Date: Sat, 7 Jun 2003 21:39:50 -0700 (PDT) From: ewrt ewrt Subject: I am in your cs201 class Bro Colton I am one of your CS201 students, and your expressed concern for your students not meeting expectation in grade last Friday has caused me to speak to you on the mater. First of all, you expressed bewilderment that the midterm exam scores were as low as they were, and that they were like that last midterm and last semester. You also have often made remarks that students don’t use the lab as much as they should. I think I can give you some explanations to your questions that you as the professor can’t see from your prospective. First of all, I believe you are an excellent teacher in this course and not really at fault for weak results. I believe the answer is not found in one thing but it is in a combination of issues that I can bring to light because of my standing in the curse. Second of all, it was no surprise to me to see the resulted scores. I fell in the midrange of it all, and knew beforehand that if I were not able to do well on my programs, I had nothing to worry about and that I still would not fall behind in this class. Lets start with what we do in class and use the CGI for example. If my judgment is accurate, you have a brilliant plan of how you teach us in that we are dependent upon the need of the lab to help us develop our own thinking to create our own programs and not just copy from what you show us. In the example of the CGI files, you wasted the whole class time in teaching us an example of CGI by eventually creating a good example of CGI and not offering any form of it to the class. You have very well written instructions to help us learn it, but we have no example whatsoever of what CGI looks like inside, not even in the Perl book. It is needed that you send us a copy of any CGI file and its output so we have something to base our structure our programs from and how the computer presses information. It was rather difficult to get anything to work in the SSH because we have no clue of what we could be missing because we have no idea what should have been in it. Also, you only offered one day of training in HTML but you base 25% of your tests on this one lesson. If you allow us to have an example of CGI it is uncertain. We are unsure of how to attain one if you and the lab do not offer any. When it comes to the lab, I have found that the only way you can make use of it is if you have at least 95% knowledge of what you are doing. Undoubtedly the lab tutors can’t write our programs but they don’t teach us anything you are purposely leaving out in class. Many students in the lab learn absolutely nothing. If the tutor helps, I have to make them come and sit down and tell me what certain function are doing to my program. Neither you nor the tutors tell/teach us what the computer is reading and in the order it has to process information. That is why so many students don’t go to the lab; half of them feel they don’t fall into the category having enough knowledge to have more knowledge given them, and more importantly when they have the program, they still don’t understand it. We write the programs that make sense to us but we are never taught what the computer really needs to look for. When we finally have programs for gradebot, we can’t duplicate the answer because we don’t know why it worked the first time. The Tutors need to do better in helping us think what the computer needs to know, AND they need to understand that the majority of Bro Colton’s class doesn’t have a clue of what to do. I find there are problems in both the class and in the lab. --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Free online calendar with sync to Outlook(TM).