[thraway3837]

Sorry, but I don't think AI is entirely to blame here. When I graduated from a CS program at a top-10 school, I felt frustrated that the professors didn't ever teach. They had slides. They read off slides, verbatim. They explained things sometimes if you asked them, but most often in a very elitist and condescending tone. Like in the movie Good Will Hunting, you could have learned nearly all of it and more by borrowing those books for free from the library. Or, just opening a complex OSS project and learning to contribute.

And quite honestly. It shows in the CS grad population too. A lot of us are condescending toward anything that doesn't make sense to us. But, I digress.

The best engineers I've worked with are all non traditional backgrounds, non degree or degree holders from non elite schools. They think differently, they tinker, they are incredibly nice and patient, and do it for the love of connecting humans to technology.

Look up the names mentioned in the article. Garcia, Ranade, Nelson. All of them are involved with highly theoretical mathematics and scientific computing. Just because you're good at 1 thing does not mean you are qualified to teach. And none of these professors are trained or taught or graded or performance managed on how they teach. For most of them, its just required that they spend 10% of their time in the classroom lecturing.

Let's be honest about another thing. 99% of EECS graduates, even from elite schools, are wrangling objects and their relationships to a graph. Simply put, we're all just a bunch of glorified JSON massage therapists. It just so happens that we get paid well for it, and we hold that over people. The same happens in the classroom.

I think in order to facilitate a healthy, educational environment for young adults, we as adults must encourage, motivate and make that environment fun and practical. We force feed binary trees and the compiler AST's, but we need to make it fun. It's like the commonly accepted saying: Schools kill creativity :(.

[nneonneo]

University education is weird. Research profs (who make up a large fraction of all profs in a typical R1 institution), are hired for research ability and are only minimally evaluated on teaching ability. Furthermore, few research profs actually receive any kind of mandatory training on how to teach; a typical research prof might be assigned a course to teach and then just let loose to do so on the first day of the semester. If a prof actually cares they may attend some optional teaching training - but I stress that these are optional at many of the institutions I know of. (I suppose if someone gets really bad teaching evals they may be advised to attend said trainings - but for a tenured prof, that's just advice).

Worse, a decent chunk of research profs will treat teaching as a burden that just has to be done - a distraction from their exciting world-changing research. So, you get attitudes like the ones you mentioned.

I'm actually not sure why the system is set up to assume that profs who are good at research are automatically suited to teach classes, but that is how it's setup.

[acbart]

The fact that you are talking about Dan Garcia, a huge figure in computing education research and an excellent teacher, and the Beauty and Joy of Computing curriculum makes this hilarious. You should look up some details about both.

[littlexsparkee]

> According to Berkeleytime, 35.3% of CS 10 students and 10.6% of CS 61A students received F’s in spring 2026. In spring 2025 and spring 2024, the percentage of F’s did not exceed 10% for either class.

I don't think instruction would've changed drastically in the last year though.

[lern_too_spel]

Garcia and Ranade are Teaching Professors. Their primary responsibility is to teach, develop curriculum, and do pedagogical research. This job posting explains: https://saberbio.wildapricot.org/Job-board/12919068

[kajecounterhack]

> I felt frustrated that the professors didn't ever teach. They had slides. They read off slides, verbatim. They explained things sometimes if you asked them, but most often in a very elitist and condescending tone

+10000. The goddamn slides. If I were a student now going to engineering school, I'd basically take the slides and throw them into NotebookLM and get way better lectures. Then I'd ask claude or GPT all my hard questions. Hell, I'd get the PDF version of my textbooks and do the same.

The number of lectures actually worthy of your time was so low.

[beej71]

I try to lecture as little as possible. No slides. Quick highlights discussion of the reading, maybe a coding demo, and then students work on coding challenges in class, in groups if they want. I circulate and help out. I'm lucky to have small class sizes at this university. I couldn't pull it off in a class of 300.

[kajecounterhack]

Wow Beej it's you!! I loved your guide to network programming in undergrad <3 you're probably not part of the problem here, lol.

[a96]

Reading this I was just thinking I've seen that nick/name somewhere.

Then I noticed several bookmarks with the same name staring at me from the browser sidebar.

[Animats]

I really wonder if it's important to learn all that low-level stuff at this point. Most programmers today will never write a binary tree or a hash table. Modern high-performance ones are generic components you get from libraries. Even MIT gave up on teaching from Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs.

I got all that stuff. I've wired up a 4-bit adder on a solderless breadboard for an architecture class. I used to have a well-thumbed copy of Knuth handy. I've designed and built a switching power supply. But I'm not up to date on using Claude Code, and should be.

[toast0]

IMHO, I think it's good to have some exposure to low-level stuff. There's a good amount of work you can't do without understanding the low-level stuff, but there's more work you can't do well without having at least an idea of the low-level stuff.

Start the kids off with high level stuff, but make them do some embedded systems on their way through. At least for an engineering degree. Also, do a bit of lower level communications somewhere in there; expose them to tcpdump/ wireshark, but they need not develop expertise.

[prerok]

I think it is important to learn how to implement it because it gives the student an opportunity to learn precisely because it's been done countless times and debated over to death. There are many analyses and if one doesn't click, maybe another one will. A student can learn how to analyze the algorithms and try out different implementations to assess differences in performance.

Of course, if a student just breezes through it then I would agree. That would make no sense.

[frollogaston]

Berkeley CS does teach for real