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My IT teacher was similarly skilled and equally wanted to teach usefully and interestingly, and he generally managed to get round the curriculum. Part of this
by corin_ 15y ago
My IT teacher was similarly skilled and equally wanted to teach usefully and interestingly, and he generally managed to get round the curriculum.
Part of this was that he managed to bend the curriculum to be more challenging and interesting (my GCSE project consisted of researching and then writing up methods of bypassing the school's internet filter system - those who preferred to could indeed do stuff like MS Access projects), and part was finding ways to achieve good grades quickly leaving plenty of free time for other areas.
Possibly the reason he was able to do this was that I went to a private school, I don't know if state schools would allow teachers this much flexibility? That said, my school was/is ranked very highly in GCSE/A-Level rankings tables, and took that very seriously, so as far as grades were concerned he was still on a very tight leash.
He was a very unusual (in a good way) teacher though, like none over I ever had or have ever heard of. In his office (connected to the IT rooms) he had a fully stocked minifridge, originally for himself but he also sold to his students at cost. He formerlly was a programmer for the Canadian air force, as well as a DJ, and would generally play techno music through classes (often loud enough for teachers above to take issue), and was regularly getting in trouble with the headmaster for wearing an ear-ring. Unconventional, but the best teacher any of us ever had.
- citricsquid 15y agoMy school was the complete opposite to yours then, it's in a poor area and the year before I sat my GCSEs the 5 A - C pass rate for the school was under 20%, the only 2 lower schools in the county were special education schools, although I noticed that last year they were celebrating that they'd achieved something like an 80% pass rate, but I suspect they're just focusing on getting people to pass now (the year I did GCSEs they offered a single test (well, one maths one English) that was the equivalent to 1 GCSE, I assume to boost averages)
- peteretep 15y agoOur Design/Technology teachers took a similar approach - we had a checklist of "How to get 100% in your coursework by ticking the boxes" parts to rush through, and then a real focus on building something cool and learning DT properly. Again, a private school.
- cstross 15y agoLet me compare with the 1980s in England, because that's what I know ... I sat 'O' levels (now replaced by GCSEs in 1981 and 'A' levels in 1983. There was no IT teaching in my school at that time. A computer lab was installed in 1980, and they began running the 'O' level computer science exams in 1983 (too late for me) although I got to use the lab's Apple IIs and Systime 525 minicomputer during my 'A' level in general studies. Teaching focused on programming; there were no office apps on those computers. The 'O' level in CS was recognizably about computer science, albeit at an embryonic level, in those days. In 1987 I began studying for an 'A' level in computer science at evening classes (I'd been at university from 1983-86). The focus was fairly hardcore programming, with some assembly language plus BBC Basic, plus boolean logic, binary and hexadecimal arithmetic, basic data structures (linked lists, trees, hash tables). Applications barely got a look in. I bailed on the CS 'A' level as too pedestrian and instead went into a graduate-entry conversion degree in 1989. The then CS 'A' level was, I will concede, useful preparation for a CS degree back then. The point is, the 1980s syllabi had zero content on application usage -- it was all about data processing and programming and the structure of computing machinery. The trend towards teaching IT seems to have cut in some time after 1988, and gone way too far ...