I actually predominantly learned COBOL and RPG in High School (which makes me feel old, even though this was in 97). I thought COBOL was useless at the time, b

I actually predominantly learned COBOL and RPG in High School (which makes me feel old, even though this was in 97). I thought COBOL was useless at the time, but amusingly have had to do two separate source code audits of COBOL code in the past year (where I was the only person in my company who could do it). My senior year, they decided to pilot a C programming class. None of the teachers knew C, but one Math teacher volunteered to take night classes and teach us what he was learning. I would say in about two months, every student in the class was significantly more knowledgeable than the teacher; but he was very cool about it. The only bad part was he spent about four months on graphics programming; which wouldn't have been bad, except we learned Borland C Graphics (getpixel, putpixel, etc.) which were pretty much useless. The year culminated in us sending a team to a C Programming Contest being held at a nearby university. I always thought it was amusing that the grand prize (which we didn't win) was a copy of Visual Cafe (the Java IDE).