[rant]
Computers and technology are ,in my opinion, the ways of the future.Here in Greece, developing a thriving semiconductor industry combined with a change to the way everyone acts could help decrease the gargantuan debt and longer down the road,lead the country to an era of economic prosperity.Although I have many reasons to support this,including the ever increasing amount of university graduates with computer related degrees who could find employment here if this happened instead of heading abroad,this isn't the topic of my post.I want to show everyone who is reading this blog how much attention is given to such an important subject and what the effects of this attitude are.
Let me start by telling you that my school is considered one of the best public schools,is labeled as experimental and exemplar( an example to other schools).It is called "Ιωνίδειος Πρότυπος Σχολή".According to its titles it should be the school with an organized and efficient approach to computer technology.Unfortunately,this is far from the truth.
I don't want to begin by bashing my teachers and their methods,so I'll start by commenting on our equipment.Fortunately,it is the on;y good thing about our school.There are two computer labs,both equipped with computers with modern hardware,a broadband connection to the internet and finally a server to form a local area network.There are also printers,scanners,projectors and many other peripherals to serve our supposed needs.In a few words,we have great infastructure that many of the other greek schools lack.
Now it's time for that bashing I mentioned earlier.The easiest way to describe how terrible our teachers' methods are,is to tell you their first sentence at every lesson.It is:"Shut down your pcs and monitors".Then they attempt to teach us a chapter of our school book,written 11 years ago in 2000.
This year,the subject we were supposed to study was programming.Before reading the book,I was optimistic that we could maybe work with Java or C# or at least any widely used programming language.Guess which one it was? Logo,an essentailly dead language no longer used for commercial purposes.As if that wasn't enough,it was also in Greek so the commands were bad translations of their english counterparts and it was hard to understand their function by comparing them to their original names.
Let's return to the teaching method for now.As I was saying,they attempt to teach us one of the subjects of the school book.What is so bad about that you may ask...The way the approach the teaching,that's what.Instead of at least letting us experiment with the computers,figuring how the commands work by ourselves with their guidance of a sample,they would write a piece of code on the whiteboard and expected us to copy it and run it as it was.The result of this approach with the handful of students who cared,like myself, was us skipping through this and then starting to browse the internet or to experiment with different,more interesting code.The majority of the class however,didn't care and they would just ignore the whole lesson or try to disrupt it by causing a fuss.This was really apparent whenever there was a test,because everyone would ask me and two other students for help because they hadn't learned anything during the whole year.
Except the fact that these teachers were incapable of teaching children properly,I was also shocked by their personal knowledge of their subject.Both my teachers were programmers so I din't expect them to know very much about hardware,but I was surprised when I once asked one of them what a data bus is and they didn't know the answer.I realized how poor their understanding of computers are,when my other teacher couldn't explain how multi core cpus beat single core cpus,while operating at lower frequencies.How can a programmer be unable to explain how parallel threads work,while I can grasp the idea quite clearly, is something I cannot understand.
I will stop criticizing my teachers now though as there are even more important things to report.First of all,something I should have begun with,the weekly hours dedicated to computer related lessons are....1 hour.This is outrageous if you consider the hours dedicated to ancient greek grammar(4 hours weekly) and the religion related lessons(2 hours weekly).These don't provide us with any useful practical knowledge we can use to succeed in our lives but still get more attention than the computer science lessons,Furthermore,it is needless to say that the amount of teachers hired for these subjects are easily 3 times as many as our computer teachers.I guess t worshipping our ancestors and being taught about the church's history is more important than trying to make our own future better.
What are my suggestions to deal with this situation?Increase the hours dedicated to computer related lessons while decreasing the hours of courses in humanities slightly.Also establish a testing agency comprised of experts which will evaluate teachers and give them penalties if they are performing their job badly.Finally use books from greek profesionnals in the field of computing to achieve optimal results.
What is the point I'm trying to make with this post?Greece is never going to get out of its current situation if some things don't change.Receiving loans will only postpone the inevitable bankruptcy and today's genration will not be able to do anything about it without proper education.
[/rant]
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| This lab is very similar to ours |
Computers and technology are ,in my opinion, the ways of the future.Here in Greece, developing a thriving semiconductor industry combined with a change to the way everyone acts could help decrease the gargantuan debt and longer down the road,lead the country to an era of economic prosperity.Although I have many reasons to support this,including the ever increasing amount of university graduates with computer related degrees who could find employment here if this happened instead of heading abroad,this isn't the topic of my post.I want to show everyone who is reading this blog how much attention is given to such an important subject and what the effects of this attitude are.
Let me start by telling you that my school is considered one of the best public schools,is labeled as experimental and exemplar( an example to other schools).It is called "Ιωνίδειος Πρότυπος Σχολή".According to its titles it should be the school with an organized and efficient approach to computer technology.Unfortunately,this is far from the truth.
I don't want to begin by bashing my teachers and their methods,so I'll start by commenting on our equipment.Fortunately,it is the on;y good thing about our school.There are two computer labs,both equipped with computers with modern hardware,a broadband connection to the internet and finally a server to form a local area network.There are also printers,scanners,projectors and many other peripherals to serve our supposed needs.In a few words,we have great infastructure that many of the other greek schools lack.
Now it's time for that bashing I mentioned earlier.The easiest way to describe how terrible our teachers' methods are,is to tell you their first sentence at every lesson.It is:"Shut down your pcs and monitors".Then they attempt to teach us a chapter of our school book,written 11 years ago in 2000.
This year,the subject we were supposed to study was programming.Before reading the book,I was optimistic that we could maybe work with Java or C# or at least any widely used programming language.Guess which one it was? Logo,an essentailly dead language no longer used for commercial purposes.As if that wasn't enough,it was also in Greek so the commands were bad translations of their english counterparts and it was hard to understand their function by comparing them to their original names.
Let's return to the teaching method for now.As I was saying,they attempt to teach us one of the subjects of the school book.What is so bad about that you may ask...The way the approach the teaching,that's what.Instead of at least letting us experiment with the computers,figuring how the commands work by ourselves with their guidance of a sample,they would write a piece of code on the whiteboard and expected us to copy it and run it as it was.The result of this approach with the handful of students who cared,like myself, was us skipping through this and then starting to browse the internet or to experiment with different,more interesting code.The majority of the class however,didn't care and they would just ignore the whole lesson or try to disrupt it by causing a fuss.This was really apparent whenever there was a test,because everyone would ask me and two other students for help because they hadn't learned anything during the whole year.
Except the fact that these teachers were incapable of teaching children properly,I was also shocked by their personal knowledge of their subject.Both my teachers were programmers so I din't expect them to know very much about hardware,but I was surprised when I once asked one of them what a data bus is and they didn't know the answer.I realized how poor their understanding of computers are,when my other teacher couldn't explain how multi core cpus beat single core cpus,while operating at lower frequencies.How can a programmer be unable to explain how parallel threads work,while I can grasp the idea quite clearly, is something I cannot understand.
I will stop criticizing my teachers now though as there are even more important things to report.First of all,something I should have begun with,the weekly hours dedicated to computer related lessons are....1 hour.This is outrageous if you consider the hours dedicated to ancient greek grammar(4 hours weekly) and the religion related lessons(2 hours weekly).These don't provide us with any useful practical knowledge we can use to succeed in our lives but still get more attention than the computer science lessons,Furthermore,it is needless to say that the amount of teachers hired for these subjects are easily 3 times as many as our computer teachers.I guess t worshipping our ancestors and being taught about the church's history is more important than trying to make our own future better.
What are my suggestions to deal with this situation?Increase the hours dedicated to computer related lessons while decreasing the hours of courses in humanities slightly.Also establish a testing agency comprised of experts which will evaluate teachers and give them penalties if they are performing their job badly.Finally use books from greek profesionnals in the field of computing to achieve optimal results.
What is the point I'm trying to make with this post?Greece is never going to get out of its current situation if some things don't change.Receiving loans will only postpone the inevitable bankruptcy and today's genration will not be able to do anything about it without proper education.
[/rant]
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