7 ms·

It's stories like this where I would like to see a more 'journalistic' approach, i.e. hearing both sides of a story. I have a hard time believing a teacher woul

by roel_v 15y ago

It's stories like this where I would like to see a more 'journalistic' approach, i.e. hearing both sides of a story. I have a hard time believing a teacher would simply put an 'F' on a project because, even though he's seen it running on the phones of his colleagues, he would say 'I don't understand how it works so I'll just fail it'. On the other hand, I have no such qualms believing a version where a 16 year old who thinks he's God's gift to mankind (hey, I was one of those) puts something together that doesn't fit the requirements of the project, submits it despite being repeatedly being steered in a different direction, comes up with unrealistic readings and interpretations of the assignment or context of the class to get them to fit his world view, and then (even if he does get a passing mark in the end) complains to everybody who will listen about how he's being discriminated against and how much smarter than everybody else he is, and oh I'm so wasting my time here between all these morons. I've been that student in an eerily similar situation, although I was 18 at the time and it was Jave Applets which were a hot new thing back then, and if I would have been my teacher at the time, I would've failed me, too (although the one I actually had did too give me a passing mark out of pittance). In short, sounds like biased view, happily accepted by the author to 'prove' his pet peeve (a pretty marginal one, for that matter), but devoid of real value or content.

alextgordon 15y ago
> It's stories like this where I would like to see a more 'journalistic' approach, i.e. hearing both sides of a story. I have a hard time believing a teacher would simply put an 'F' on a project because, even though he's seen it running on the phones of his colleagues, he would say 'I don't understand how it works so I'll just fail it'. You have to understand how the system works in the UK. From ages 15-18, there are ~4 years of exams, preparation for exams, that kind of thing. Ultimately these exams are mostly meaningless, their main purpose is to get you a place at university (which is only 3 years, go figure). The exams are set by these big official exam boards. Now during this time, the teachers aren't going to be thinking "Does this deserve an A", they're going to be thinking "Would an examiner give this an A". The exam boards circulate marking schemes. If it doesn't meet the criteria sufficiently (has the candidate demonstrated with this that they know the difference between a file and a folder in this project?), it's not going to be given an A, regardless of merit. I've had teachers explain to me that otherwise A-quality projects have been given low marks because they were written in C++ instead of VB6.
- AlexC04 15y ago
  I was an ICT teacher in the UK for 5 years. Our requirement is that we teach units to an accepted common standard. http://www.teach-ict.com/contributors/Ritchie_King/gcseproject/SampleSSCoursework.pdf http://www.teach-ict.com/contributors/Ritchie_King/gcseproje... Is an example of one marking scheme that I found (on a quick search). See page 7 and notice that the requirement is that the student "identify" on a scale of 5 marks - A clear statement of the problem, giving some background detail and identifying user(s) - Consideration of possible alternative solutions with adequate justification given for the chosen method - Quantitative objectives or user requirement Now if a student just goes out and makes a mobile app that doesn't cover any of the requirements so for the above section I'd have been forced to give a 0. The UK school system has a number of very deep, systematic problems that are preventing it from delivering a good education in IT. It's a shame, it's frustrating and it's not going to change any time soon.
  - eftpotrm 15y ago
    One thing I had drummed into me in my UK ICT education (admittedly 15 years ago and it wasn't called ICT then) was that we were aiming at fulfilling client desires; that we shouldn't just go off and produce something cool, if it wasn't of use to the described and defined end user (who we had a great amount of freedom to select) and we couldn't objectively justify our development approach, it wasn't good enough. Now, I can't say I object to a marking scheme that requires students to learn to develop what is useful and efficient rather than just what is cool...
    - daredevildave 15y ago
      I would much rather kids make stuff that is cool, rather than stuff that is useful. They have 60 years after they leave school to make useful stuff (probably for other people).
      - eftpotrm 15y ago
        There was a strong software engineering and project management streak to the course when I was on it; you were taught that code was written for a purpose and for an end user, and that you should be aiming at that target. You could have written a game or a graphics demo if you could have justified it, but you had to actually produce what you could argue somebody wanted. Frankly, for a relatively vocational course, I think that was the right balance. If they want to play then let them but teach them the discipline of producing to a spec too.
leoedin 15y ago
You're probably right. The fact is that in order to grade assignments, there needs to be a standard. GCSE's are very simple exams - they give a qualification to people who leave school at 16, and they let people identify what areas they want to study further at A-Level or university - but they're not designed with flexibility in mind. If the person in the article wants to spend their time at home writing Objective-C and iphone apps all day long, he's welcome to - if he's as clever as he claims he is, he'll have no dearth of free time because the work load for GCSE's is relatively minimal. The smart thing to do would have been to simply follow the assignment as given (a nice simple powerpoint presentation) and get on with doing fun stuff at home. Yes, there's a shortage of qualified computer science teachers. Yes, ICT teachers probably should understand programming to a limited extent, but currently? they don't. It's not until university that the people grading his assignments will truly be able to understand his brilliance (assuming he is as he claims...), but while I don't agree with the current state of the system, I also don't think that we should ensure that every ICT teacher in front of a class of GCSE ICT students (the majority of whom would simple be unable to write any Objective-C) should be educated in current programming fashions like iPhone development so that the one brilliant student in the class can do his coursework in it.
- jiggy2011 15y ago
  True, I also found it odd that he would have expected the teacher to know python or ruby. I program for a living and I've only just started looking into python and I know virtually no ruby. Although I'm sure if I had some well documented code I could figure out what it does, but I guess GCSE teachers only get limited time for marking and in most cases have to do it from home.
  - jacques_chester 15y ago
    One thing I enjoyed about my 3rd and 4th year university units is that they stopped imposing language requirements. Hand it in, if the professor can follow it, you get marked. Otherwise he or she will call you in and you can explain it in person.
Jem 15y ago
Indeed. ICT teachers have a curriculum to stick to, whether they like it or not. If that curriculum, dictated by everyone from the head of department to the local authority, says "create a crappy powerpoint app" and the student doesn't do that, then he's failed. I remember the painful discussion I had with my lecturer at college regarding the website module on my AVCE ICT course (college level; 16-18). I had a choice: I could create a website putting everything I knew about semantics and accessibility etc into it, using valid HTML & CSS etc etc etc... or I could pass the course (using Frontpage + frames). It's a shit system (I've seen it both sides of the fence - student and IT support) but getting teachers to the level of your average HN user just for the sake of 1 in every few hundred students is a waste of their time.
- JoeAltmaier 15y ago
  Its a waste of a drone's time. But nurturing that 1-in-100 student can be a more powerful social effect than passing 99 adequate IT students. There are other choices. Help them move to the CS track. Get them mentors outside of school. Suggest further reading or activities. But to just drop them a failing grade and ignore them? That's the act of a drone.
  - tobylane 15y ago
    A more powerful social effect maybe, but that teacher won't keep his job. It sounds like this kid already knows what course he'll pick for uni, if he's going, and the teacher doesn't know the area at all, so can't help in any way.
rmc 15y ago
* I have no such qualms believing a version where a 16 year old who thinks he's God's gift to mankind (hey, I was one of those) puts something together that doesn't fit the requirements of the project, submits it despite being repeatedly being steered in a different direction, comes up with unrealistic readings and interpretations of the assignment or context of the class to get them to fit his world view* I can well believe that could have happened. But this is inconsistant with the stated goals of most teachers, teaching groups, schools and state education policies. Most of this think that the school system, and teachers, should not be there to produce rote automatons who can only answer the given question. They claim they want to encourage independent thought, and thinking, and creativity. If a student does well better than their peers, but it doesn't fit exactly what the assignment calls for then they should get an A for demonstrating their talent, and the system should be fixed.
SomeCallMeTim 15y ago
The student in question added more information in the comments below the article, and has this to say: >Some extra information: >Before I started the assessment, I asked for the mark scheme to make sure my project hit the criteria for a passing grade. We weren’t asked to build in powerpoint, but most opted to do so for lack of a better option. I asked if it would be a good idea to build an iPhone app for the assessment and the teacher of my class said “Sure if you can, give it a shot”. I maintained close contact with the teacher, regularly demoed the project and all was well. I have no idea when the teacher became aware that the project would fail but at no point was a concern raised with me until final marking. >I didn’t build a complex project ‘just to be different’, I instead thought “Well here’s an opportunity to learn to do something I didn’t know how to do before”. Id been developing web things for a while but hadn’t dipped into native code up until that point. Again, the thought crossed my mind “If I can learn this in a week, surely they can at least have some basic understanding of it after 2 months” >I was commenting while writing the code where I thought it necessary however, I had to go back and comment on libraries I used, on top of the comments that already existed, in basic terms To me this sounds like the teacher screwed up.
- roel_v 15y ago
  "To me this sounds like the teacher screwed up." Call me cynical, to me this sounds like a story so outrageous that it becomes rather implausible. Of course it's possible that there is a teacher who for several weeks/months says 'looks good, go for it' and then out of the blue, at the end, decides to do a 180, fails the students and says 'I'm failing you because I don't understand'. But despite me knowing quite a few idiots and incompetent people, that just doesn't sound very much like something that would really happen in the way it is being painted. Of course I don't know the student, so I'm not going to go out and say that he's a liar, either. But there is room between calling somebody a liar and word for word believing a random stranger on the internet. Which is why I commented that in these cases, I'd prefer to hear the other side of the story, rather than using an obviously colored view as 'proof' for the article's author preconceived notions.
  - GeneralMaximus 15y ago
pjscott 15y ago
I can believe most any story of a teacher being preposterously unreasonable, though of course not all of them are true. I've had some bad experiences. But that's not what I wanted to talk about; I wanted to talk about this: > On the other hand, I have no such qualms believing a version where a 16 year old who thinks he's God's gift to mankind (hey, I was one of those) puts something together that doesn't fit the requirements of the project, submits it despite being repeatedly being steered in a different direction, comes up with unrealistic readings and interpretations of the assignment or context of the class to get them to fit his world view, and then (even if he does get a passing mark in the end) complains to everybody who will listen about how he's being discriminated against and how much smarter than everybody else he is, and oh I'm so wasting my time here between all these morons. You say that with loads of negative connotations, but when I was a grad student teaching programming, I loved it when students would do this sort of thing, because they learned so much more than they would have by sticking to the lesson plan. Of course, I actually rewarded them with good grades for going above and beyond what they had to do. Sure, it was inconvenient for me to have students ignoring my carefully-made lesson plans. But screw my plans; classes are about the students, and I wanted each student to do as well as they could. In other words, I wanted to be the kind of teacher I had always wanted, and occasionally had. It worked out well.
- nitrogen 15y ago
  Perhaps the OP was referring more to the student who turns in a GUI made with VB for an assignment that called for a console app made with C++. "But, it's a GUI! And GUI's are way more advanced than the command line!"
- roel_v 15y ago
  Yes, as with most things, it can go both ways, and I painted a stark contrast to make my point. Sometimes better results come out of people who don't stick to what they're supposed to be doing. On the other hand, sometimes the results are worse, too. I can't say, I haven't seen the project, don't know anything about the assignment, and haven't heard any other view. This particular story though doesn't sound very plausible to me, though.

by roel_v 15y ago

alextgordon 15y ago

> It's stories like this where I would like to see a more 'journalistic' approach, i.e. hearing both sides of a story. I have a hard time believing a teacher would simply put an 'F' on a project because, even though he's seen it running on the phones of his colleagues, he would say 'I don't understand how it works so I'll just fail it'. You have to understand how the system works in the UK. From ages 15-18, there are ~4 years of exams, preparation for exams, that kind of thing. Ultimately these exams are mostly meaningless, their main purpose is to get you a place at university (which is only 3 years, go figure). The exams are set by these big official exam boards. Now during this time, the teachers aren't going to be thinking "Does this deserve an A", they're going to be thinking "Would an examiner give this an A". The exam boards circulate marking schemes. If it doesn't meet the criteria sufficiently (has the candidate demonstrated with this that they know the difference between a file and a folder in this project?), it's not going to be given an A, regardless of merit. I've had teachers explain to me that otherwise A-quality projects have been given low marks because they were written in C++ instead of VB6.

AlexC04 15y ago
I was an ICT teacher in the UK for 5 years. Our requirement is that we teach units to an accepted common standard. http://www.teach-ict.com/contributors/Ritchie_King/gcseproject/SampleSSCoursework.pdf http://www.teach-ict.com/contributors/Ritchie_King/gcseproje... Is an example of one marking scheme that I found (on a quick search). See page 7 and notice that the requirement is that the student "identify" on a scale of 5 marks - A clear statement of the problem, giving some background detail and identifying user(s) - Consideration of possible alternative solutions with adequate justification given for the chosen method - Quantitative objectives or user requirement Now if a student just goes out and makes a mobile app that doesn't cover any of the requirements so for the above section I'd have been forced to give a 0. The UK school system has a number of very deep, systematic problems that are preventing it from delivering a good education in IT. It's a shame, it's frustrating and it's not going to change any time soon.
- eftpotrm 15y ago
  One thing I had drummed into me in my UK ICT education (admittedly 15 years ago and it wasn't called ICT then) was that we were aiming at fulfilling client desires; that we shouldn't just go off and produce something cool, if it wasn't of use to the described and defined end user (who we had a great amount of freedom to select) and we couldn't objectively justify our development approach, it wasn't good enough. Now, I can't say I object to a marking scheme that requires students to learn to develop what is useful and efficient rather than just what is cool...
  - daredevildave 15y ago
    I would much rather kids make stuff that is cool, rather than stuff that is useful. They have 60 years after they leave school to make useful stuff (probably for other people).
    - eftpotrm 15y ago
      There was a strong software engineering and project management streak to the course when I was on it; you were taught that code was written for a purpose and for an end user, and that you should be aiming at that target. You could have written a game or a graphics demo if you could have justified it, but you had to actually produce what you could argue somebody wanted. Frankly, for a relatively vocational course, I think that was the right balance. If they want to play then let them but teach them the discipline of producing to a spec too.

leoedin 15y ago

You're probably right. The fact is that in order to grade assignments, there needs to be a standard. GCSE's are very simple exams - they give a qualification to people who leave school at 16, and they let people identify what areas they want to study further at A-Level or university - but they're not designed with flexibility in mind. If the person in the article wants to spend their time at home writing Objective-C and iphone apps all day long, he's welcome to - if he's as clever as he claims he is, he'll have no dearth of free time because the work load for GCSE's is relatively minimal. The smart thing to do would have been to simply follow the assignment as given (a nice simple powerpoint presentation) and get on with doing fun stuff at home. Yes, there's a shortage of qualified computer science teachers. Yes, ICT teachers probably should understand programming to a limited extent, but currently? they don't. It's not until university that the people grading his assignments will truly be able to understand his brilliance (assuming he is as he claims...), but while I don't agree with the current state of the system, I also don't think that we should ensure that every ICT teacher in front of a class of GCSE ICT students (the majority of whom would simple be unable to write any Objective-C) should be educated in current programming fashions like iPhone development so that the one brilliant student in the class can do his coursework in it.

jiggy2011 15y ago
True, I also found it odd that he would have expected the teacher to know python or ruby. I program for a living and I've only just started looking into python and I know virtually no ruby. Although I'm sure if I had some well documented code I could figure out what it does, but I guess GCSE teachers only get limited time for marking and in most cases have to do it from home.
- jacques_chester 15y ago
  One thing I enjoyed about my 3rd and 4th year university units is that they stopped imposing language requirements. Hand it in, if the professor can follow it, you get marked. Otherwise he or she will call you in and you can explain it in person.

Jem 15y ago

Indeed. ICT teachers have a curriculum to stick to, whether they like it or not. If that curriculum, dictated by everyone from the head of department to the local authority, says "create a crappy powerpoint app" and the student doesn't do that, then he's failed. I remember the painful discussion I had with my lecturer at college regarding the website module on my AVCE ICT course (college level; 16-18). I had a choice: I could create a website putting everything I knew about semantics and accessibility etc into it, using valid HTML & CSS etc etc etc... or I could pass the course (using Frontpage + frames). It's a shit system (I've seen it both sides of the fence - student and IT support) but getting teachers to the level of your average HN user just for the sake of 1 in every few hundred students is a waste of their time.

JoeAltmaier 15y ago
Its a waste of a drone's time. But nurturing that 1-in-100 student can be a more powerful social effect than passing 99 adequate IT students. There are other choices. Help them move to the CS track. Get them mentors outside of school. Suggest further reading or activities. But to just drop them a failing grade and ignore them? That's the act of a drone.
- tobylane 15y ago
  A more powerful social effect maybe, but that teacher won't keep his job. It sounds like this kid already knows what course he'll pick for uni, if he's going, and the teacher doesn't know the area at all, so can't help in any way.

rmc 15y ago

* I have no such qualms believing a version where a 16 year old who thinks he's God's gift to mankind (hey, I was one of those) puts something together that doesn't fit the requirements of the project, submits it despite being repeatedly being steered in a different direction, comes up with unrealistic readings and interpretations of the assignment or context of the class to get them to fit his world view* I can well believe that could have happened. But this is inconsistant with the stated goals of most teachers, teaching groups, schools and state education policies. Most of this think that the school system, and teachers, should not be there to produce rote automatons who can only answer the given question. They claim they want to encourage independent thought, and thinking, and creativity. If a student does well better than their peers, but it doesn't fit exactly what the assignment calls for then they should get an A for demonstrating their talent, and the system should be fixed.

SomeCallMeTim 15y ago

The student in question added more information in the comments below the article, and has this to say: >Some extra information: >Before I started the assessment, I asked for the mark scheme to make sure my project hit the criteria for a passing grade. We weren’t asked to build in powerpoint, but most opted to do so for lack of a better option. I asked if it would be a good idea to build an iPhone app for the assessment and the teacher of my class said “Sure if you can, give it a shot”. I maintained close contact with the teacher, regularly demoed the project and all was well. I have no idea when the teacher became aware that the project would fail but at no point was a concern raised with me until final marking. >I didn’t build a complex project ‘just to be different’, I instead thought “Well here’s an opportunity to learn to do something I didn’t know how to do before”. Id been developing web things for a while but hadn’t dipped into native code up until that point. Again, the thought crossed my mind “If I can learn this in a week, surely they can at least have some basic understanding of it after 2 months” >I was commenting while writing the code where I thought it necessary however, I had to go back and comment on libraries I used, on top of the comments that already existed, in basic terms To me this sounds like the teacher screwed up.

roel_v 15y ago
"To me this sounds like the teacher screwed up." Call me cynical, to me this sounds like a story so outrageous that it becomes rather implausible. Of course it's possible that there is a teacher who for several weeks/months says 'looks good, go for it' and then out of the blue, at the end, decides to do a 180, fails the students and says 'I'm failing you because I don't understand'. But despite me knowing quite a few idiots and incompetent people, that just doesn't sound very much like something that would really happen in the way it is being painted. Of course I don't know the student, so I'm not going to go out and say that he's a liar, either. But there is room between calling somebody a liar and word for word believing a random stranger on the internet. Which is why I commented that in these cases, I'd prefer to hear the other side of the story, rather than using an obviously colored view as 'proof' for the article's author preconceived notions.
- GeneralMaximus 15y ago

pjscott 15y ago

I can believe most any story of a teacher being preposterously unreasonable, though of course not all of them are true. I've had some bad experiences. But that's not what I wanted to talk about; I wanted to talk about this: > On the other hand, I have no such qualms believing a version where a 16 year old who thinks he's God's gift to mankind (hey, I was one of those) puts something together that doesn't fit the requirements of the project, submits it despite being repeatedly being steered in a different direction, comes up with unrealistic readings and interpretations of the assignment or context of the class to get them to fit his world view, and then (even if he does get a passing mark in the end) complains to everybody who will listen about how he's being discriminated against and how much smarter than everybody else he is, and oh I'm so wasting my time here between all these morons. You say that with loads of negative connotations, but when I was a grad student teaching programming, I loved it when students would do this sort of thing, because they learned so much more than they would have by sticking to the lesson plan. Of course, I actually rewarded them with good grades for going above and beyond what they had to do. Sure, it was inconvenient for me to have students ignoring my carefully-made lesson plans. But screw my plans; classes are about the students, and I wanted each student to do as well as they could. In other words, I wanted to be the kind of teacher I had always wanted, and occasionally had. It worked out well.

nitrogen 15y ago
Perhaps the OP was referring more to the student who turns in a GUI made with VB for an assignment that called for a console app made with C++. "But, it's a GUI! And GUI's are way more advanced than the command line!"
roel_v 15y ago
Yes, as with most things, it can go both ways, and I painted a stark contrast to make my point. Sometimes better results come out of people who don't stick to what they're supposed to be doing. On the other hand, sometimes the results are worse, too. I can't say, I haven't seen the project, don't know anything about the assignment, and haven't heard any other view. This particular story though doesn't sound very plausible to me, though.