Once again, PostalCow, you've written a great article.
After I graduated high shool I spent a year in Seminary, then two years at a State School studying Elementary Education with a minor in music history/literature. I had done my practicum and I was only 2 courses shy from receiving my state certification.
Now I work as an E-Services Coordinator at a local credit union, managing the website, providing member assistance with the home-banking product and fixing the copier's paper jams. Hey, life happens... but I look back on everything and realize that even though I was a damned good teacher, I'm much happier where I am now.
Actually, the reason I am where I am today is greatly in part because of a few Pascal computer programming courses I took in High School.
I graduated High School in '98, so I was learning programming skills just about the time the Internet was really becoming "main stream" and there were a lot of my peers were learning HTML. There was even one or two "nerds" who talked about "spending all night compiling something called Linux."
A lot of the programing exercises we had to solve delt with math problems. So in that regard, the computer programming classes helped me with my math skills.
Code:
Algebra: X + Y = Z
Pascal: Z:= X + Y;
And most definately the courses helped me to learn critical thinking and logic.
Code:
var donuts: integer;
begin
donuts:= 500;
if donuts > 2 then
GetSick()
end.
Ironically, it didn't really help me much in the computer programming arena since most the practical applications I script deal with string processing... not using a recursive function to determine the 52,293rd decimal place of PI.
While at the State School I took a course entitled, "Computers in Elementary Education." I was hoping to learn new ways the computer can be used to promote learning in the classroom, such as online conferences with NASA astronauts, searching pictures to create virtual "vacations" to places about which the children are learning and how to use some software to manage lesson plans and attendance records.
Instead, I learned how to use Netscape's Composer to design a webpage.
A. I already knew how to code HTML (thank you High School Geeks!)
B. I code my pages by hand because I don't like WYSIWYG HTML editors
C. What does any of that have to do with Elementary Education?
Anyways, with all that rambling being said, I feel that computers can have a place in a classroom... but definately not in the way that they're being used now.
We need to train our educators how to properly integrate them into the class room. It's the teachers who should be using them to demonstrate abstract lessons to the kids... not kids playing "Oregon Trail" during Study Hall.
Classes where we teach children to use computers such as word processing/typing skills, computer programming, etc... should actually meet their own objectives.
Also, they should teach skills as opposed to the use of proprietary software. That is, we should teach how to write <html> </html> vs. how to save a word processing document with an html extension and call it a web page. Teach the children how to accurately type 70wpm instead of how to format the text in "pretty colors" using Microsoft Word (which, by the way I saw selling today for $219USD).
-Tim
Codewalkers Forums Sponsor:
October 13th, 2003, 06:44 AM
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