My Out Of Touch Programming Teacher
By MetalGearSunny 15 Comments
I keep having nightmares. Not the ones I used to have, like being possessed by Pazuzu or having the girl from The Exorcist stab me while I'm laying in bed. (Yeah, just thinking about that movies really fucks me up. And I haven’t even seen the whole thing!)
The nightmares that I’ve been having involve my programming teacher that I had in the second semester of this past school year. It’s summer for me right now, but apparently my subconscious still completely hates everything about that class. I would just have dreams about being in her class and having to put up with her crap on a daily basis, and I think that alone is completely terrifying.
And it’s not the subject of programming that scares me. Basic programming is pretty easy once you know all the terms and the math involved. It’s just that my teacher wasn’t very fit to teach it. It baffles me that we live in an age where technology is so prominent in our lives, and yet some of our teachers in charge of educating us are so out of touch.
So, what was so bad about my teacher? Well, first off, she never stops talking. You would think I’m exaggerating, but I’m not. She talks through almost every second of our 90 minute period. She would repeat herself constantly and give us useless tips. Every ten minutes she felt the need to remind us that we can work together, and then five minutes later contradict herself by tell us to stop communicating with each other. When she had to teach, she would pull up a slideshow and just read it, and when we asked questions or didn’t get something, she would tell us to read our textbook, even though she thinks our textbooks aren’t very good at explaining things. And then she would keep talking, making it extremely hard to focus on trying to understand the textbook or do any of the work. She did this to a point where I don’t think she understood how to program. Whenever someone in our class needed help on a specific program, she would give us clues that had nothing to do with the problems we were having, and if that didn’t work, she would just pull the program up on her computer and show us the code. By that time, we would realize “Oh, I just made a small mistake right here.” If it were any other teacher, it would've taken probably two seconds to figure out our errors, but our teacher insisted on making things way more complicated than it actually was.
We lost a lot a class time because of this. When we were learning how to do loops, she just gave us assignments from the book and told us to figure it out on our own. We did this for a week, and it was obvious that almost everyone was lost. The next week, when she actually tried to make an effort to teach us, she told us that the past week was just us “dipping our toes in the water, and now we’re going to swim with the sharks.” And she repeated this sentence as she taught the material. Over and over again.
This is the fundamental problem with her class. She talked about teaching more than she actually taught us. We didn’t even finish all of the curriculum, and she just brushed it off, saying “oh, it’s okay, you’re going to learn all that in advanced programming anyway.” Yeah, but isn’t your job to prepare us for the advanced class? I barely learned any real programming because she was so terrible at her job. Do you want to know her explanation of a Do While Loop? “Remember, you do the loop...while you do something else.”
…
Yeah, that really helped.
On top of her incoherent banter, she would also get mad for no reason. One class, I think it was in March, there was some cold going around and a lot of people in my class were sick. When you get sick, you start coughing. She yelled at us all for coughing while she was talking, and accused us all for faking it. She even told us that if we needed to cough, we should go outside of the class to cough. And when people went outside, they got yelled at for going outside.
She was also pretty sexist towards males. Maybe sexist is too strong of a word, but she definitely favored the females in her class. We had only one girl in our class, and our teacher would only yell at the males for talking, even though everyone in the class was talking. She also put people who got good grades on a pedestal, including me. She would call out the people with the highest grades and tell everyone to be more like them. And the best part of that is that we were clueless about a lot of the same things everyone else in the class was, we just got higher grades because we did all of the work and did our best to figure it out, while others just didn’t bother.
The worst part of it was just the little stuff. The stuff that she said that proved that she knew nothing about computers. Stuff like “You’re not allowed to have a desktop background because that would just take up bandwidth” or “They’re skipping Windows 9 and going to straight to making Windows 10” or “Our computers don’t have enough RAM or ROM to run all of these programs.” She would say these things constantly.
When things would go bad, like if our programs were not working or the internet was down, she would blame it on the school’s network. “The computers are slow, it’s the network.” “Your programming isn’t running correctly, it’s the network.” “Your files are gone? It’s the network.” Sure, some of that might be true, but when I find a coding error later on and you’re still blaming the network...how does that make any sense?
The last unit we had learn was how to use GameMaker, because apparently our curriculum required that we knew how to make a game in that thing. This was probably the best part of the whole class because that’s pretty much all we did for the last two weeks about school, but there was also paperwork associated with it. We had to list different genres of games and state our favorite game in that genre. My teacher tried giving us an example, but she didn’t know what she was doing. For the first half of that class period, she pronounced genres as “jeneres” and had to google “five different types of game genres” just to get an idea of what they were. It’s also pretty dumb considering there are way more that five types of games out there. But anyway, someone in the class gave her the game Dark Souls as an example of a role-playing game, and on the projector, she spelled it “Dark Soles.” This “lesson” was followed by people in the class arguing about what games belong to what genres, and as someone who couldn’t give less of a shit about labeling things, I wanted to die.
So...yeah. I’m really glad that I never have to set foot in her room ever again. It was the worst.
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So...video games, right?
Before E3, I didn’t really care about the “next gen” stuff. The DRM with Xbox One was very troubling and everyone was certain that Sony was going to having something similar.
Nope.
Say what you will about the DRM and pricing decisions, but there’s no way you watched the Sony conference and not felt any excitement for video games. They knocked it out of the park with that conference, and it completely sold me on the system.
Looking back on the PS3’s life, I realized that it is the perfect time for the new consoles. The games are starting to look more and more dated. But that doesn’t mean I think that the PS3 is a bad console. Yeah, it has major flaws. Downloads take forever. The recent firmware update (which they have since pulled) bricked people’s systems. People got hacked. The PSN interface isn’t great. But I’m 100% satisfied with my PS3. This last week I downloaded Deus Ex: Human Revolution and the new X-COM, and right now I’m downloading Saints Row the Third, all because of Playstation Plus. It’s a hell of a service, and I hope they deliver the same quality on the PS4, and hopefully the downloading with be much, much faster. PS3 is just a great platform for games right now, and yeah, it took awhile to get there, but I’m so happy with where it is now.
I’m excited for the PS4, and I haven’t been this excited for a console since the PS2. It feels good to have the old Sony back.
360 is a pretty okay system too but holy shit fuck this xbox one shit
Games I'm looking forward to:
Infamous