Why do Comp Sci teachers suck?
- Thread starter AFB
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MartyMcFly3
Lifer
I dunno but my Java professor sure sucked. My roommate actually taught the stuff to me. I asked you and amdskip some questions too I recall. So :beer: for the help. That guy had no clue how to teachin a way people understood.
all the comp sci teachers I had would give half assed lectures, make students pick up the rest, and divert everything to the TA's. At my school they would rather spend their time researching and doing projects rather than lecturing.
Coz you can't teach a person how to program in a classroom... its as simple as that. Programming has to be learnt and understood yourself through experimentation and hours of coding NOT by listening to a lecture on how to program.
Unfortunately, you need a degree to gain some footing in the job market... especially in todays market.
A degree, especially in Computer science, says close to nothing about your capability to program or understand computer science.
Computer Science is a comparitively young degree program and universities, IMO, haven't found an effective method of teaching it yet
Because they teach you the techniques on how to code well and smartly. Like take recursion for example. Many developers don't know it. And if they did know it, how many know to use it efficently (like tail recursion)? That's what the classes are there for.
BS... you don't need to goto college to learn about recursion. I knew about recursion long before I even heard of it in a class room. And you absolutely cannot learn how to code smartly by reading books or listening to leactures.. you learn how to code smartly by coding yourself... through trial and error. There is never a set way of approaching a problem, you have to improvise and come up with the best method yourself... that comes through experience not through class room lectures.
Again, theory is best learnt and best understood through self learning and experimentation. Heck, I know a lot of people who've gotten As in programming classes yet they don't understand the concept behind a linked list. All they can do is regurgitate(sp?) what they read in the text book... but pose them with a problem that could use a link list or ask them to develop a program that used a linked list in a manner that wasn't described in the textbook, they could never do it.
The best CS professors I've had are the ones that said very little and used most of the time to let us experiment with the code during class, and answer any trouble we came across.
mugs
Lifer
- Apr 29, 2003
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And you think those people could handle learning it on their own?
If they can't under a simple concept like a linked list, they probably have no business being a computer science major... the fact that they got an A is a reflection of the quality of the comp sci program they're in. Some teach you, some take your money and give you grades.
I will agree that I did the majority of my actual learning outside of class, but the classroom instruction put me on the right track.
I don't think they suck. Most of the great things about computer science has come from university professors - IP anyone?
People think they suck because they go on and on trying desparately to drill this stuff into your head. But being such a uber-smart late teen/early 20 something person younguns think the profs must be stupid. Therefore the college kid must know everything, especially because he's on the intarweb and knows how to write uber-cool web pages and can make a killer counter strike map.
I respected my comp sci teachers, what they taught me was how to learn.
Any monkey can write a program. Not all monkeys can use a computer to solve a scientic problem/question. In fact the monkeys that write the "most complex" code are the monkeys who never "learnt" anything because they know no better.
People think they suck because they go on and on trying desparately to drill this stuff into your head. But being such a uber-smart late teen/early 20 something person younguns think the profs must be stupid. Therefore the college kid must know everything, especially because he's on the intarweb and knows how to write uber-cool web pages and can make a killer counter strike map.
I respected my comp sci teachers, what they taught me was how to learn.
Any monkey can write a program. Not all monkeys can use a computer to solve a scientic problem/question. In fact the monkeys that write the "most complex" code are the monkeys who never "learnt" anything because they know no better.
Wow, you have no idea what lectures and books really are. They are other people's recorded experiences, other people's trial and errors, all so you don't have to commit the same mistakes they did. And none of the books I've ever read ever dictate a set way to solving a problem; it's always what people usually do or the best way to solve that problem. Of course, just reading and going to lectures aren't enough, that's why you must practice what you've learned, ie assignments and projects.
Exactly. No matter how good of a coder you are, you will never make more than your supervisor who knows only basic coding but instead knows how to design programs.
Absolutely... if they really wanted to or really tried or even if the universities put more of a focus on actually learning instead of 'getting As'. The majority of the students are in the class to get good grades and pass, not to learn. So what they end up doing is studying to getting As which is memorizing short segments of code and definitions.
I'm a full-time working college student, so I'm speaking from both a college student's point of view and from an employee's point of view. You won't believe the level of incompetence I have to deal with with some of the new hires in our company. They just can't write decent code because they spent their college life getting As as opposed to actually learning the material. Almost ALL of them learn how to code well after a year or so... however, there are a couple of people who haven't been to college for computer science (one person I work with graduated from Med school) but rather learnt programming through self-learning and they are WAY more seasoned than your average college grad.
you'll need to get over the incompetant people who didn't "learnt" right. You'll deal with them the rest of your life. And more than likely you'll call them BOSS.
And you think you are going to learn how to program well within a time span of ~4 months (1 semester) and through a couple of assignments and projects which you will probally forget within the next few months when you don't use the language again prolly for the rest of your college life. Programming is an art that needs to be reinforced primarily through experience to learn it best.
Its not incompetence my friend... its simply the fact of life for the Industry.
Experience>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>Education
(Ooh... I see you caught my typo... so sue me!)
but of course, but I've been in IT for close to 15 years now and I've seen all kinds of incompetant, educated, experienced folk.
I find the way my AP Java course was taught to be fairly useful. There were reference materials available, and we went over them as a class before jumping into a given lab and whatnot - just to familiarize ourselves with the concepts. Then the teacher left us the heck alone. We helped each other to get a task accomplished - and learned a helluva lot more that way. Computer science isn't much about learning how to do things, it's all about learning problem solving skills. You can't teach that, you can only teach the tools that are needed. So you learn the tools, which are often simple enough to only warrant a brief overview on what they are, and then go solve problems with them.
It's less a science than an art. It is, however, an art that can be boiled down to a mathmatical device - the efficiency of your algorithm. Arts are learned through practice.
It's less a science than an art. It is, however, an art that can be boiled down to a mathmatical device - the efficiency of your algorithm. Arts are learned through practice.
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