I’m volunteering a couple mornings a week in an AP Computer Science Principles class for the upcoming school year . . .
Schools are adding more CS classes and, almost without exception, retraining in-service teachers to teach them, rather than hiring people with knowledge and experience in the field.
I met with the teacher today to do some upfront planning. At one point, he was calculating how many printouts we’d need for 6 groups of 4 students each . . .
“Let’s see,” he said, “6 times 4 is 20 . . .”
If you think that’s funny, guess what class he normally teaches: accounting.
“Are you going to write that?” someone asks me. “Does he know you have a website?”
“I don’t know what he knows or doesn’t know. Except he doesn’t know what 6 times 4 is.”