On Mon, Dec 5, 2016 at 12:40 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull <turnbull.stephen.fw@u.tsukuba.ac.jp> wrote:
That's not exactly what he said. High school teachers are likely to be the product of education schools, and may be highly skilled in building PowerPoint presentations, and have some experience in programming, but not as a professional. So I can easily imagine a teacher responsible for several classes of 40 students for 2 hour-long sessions a week per class, and not being able to "interpret at a glance" many error messages produced by the Python interpreter. This is basically the "aim for 90%" approach you describe, and he admits that's the best we can do.
Okay, then I misinterpreted. Seems we are indeed in agreement. Sounds good!
IMO the right way to teach computer programming is for it to be the day job for people who do all their programming in open source and/or personal projects. There are plenty of people competent enough to teach programming and would benefit from a day job.
I don't know where you live, but in both of my countries there is a teacher's union to ensure that nobody without an Ed degree gets near a classroom. More precisely, volunteers under the supervision of somebody with professional teaching credentials, yes, day job, not in this century. And "teaching credentials" == degree from a state- certified 4-year Ed program, not something you can get at a community college in an adult ed program.
Sadly, that's probably true here in Australia too, but I don't know for sure. I have no specific qualifications, but I teach online; it's high time the unions got broken IMO... but that's outside the scope of this. If it takes a credentialed teacher to get a job in a school, so be it - but at least make sure it's someone who knows how to interpret the error messages, so that any student who runs into trouble can ask the prof. ChrisA