Thursday, 30 August 2012

Why CS graduates don’t teach, but it’s not inherent to CS

I mentioned that a UK survey of CS graduates found that fewer of them went into teaching than did other kinds of graduates. The below blog piece tries to explain why that’s a case, and generally suggests that it’s not because of money. In other countries, CS graduates do teach, e.g., Israeli CS teachers get a CS degree, first. The problem is likely cultural to the region, not inherent to the discipline. It is a real concern that computer scientists are not getting involved much in creating more high school teachers — computer scientists are not going to be happy with the result if we don’t participate and influence the preparation of the teachers and the definition of the curriculum.

I found that the Computer Science graduates from my course fitted into one of two categories. They either chose CS because they thought it could make them a lot of money, or because they were a bit of a geek and they were into that kind of thing. The first group are lost already – you don’t earn anywhere near as much in teaching as you potentially could do in industry. The other group by their very nature are usually not particularly comfortable with social situations, and may find it their idea of hell to stand up in front of lots of people, let alone do it every day as a job. I’m not saying everyone shuffled around staring at the floor wearing 2 week old clothes and grunting for social interaction, but putting oneself on show in such a manner as teaching demands is not usually within a geek’s comfort zone – unless of course the room is filled with other geeks, which at school it definitely isn’t.

Deepa Singh
Business Developer
Email Id:-deepa.singh@soarlogic.com

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