I'm a coder and now a new teacher. Schools would rather employ a good art teacher to teach comp sci than a bad comp sci teacher. Controlling 35 - 40 students i

I'm a coder and now a new teacher. Schools would rather employ a good art teacher to teach comp sci than a bad comp sci teacher. Controlling 35 - 40 students is hard. Coders are not naturally good at it. Someone who likes to sit at a PC and read HN and slashdot is not the sort of 'drill sergeant' who is needed to take control of them. My coding skills are not used. The most complex things the students are asked to so are simple loops. So this leads us to Michelles question. How do you get teachers to get girls interested in STEM? The role models are weeded out at the teacher training stage. I would estimate 90% of nerds and coders remove themselves from the teaching profession. Of the other 10%? They find the school system almost impossible to target a student. Say I see the students for 60 minutes a week. Of those 60 minutes, 5min is registering them while they log into the computers. Then we are asked to do a 'starter' something to engage the students with the lesson, that's 10min. Then we teach and the students work. At the end of the lesson we do a plenary, 5 - 10 minutes. So I get about 30 minutes of teacher student time, so a minute per student. How am I supposed to explain to a stroppy 13 year old girl why computing is a good career choice? Or why maths is interesting? In 60 seconds? In my last lesson a boy took a girls coat, so that girls rugby tackled the boy and punched him in the head. I had to drag them apart then wait for someone to come help. This is not uncommon. Imagine telling students how much fun a career in IT is, then tend to shout "This is fucking boring sir" The school system has too many people asking things of it. English lessons. Science. Music. Sports. Tech. Religion. There isn't enough time. There isn't enough money. The type of person that can survive a teaching qualification is not the sort of person who is sitting in an apple conference. Having spent a great deal of time looking at the lack of women in STEM and what teachers can do about it, the most effective solution is to have great women role models come into schools and give talks or help teach. I can not tell you how many hoops I would have to jump through to make this happen. Even if I could find any women role models who would talk in front of a class of students. It would take months of paperwork. It's the sort of 'once a year' event that could take place. It would take the combined effort of my, my manager, the head of department, senior management and the head teacher to be involved. I don't know what the answer is. I don't think anyone does.