Re: Can a non-programmer teach Perl?

[Abigail-II]

My first reaction is "Oh boy, why?".

Here's the scenario as I understand it: a local high school wants to teach Perl (yay!) to some students. Unfortunately, they had no teachers who knew Perl.

This begs the question: why does the high school want the teach Perl if noone knows Perl? How can they know it's something useful for the students? This smells very much like "We got to appear cool. We got to give out students web. Perl is web".

This has disaster written in big blinking bold letters written all over it. Who should gain by this? The students? Not very likely - high school students are about the worst students you can find; they are hard to motivy (because of their age, and because they are in school all day anyway) - you need one hell of a teacher to teach something he doesn't know, and what will be unappealing for most of the students. (Just like most of the students will not like chemistry, math or English literature). Will the teacher gain by this exercise? Unlikely. He will have to put a lot of work into preparation, with probably a little result.

Will the Perl community gain by this? Not at all. At best, the students will just attent the classes, and then file it as a horrible experience they had to live though. At worst, the community will get more bad "web designers" who think they need Perl to write webapplications, and clutter forums like this with questions like "I downloaded this script from Matt Wrights archive and it doesn't work....".

I pity the teacher.

Abigail

[tbone1]

This begs the question: why does the high school want the teach Perl if noone knows Perl?

Consider the kinds of people who make these decisions at schools and you have your answer.

--
tbone1
As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly.