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Discussion on: What are the skills that a public school Computer Science teacher should possess?

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rrackiewicz

I personally favor the language agnostic point of view in favor of someone who can teach what really goes on in side of a computer. Basically, a first principles approach to computer science. We have an overabundance of programmers in this country that ride the wave of hot technology/languages, and a severe underabundance of programmers that first and foremost understand how computers work and choose the best technology/language to fit the requirements of the job. The former will also struggle to find meaningful and continuous work. Get kids excited about computers, not hot technology and languages. The rest will fall into place.

Putting the grand plan aside, if I had to pick a few simple languages to teach beginners, I'd favor Scheme for functional programming and Python for OOP (there's only one way to do it).