I'll Learn Perl After I Teach It

Our company was trying to woo an IT college for a web page. This is like getting to do first aid on a doctor. The truth be known, this IT college probably wasn't able to turn out graduates from its web design programme. They couldn't set up a web server to save their life. Graduates of their graphic design courses couldn't even manage a stick figure in PC Paintbrush. I won't mention the "College" by name. Let's just sum them up with a pseudo-haiku. They are:
Completely
Detrimential to the
Information technology workforce.

After a while, I stopped doing sales calls. Our lead dweeb went out to try to snag the college. He came back after an hour or to announce. "They want me to teach their Perl course.... can someone teach it to me?" He wasn't joking. Even though he had a Perl book on his book shelf, he had never cracked it.

When it came time to teach, he would goad a twitchy guy who worked with him to develop sample code. The courses were weekly, he made up a lesson plan on the morning of the course and then pushed twitchy to write the code with 10-20 min. of warning. Oh yeah, that'd be solid code.

When people asked him questions in class that he didn't know the answer, he had favourte phrases:

• "What would you think could be the solution to that?"
• "If I tell you, then you'll know."
• "That's a Perl of great price."

The students like him, because he challenged them. The college liked him because they didn't know he was full of crap. As he did this work through FoolSoft, the money went to FoolSoft then he got a cut. Towards the end of his tenture at FoolSoft, he needed more money. He was getting hammered for not paying his taxes. Technically, they weren't his taxes. Years before, he needed a job and he didn't have a social security number so rather than wait, he made up a number and was lucky enough to get one that matched the SIN# checksum. Since then, he was using that SIN# on his taxes. I told people in two levels of government about his scam. They seemed uninterested. He stopped paying taxes. So, the government pounded him for back taxes and started to guaransue his FoolSoft wages. Ever the weasel, he got some of his cheques directly from the college. The college was really comfy with separating hapless kids from their tuitions, so they didn't see a problem separating FoolSoft from its revenue.

Eventually, the dweeb fled the country to defraud people in new lands. He left behind students who needed to wrap up their course in mock Perl (mock in that they were they trying to learn Perl for real, but their teacher taught them nothing). He also left behind his "teacher's mug." This crappy mug that he got from the college in gratitude for his great service. One of the other FoolSoft founders found the mug while clearing stuff from the FoolSoft office. He took a hammer, a garbage basket and the mug. He shattered the mug over the garbage can (even while angry he was tidy) and proclaimed, "There's your fucking teacher's mug."

The lesson to be learned? Tech colleges have good courses and bad courses; good teachers and shams. I haven't heard of the former in either case, but they-- like the loch ness monster and the gunmen on the grassy knowle-- probably exist. In the above case, the college scammed the students by hiring an unvetted teacher. They left the course with paperwork, but no job skills. Indirectly, the college scammed those future employers of their graduates. They scammed another company by siphoning money from the teacher's employer to direct to the teacher. Would I hire a graduate from this college or one of the many colleges like it? Sure: as a janitor.

tags : tech colleges Perl teaching CDI