level courses are taught by instructors who don't want to teach them. It's a fact that we need to produce better CS students, but it will take a combination of good, dedicated teachers and motivated, smart students to accomplish that goal. It also might help if we stop killing off the education budget in this country!

Ogman

# re: Weed them out or teach better @ Thursday, December 29, 2005 8:53 PM

James (jalt1), you stirred up some ancient memories with your description of less-than-effective professors. I can still recall (twenty-some years later) both the great and the not-so-great teachers I had. The great ones did a fantastic job of getting the material across; the not-so-great ones performed as you described. Yet I don't think the less effective ones were so much concentrating on research as just not that good.

Mr_I

# re: Weed them out or teach better @ Friday, December 30, 2005 8:04 AM

Having bad teachers early in college life cuts students off at the knees. They're turned off from programming forever and computer science loses yet another promising mind. So yes, we should try very hard to teach very, very well.

Didith

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