Will your CS courses get the axe?
Joe Kmoch
Chair, SIGCS
Washington High School of Information Technology
Very recent headlines like "Tech sector employment market grim…"
and "Offshoring
of IT Jobs only Beginning" make you wonder. Is this more fodder for
school systems
to use as an excuse to cut programs, thus saving money? I hope not,
but it's
already happening. I've always been a strong proponent of computer
science courses
in high school and computer programming units in middle school. If
what we teach
goes beyond teaching another computer language, at least we have a
fighting
chance.
I continue to read article after article about the problems in the US
tech
sector which point to two items which are helping individuals survive
these
issues. Having analysis skills and strong interpersonal skills makes
one more
marketable. At the middle and high school levels, I think these
translate into
problem solving/analysis skill development and employability skills
development.
You might agree that it's really easy to have computer science slip
into a
course in which another language is taught, spending lots of time
pounding code
and debugging syntax issues and not so much time having students
develop solutions
by thinking through problems. It's much harder to get kids to think
about a
problem than just to give them your analysis and have them code it.
Avoiding
this in your computer science classroom takes effort but is really
worth it
for the kids.
Developing interpersonal skills is another huge issue. In fact, I'm
not even
sure that much can be done in a single course. At our school a small
group of
us developed six week-long foci. Each week we focus on a particular
skill in
our classes. These are Ethics/Integrity, Communication, Professional
Attire,
Attendance/Punctuality, Team Work, Work Habits. During the week we try
to integrate
or at least talk about the skill of the week.
These were developed along with our business partners. After working
on these
through the school year in classes, our business partners could see
improvement
in interviews, for example, at the end of the school year. They really
think
that the focus on these skills in combination with what we do in our
technology
courses makes a difference.
Making sure our courses include these elements will provide support
when the
budget axe starts to fall in our direction. If you're interested in a
PowerPoint
presentation and some handouts we put together dealing with our
employability
skills development project, please email me at
<kmoch@whs.edu>.
Joe Kmoch
9/16/2004
|
