Did you have good or bad compulsory IT classes?

[ToastiestZombie]

So, if you're younger than say 30 then you've probably had some sort of computer education in high school, elementary school, primary or secondary school. So what were yours like? Were they good, bad or incredibly meh. Here's a story that I reckon will tell you my views.

We were told to do some animation on powerpoint using the simplest of tools, and using things we already know about. But, since I had begun to learn the basics of flash I decided to get a little practise in and animate is using flash. I put in some basic motion tweens to make a ball move between two table tennis bats, and put a simple loop on it. The teacher came over, and gave me a fucking commendation and a sticker for doing something they should of been fucking teaching if they've been teaching animation! If you can do custom animations on powerpoint, you can make a motion tween on flash. But because the classes appeal to the stupidest types of people there are anyone with even a hint of a brain could fly through it.

 

[Virus0015]

I only did up to short course ICT at GCSE.

I aced the coursework with full marks and was 1 point away from an A*. So in short, it is easy as fuck. I hear A level ICT is just a mindless slog with hundreds of pages of boring coursework.

My school had 1 competent ICT teacher and 1 who was complete shit, he is gone now thankfully.

Not sure how you stuck with it it. I took long course, got bored and dropped down to short course, got bored and dropped it altogether.

So many evidence screen shots, so little fucks to give.

I may have stuck with it if the syllabus was semi-decent, apparently the UK government is fixing it soon.

 

[Total LOLige]

They were a piece of piss and boring as shit because they were so easy I joked around with friends, this made the ICT teacher dislike me. I always got the work done, I just liked pissing about more.

 

[ToastiestZombie]

They were a piece of piss and boring as shit because they were so easy I joked around with friends, this made the ICT teacher dislike me. I always got the work done, I just liked pissing about more.

Yeah, before GCSE's pretty much every lesson was me getting all the work done to a really good standard, but it was "terrible" because I had decided to make the endless powerpoint presentations and excel spreadsheets fun. For example, I decided to not do a boring theme park for our theme park project and instead do an incredibly offensive yet hilarious park called "Pensioners Park". Pretty sure you can guess the outcome of my teacher seeing that.

 

[Dags90]

My school never had a formal computer education class. You learned relevant programs as part of your normal classwork and the library staff were always there to answer any computer related questions for schoolwork. There was an optional typing efficiency class in high school which I took. Mostly we just played games because everyone was reasonably proficient at typing already. I still don't touch type the "correct" way with the home row stuff but I don't think it really holds me back, I do alright.

I think I first used a computer in class in third grade.

 

[ToastiestZombie]

They were a piece of piss and boring as shit because they were so easy I joked around with friends, this made the ICT teacher dislike me. I always got the work done, I just liked pissing about more.

Yeah, before GCSE's pretty much every lesson was me getting all the work done to a really good standard, but it was "terrible" because I had decided to make the endless powerpoint presentations and excel spreadsheets fun. For example, I decided to not do a boring theme park for our theme park project and instead do an incredibly offensive yet hilarious park called "Pensioners Park". Pretty sure you can guess the outcome of my teacher seeing that.

Before GCSEs I installed VLC onto my computer and watched films during class, our teacher gave me the admin password to do it.

She also introduced me to piracy on my DS by telling me about flashcards and how they worked. She was a cool teacher.

Damn, my teacher was basically what you would get if you put the most boring computer how to book in a suit. He didn't even let us change our wallpapers, or do anything but mindless Microsoft Office shit. Seriously, I swear that guy sucked everything fun about computing for every single one of us. I knew a kid who really wanted to learn how to make flash animations, so when we were doing an animation lesson for a "reward" he decided to do it on flash instead of using the shitty powerpoint custom animations. He got a bloody lunch-time detention for trying to learn how to animate for real!

 

[Total LOLige]

They were a piece of piss and boring as shit because they were so easy I joked around with friends, this made the ICT teacher dislike me. I always got the work done, I just liked pissing about more.

Yeah, before GCSE's pretty much every lesson was me getting all the work done to a really good standard, but it was "terrible" because I had decided to make the endless powerpoint presentations and excel spreadsheets fun. For example, I decided to not do a boring theme park for our theme park project and instead do an incredibly offensive yet hilarious park called "Pensioners Park". Pretty sure you can guess the outcome of my teacher seeing that.

That reminds me of an "offensive" piece of art I did in art class. The class had to make a headdress with an underwater theme, everyone else in the class was making jellyfish hats and shit. I made a piece of "art" in the style of those arrow through the head things from joke shops, instead of an arrow it was a harpoon. On top of the headdress I made a whale, the whale had a speech bubble that said "Right in the blow hole" I was going for a subtle sexual innuendo. My art "teacher" picked up on this and said that some people might find it offensive so I had to remove the speech bubble. He didn't say that a whale headdress with a harpoon was inappropriate, he should have found that offensive. I pissed about in art as well.

 

[ToastiestZombie]

They were a piece of piss and boring as shit because they were so easy I joked around with friends, this made the ICT teacher dislike me. I always got the work done, I just liked pissing about more.

Yeah, before GCSE's pretty much every lesson was me getting all the work done to a really good standard, but it was "terrible" because I had decided to make the endless powerpoint presentations and excel spreadsheets fun. For example, I decided to not do a boring theme park for our theme park project and instead do an incredibly offensive yet hilarious park called "Pensioners Park". Pretty sure you can guess the outcome of my teacher seeing that.

That reminds me of an "offensive" piece of art I did in art class. The class had to make a headdress with an underwater theme, everyone else in the class was making jellyfish hats and shit. I made a piece of "art" in the style of those arrow through the head things from joke shops, instead of an arrow it was a harpoon. On top of the headdress I made a whale, the whale had a speech bubble that said "Right in the blow hole" I was going for a subtle sexual innuendo. My art "teacher" picked up on this and said that some people might find it offensive so I had to remove the speech bubble. He didn't say that a whale headdress with a harpoon was inappropriate, he should have found that offensive. I pissed about in art as well.

I love sharing these types of stories! Here's another one of mine! It was in year 9 french (not taking that now and will never take it again) and we had to write a letter to our pen pals in france, in english. I thought that since I had to write a letter to the same person another person in my class was writing to, I thought I might as well make it funny and a little bit dumb. So I decided to do a really, REALLY funny letter about how scary ghosts haunt my house and about how I like bagels. Teacher (who was Frecnh herself by the way) came to look at it, she read it and said "This is just offending to French people! You might make him think he's dumb!". Seriously, she said that... fuckin' teachers sometimes!

 

[Total LOLige]

SNIP

Yeah teachers just don't get humour.

 

[Scarim Coral]

I took IT in Hightschool during my AS/ A level.

During the AS level year the lesson were bad as the bloody teacher (who is quite old before you asked) just keep focusing his attention to help the bloody girl group of the class (attention bitches as they were screaming for help). It also doesn't help that the other group keep playing RnB, the type of musics I hate.
It wasn't suprising that I got an E during the exam since he fail to inform us of the requirement guideline to meet in order to get a higher markings for our projects.

In A level we did get a new younger teacher who is far more useful compared to the old sod. He was a friendly and awesome guy too as he was more helpful (willing to stay after school had ended when I needed some help) and he was the one who us this clip (before the birth of youtube)-
Ok I did get a D for the exam result but I never blame him for that.

 

[sky14kemea]

Our IT course wasn't compulsory, but I took it 'cause I thought it'd help later on. We went off-site to do an ECDL course with another company, which was good because our teacher was shockingly bad.

She was an ex-math teacher, and was only 1 lesson ahead of us herself, which pretty much explains why she knew next to nothing. She even kept asking me for help when I'd gotten further in a lesson just by guessing what she wanted us to do next. xD

I did get an E-Type certificate (Touch-typing, basically), because she wanted someone to test it out on. It was kinda nerve wracking, because she insisted on complete silence for me, so all everyone could hear was me rattling the keyboard to death. O-o

There were good sides to it though. We could basically get away with anything in her classes. I'd have my iPod on 90% of the time, and my friend just used to play Flash games.

Goooood times.

 

[Esotera]

Atrocious, but really easy as a GCSE. We had to design a website based around several activities for some hypothetical company, and this was all stuff like taking screenshots of powerpoint et cetera. The sysadmin incorrectly set up the permissions on the server though, meaning you could use a directory traversal to write a file into someone else's user profile. This was routinely used as a messaging service in notepad...

 

[IndomitableSam]

This was about 15 years ago, so bear that in mind. We (my sister and I) took a "computer science" course in high school designed to teach us the basics of coding. I forget what, specifically. Anyway, we were the only two girls in the class and he did not teach - he showed people individually how to do things. He did not show my sister and I anything.

We were supposed to code something (again, I forget what program) to make little characters run around a baseball field. I figured it out enough to get them all to third base, and then they got stuck. Oddly. Could not figure it out.

I remember calling over the teacher, he looked at the code and said "This is completley wrong, how did you manage to screw this up so badly?" then walked away.

We ended up dropping the class as he refused to help us.

... I also ended up dropping the calculus class he taught. He had a thing for timed quizzes almost daily and even if you knew the stuff, if you couldn't finish 3-5 questions in 5 minutes, you failed. Seriously? Who gives 5-minute calculus tests?

 

[Wintermoot]

the only reason I did bad on compulsory IT was due to dutch terms overall if my IT classes weren't based on Babbage (some sort of program that assumes I just discovered computers) I would have breezed past it.

 

[DoPo]

Mine was very bad. We had compulsory IT and umm other kind of IT classes in year 10 and 11. It was something like Informatics for one half of the year and then, well, IT, the other half. I can't even remember the difference other than the teachers. Both of them were utterly boring, though. We learned Microsoft Office (and I had gone to another computer course before, that did that, as well) which was easy. Then we had some programming in Pascal which I remember absolutely nothing about. Seriously, we probably had 2-3 lessons or something because I only remember that I should have done Pascal but for the life of me I can't remember anything else than that. Oh, we also had some basic DOS training. Also, I had been repairing friend's computers (and mine) for a while now, and when the Windows installation gets corrupted, you're left with a) going through DOS and fixing stuff quickly and painlessly b) reinstall the OS. I was doing both in equal measures so DOS was no mystery to me. Well, at least not the basics, I wouldn't call myself a power user.

And in year 12, the last one, we had a so called "compulsory elective class", which meant, that we got to choose what to take - the choice was between history, geography, maths, chemistry and more IT. I went with IT because they promised to teach us how to make websites. Well, not really. The very first classes we had, the teacher went off about what HTML is and what markup is...stuff I knew, since I had been visiting forums for the past...4-5 years or something. I had to listen for about 10 minutes about how HTML is basically the father of BBCode (not the teacher's actual words, he made it sound way more complex), so at that point I just went to w3schools and looked up how to make an actual web page. So these were the first sessions - the teacher would blab about trivial things, while I'd read stuff on w3schools. Later we actually did some stuff...only it was so easy, it was mind numbing. Let me give you an example - our test consisted of each student picking a random piece of paper which had a table there and we had to do it in HTML. Yeah. Oh, it was something like, three rows, the first one consisting of a single cell, the second having three and the final having four, or something, the middle cell will have some text that is left aligned and three other cells would have a background colour. And the sizes, hex colours and all relevant info, was there on the piece of paper. I finished mine in about 5-10 minutes and when the teacher came to see it he was amazed, amazed that it looked exactly the same as the sample.

But that's not really the worst. We learned HTML, all right, but we learned it badly after some more web programming knowledge I was horrified how bad things were. No CSS, all inline attributes, no valid HTML, and we were taught frames. Frames! A technology and practice that must die a horrible painful death. Also, making the webpages layout in tables. I cringe any time I see a website doing it now. We spent an entire year learning the very basics of how HTML works, no actual useful skills for building a webpage. It was horrible.