This thread on Hacker News terrifies me

[RhyS]

On Friday, 31 August 2018 at 23:47:40 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> The are plenty of cases where the teachers actually do an 
> excellent job teaching the material that the courses cover. 
> It's just that the material is often about theoretical computer 
> science - and this is actually stuff that can be very 
> beneficial to becoming an excellent programmer. However, many 
> teachers really aren't great programmers. They aren't 
> necessarily bad programmers, but unless they spent a bunch of 
> time in industry before teaching, odds are that they don't have 
> all of the software engineering skills that the students are 
> going to need once they get into the field. And most courses 
> aren't designed to teach students the practical skills.

Imagine getting a Industrial Engineer that switched over to 
become a teacher, showing up to teach Visual Basic and Database 
normalization.

That same teacher used one of those red little VB books for his 
study material ( been 20+ years ago, not sure if they still exist 
).

The students ended up helping each other fixing issues because 
the teacher was useless. It was even so bad, he took examples out 
of the book, little bit reformatted the questions and used that 
for tests. Of course one of our fellow students figure this out, 
he got his hands on the book and voila, every test answer.

Worst was that the teacher was so BORING, that nobody wanted to 
sit in the front of the class, because his database class was so 
bad, people literally needed to keep each other up from falling 
asleep. I am not joking!

You can guess that i never learned database normalization in 
school and ended up doing it on my own. So yea, first hand 
experience with bad teachers.

The guy that did C++ was way better and you actually learned from 
him. A bit scary guy but knew his stuff. Teachers make all the 
difference for children/students to learn anything.

If they are boring, burned out or just doing it to earn money, it 
shows in the lacking responds and score of the students. A good 
teacher draws in the students and helps them focus. A good 
teacher does not make things over complicated and does not assume 
that everybody understand. Seen brilliant teachers that are 
horrible at teaching because they are so smart ( or repeated the 
same material so much ), they assume everybody understands 
everything as they do.

Teacher make all the difference in teaching but a lot is so 
politicizes/internal power games, ... that good teachers tend to 
leave and bad ones just end up doing the job, because its a good 
government/public servant job with nice vacation perks ( here in 
the EU ).