Communications of the ACM
Common Problems of Se Students in Latin America, Part 2
In my last blog i mentioned two problems of education: lack of interest and poorly prepared teachers.
Talking about teachers, many educational institutions use professionals as teachers; however, this is not always a good choice.
A good professional does not imply a good teacher; i mean, if a professional wants to teach it is necessary to have some training or experience with teaching techniques, strategies, and more skills such as, for example, "group control," "conference preparation," "evaluation methodologies," etc.
Right now there are a lot of professionals at several educational institutions teaching without meeting minimun requirements; this leads to a particular situation where a given professional is able to prepare a very good lesson for a particular class and the students are interested in the lesson, but all that knowledge does not reach a student's mind because that professional has no "group control."
Also, if a professional wants to become a teacher it is necessary not to be afraid to talk in public; if that pro has this kind of fear, no matter if the material was prepared with all the requirements, that knowledge will not reach students.
On the computer science side, students of this career in many cases do not know how to write a good program following basic international standards, or even worse those programs are practically unreadable by another programmer. This is a common situation that is related to the idea of simplicity and ease of use of modern programming languages, and that is good, modern languages help developers by reducing the amount of time wasted on issues like developing visual controls, but this doesn't imply that the developer should forget how to properly develop software.
It is necessary to break some paradigms on education in order to improve. It will require some effort, but the results will worth the invested time and effort.
No entries found