Hall Of Shame

I have to share this:

This past Wednesday I had a student interview me in regards to my web business, as Web Development is his major at a 2-year college. During the interview, he told me that he was in amazed that I "hand code", as his teachers all use FrontPage and tell him it is the only way to go. He has no idea how to use any tags since FP does it for him. He had never heard of how to use CSS, he was told that FP does it for him when necessary.

I showed him the FP site that I'm currently cleaning up and I told him to have his teachers look at that site so they can see what constant updating with FP will produce. I told him that, IMO, hand coding is what should be taught, not FP, DW, etc.

One of those teachers just called me to complain that I "have no right to tell his students about a better alternative to FP".

I asked the teacher to direct me to a real website in the real world that he has developed. He told me his job is to teach, not create a site. I then asked if he could accurately describe the use of the <a href> tag and how to make it open in a new window. Total silence. I then asked if he knew what "CSS" stood for and its place in web design. Once again, silence. I asked what PHP is. I asked about asp and its purpose in web design. Still silence. I was sure he hung up on me, but I was wrong.

After 10 seconds of stammering his way through the css question, he summarized his comments by telling me that CSS is a very specific programming language seldom seen in the real world. He admitted he was not familiar with asp and phc (that's right, ph"c"). He feels that since it is seldom used, there is no reason to teach it to the students.

I politely told him that I was too busy to talk further, but I would be happy to meet with him in the future to review his course syllabus to make sure that his students were learning "real world" skills that would allow them to get a job offer after they receive their degree. That's when he finally hung up on me.

It's scary that this is what these schools call web design classes, and what type of employees will be available in the future.

Contributed by Steve Z. in Chicago; originally appeared the Usenet group alt.www.webmaster on January 19, 2006 with Message-ID: <MPG.1e3b0a90816f3f9e989831@newsgroups.comcast.net>.

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