Current mood:	cranky
Current music:	[Kitchie Nadal] Wag na Wag Mong Sasabihin (#5 - Kitchie Nadal)

Don't mind me; I'm just venting overdue heat
I’m often asked how I’m doing in school (Adamson University), what year I’m in (records aren’t in agreement; I’m officially a sophomore, but I’m taking up 3rd year majors), and, most especially why I haven’t finished college yet.

So I tell them: All of the professors I’ve had for my majors are total fuck-tards. They don’t know, let alone understand, what they’re supposed to be teaching. In fact, I go all out, and say that the whole lot of them are stupid.

That’s when I get blank looks, incredulous stares, and/or apprehensive disbelief.

What’s so hard to believe about it? When you think about it, it makes perfect sense. ‘Computer Science’ isn’t as much a science as it is an art; the field has only been around for about half a century or so—barely enough time for sound theories to be thought up, understood, and prepped for teaching.

At this point in time, anyone who has the time to whip up lesson plans, prepare exams, compute grades and deal with all the other brouhaha that comes with being in Education (hah!) is practically guaranteed to not have the time required to monitor the things that are happening to the field.

Reliable sources have informed me of the existence of actual teachers (as opposed to professors, who only profess their ignorance of the subject matter, and to doctors, who merely, well, doct) that, at the very least, admit that they can’t and don’t know everything there is to know about ‘Computer Science’. Unfortunately, in all my years of being in school, I’ve never met one of these (to me) mythical creatures.

I hope I can do so, before I die.

That’s something that puzzles me, as well: How can anyone with a measurable IQ even begin to presume that he (not to be sexist; perpetrators of this crime have usually been male) has the requisite knowledge to teach a floundering field?

I don’t care if you’ve graduated even from Berkeley, Harvard, CMU or even MIT: YOU WILL NOT PERSUADE ME THAT YOU HAVE WHAT IT TAKES TO TEACH THE FIELD.

The most I’ll agree with is that you’re further along than the rest of the planet.

Why is it that just about all CS professors have the chutzpah to act like they’re omniscient? That when they’re wrong, and a student’s right, they’ll declare it the other way around, and make the rest of the semester a living hell for you? I practically failed my Assembly class a year ago; a class where the prof didn’t even know what the ORG 100H instruction does, when it’s in every introductory ASM book I’ve picked up.

And so what if I called him stupid to his face? Is it a crime to say the truth?

I don’t mind lack of knowledge in professors: like I said, no one can know everything about anything. What galls me is their obvious apathy, their unwillingness to admit their lack and actually do something about it. That, and the way they walk around like they’ve been declared the ‘Irrevocably Best CS Professor of All Time’.

Pfah! I spit in your general direction, undereducated pigdogs!

It’s a frequent statement of mine that, in CS, if you’re gone six months, you’ll need a year to catch up; after that year, you now have two sets of six months each’s worth of studying to catch up—and so on, and so forth, ad nauseaum. Look at what has happened these month alone: BitKeeper has proved how sucky it is because it’s proprietary, and Torvalds is caught with his foot in his mouth; GCC 4.0 has been released; there is a sudden rush of SCM development, among which Bazaar-NG is my current favorite; Sun has finally revealed itself to be the hideous profiteering ass it has always been; the call for a free (as in freedom) BIOS has been strengthened.

These merely from the first page of the hits from a search in Google News for the string “Richard Stallman”.

Now, I ask: Is it merely enough that a professor has graduated from a reputable school? Or does he have to have at least a Master’s degree? Personally, I don’t give rat’s patootie where a prof graduated from, or even if he has never finished high school; I don’t care if he has ten doctorates, even if they’re all earned (and not merely ‘honorary degrees’). As far as I’m concerned, universities should only hire experienced programmers to teach programming, not some button-pushing, paper-shuffling university-type whose only virtue is his perfection of ass-kissing.

But, then, that requirement practically guarantees that no competent teachers will ever be hired. After all, if you’re already doing what you want to do, why leave it?

Sigh. I guess the old adage is true (at least for Computer Science): Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.