| In Italy I had the first programming introduction at 11, using Commodore 64 and the language used for teaching was Logo. Logo had to be loaded from 5" floppy disks. Commodore 64 were already obsolete by the time, in fact at 12 (the next year), we switched to Windows, and we used something to do hypertexts instead. Needless to say, Logo was much more instructive to whatever bullshit we were using the next year (in fact, I don't ever remember what I was actually doing during these classes). Our teacher was an Italian teacher, with the usual assumption at the time that programming language = natural language. The switching to hypertexts the next year/s was obvious for them in retrospect, though had little to do with programming at all. At 15 we started "real" programming classes with Turbo Pascal under a dos environment. By that time, I was already programming by myself, so I always found these classes to be boring as hell. I was using the practical classes to program simple video games. Though pascal (and TP in general) was a huge step up compared to other "modern" classes we had in our school that were teaching Visual Basic or Java. Under TP we were actually doing some basic algorithms, while the other guys were left doing some useless GUI. With TP you could inline assembly, switch to graphical mode, and whatnot. The teacher I had this time was a math teacher, which had only minimal CS knowledge. Better than nothing, but still a far cry. The "lessons" were split in two parts: * basic math introduction to some concept (say, "calculate area of triangle") * applied session of the concept, for example: make a program that computes the area of said triangle Nothing much learned in these classes, if anything actually. I got several 0 marks (which got my math grades from 10/10 down _under_ the sufficiency and required me to _repeat_ the year) for arguing with the teacher about the limits of the machine words (I went with a print-out of a ~10 pages bignum library I wrote just to disprove her). I actually got suspended for asking the school director if I could be an assistant during these classes. I only have shitty memories about these times. Different times, as CS was barely a "science" these days. Though my fear, especially after participating as a _real_ assistant in classes, is that there will be no CS at all, or at least nothing that would actually teach these kids anything. In retrospect, the C64 was the best teaching environment I could ever have. You could understand the whole system (hw&software stack) in relatively little time. No chance you could do something similar with any modern system. |
See that's where you messed up and made a mistake. In school you are supposed to learn but also not a huge dick to the teacher. "Yes sir. No sir" is all you should be saying and you get along just fine. The time to rise is college, high school is just kindergarden with the occasional make out session.