[rescue] Cooling (Long Message, sorry)

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Tue, 16 Apr 2002, Dave McGuire wrote:

>   Yeah...The thing is, in my school, the CS teacher was brilliant...but
> she was a *MATH* teacher.  The pseudo-suits that ran the school
> figured "ahh, computers means math!" so they dumped it on the Math
> Department.

At my HS, computer science was dumped on the -accounting- department.
Their reasoning was:

   1) Businesses use computers.
   2) Computers, therefore, are part of business vocational training.
   3) Computers also do math.
   4) Accountants are business people that do math.
   5) Computers, therefore, should be taught by the accounting department!

My HS computer teacher really, really tried.  She liked computers and
accounting, but was more of a "lets get lots of letters and reports and
data crunched in MS Office and/or WordPerfect/1-2-3" than a "lets code and
network" person.  So, the entire computer department was churning out
people who could use Office (or WP/1-2-3, depending on what year you
started the course) like anything, but didn't know anything about how
stuff worked.

Really, though, if you use a computer (yea, even a lowly PC) as a tool to
get a non-computer job done, do you -need- to know how the internals work?
The school didn't really understand that the question might be flipped
around the other way (ie: if you're a techie, and can make money that
way, do you really -care- how to do mail-merge in MS Access and MS Word?).

I tried like hell to get an -actual- CS program started, and was rewarded
with one CS class my senior year.  It was taught in Pascal, which meant it
was okay for the absolute basics of algorithms, but totally worthless for
anything resembling application.  But, I was impressed by the fact that my
bitching for three years actually caused them to create a class.  I've
gotta hand it to them--at least they tried, which is quite a lot in
today's US school system.

--Jonathan