I wish they'd teach Linux in school, starting from the kernel, instead of this "how to use MS Office" tripe that passes for "computer science" here in the states.
Not that I entirely disagree, but the English teacher couldn't care less whether his/her charges understand, well, anything about Linux, but the English teacher cares a great deal whether his/her charges can manage 1-inch margins and double-spacing on whichever word processor is currently winning the mindshare war.
I still do not understand this. If I were an English teacher I would tell my students to email me the assignment with the following format
Subject: Assignment 1 - Larry Jones - Romeo and Juliet Meets Robots
Body: [5 paragraphs of text]
Or even better would be for them to have it on a blog, so you get social pressure to do well. Parents might not go for that one though.
Why do we need to be good at margins, double spacing, etc. When was the last time I needed to change the margins on a Word doc? 3 months ago? Waste of time/resources.
I think it was so the teacher could write comments on the pages more easily. That was 10 years ago though, so I'm not sure if students still have to hand in printed hard copies?
I think he's referring to high school, where the selection of computer courses is far more limited. At my high school right now (in the United States), the only computer course covers using MS Word, Powerpoint, and Excel. Absolutely no programming courses whatsoever.
(As a side note, I self-studied AP Computer Science and it isn't much better. Its pretty much all Java syntax and logic with a few sorting algorithms thrown in so that they can call it "computer science").
