Blair STEM magnet CS program teachers

[Anonymous]

Wow, Ms. Piper is still there! I had her for Magnet CS 25 years ago.

[Anonymous]

Don't worry CS education has remained pretty much the same as it was in the 70s despite the many advances in the real world.

[Anonymous]

Love the Blair magnet, but the CS teachers overall are extremely weak. Mr. G, who is leaaving, was good - trained by Mr. Paul who went on to have a political career.

The other two (sorry, Ms. Piper, b/c I like her as a person), are not up to snuff for the kids and where they are today. It has made the Blair CS classes truly annoying and not great experiences for my kids, who really thrive with the subject matter.

I'm guessing it must be extremely difficult to get good CS teachers b/c if you're good with CS, then you're likely to make a lot of money in businesses vs teaching. I do hope that Mr. Ostrander can find good teachers.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Ms. Piper is not leaving. Mr. Khetarpal (K) is leaving. He was a teacher in training. He did not teach and gave ridiculously hard assignments and tests. The recent final exam he gave he admitted was intentionally made so hard that no one would finish. His assignments and labs did not include any rubric and he changed the grading as and how he saw fit so that no one easily got an A. Per him, he was preparing these freshmen kids for what college profs and courses are like. He will be gong to PHS.

Some of his assignments and tests had errors in them and atleast one of the assignment he gave was so hard that kids were up late trying to finish it. The next day he could also not solve the problem he gave in class. The kids kept finding flaws in his solution. So finally he told he kids that they should just submit a write-up instead of a programming solution (if they couldn't get it to work) and he would give the credit. This, after the kids wasted days and nights trying to program the assignment.

I am 2nd poster and could have written this. Mr. K has totally turned my kid off from comp sci. It's a real bummer. He seemed like a nice guy, but completely agree with everything above poster stated. Serious teaching issues, and I think he should have had more supervision. We actually complained. Is there another student teacher?

[Anonymous]

Same with Mr K with my DD too. Got into ADS-A as she was very interested in CS, but now she is totally turned against CS. Hope the new CS teacher will be a good one.