You’d think so, wouldn’t you. For a year, I watched someone who was an experienced middle school math teacher teach computer science. He had a degree in Computer Science and I think he went through the alternative certification route.
He wasn’t a good teacher. On his good days, he might have been equal to my bad days, my first year. Maybe. I always thought I was being generous. However, he spent too much time talking and not enough time letting students do. The mistake that most teachers make in a computer lab. His classroom management technique was to pick on the whitest kid on the class and make the rest of the kids think they were next.
I might go too far the other way. I think students stay engaged longer, if you talk less and let them work more. I tend to let them stay in their holes too long. I need to work on getting them to ask for help.
By the way, the reason he wasn’t teaching middle school math – he wasn’t very good at it – and he left teaching after trying computer science.
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