Question

After a burst of ranting about homework, the applicability of the classes I'm taking, and my computer science teacher, I have some questions concerning education for my career path as a developer.

I taught myself everything I know about programming. I've been thinking lately about the advantages of teaching myself vs. learning from a teacher. I feel I might miss some things I would normally learn. I might learn some concepts wrong, or something. After all, computer science eduction has been around longer than I have.

The problem is, I'm not learning anything new about computer science in my programming class. I put the computer programming 2 course on my schedule (it was labeled as Computer Science when I signed up for it). It turns out that it's just learning C++ and of course OOP. In fact, the CP2 students are in the same classroom at the same time as the CP2 students, except the CP1 course is a half-year class instead of full year. I thought we'd do something like data structures (other than arrays), or something I'm less experienced in. The teacher had me change my schedule to CP1, but he "lets me loose" to work on projects with the CP2 students while he teaches the CP1 students.

I usually end up helping the CP2 students with build errors and things like that after I'm done. I certainly don't mind helping them, but I'm not learning anything new, and I likely won't, seeing that AFAIK linked lists will be the most advanced concept taught (for the CP2 students; The class ends this semester for CP1, including me). Frankly, I'm not interested in copying source code from paper to screen, which is 90% of what the CP2 students do.

I want to be learning something computer science related. I'd hate to sit around waiting for my options to catch up. I want to take classes not offered by my high school, like discrete mathematics, algorithms and data structures, or something like that.

So my question is, where can I take classes which aren't offered by my high school? Can I take college classes? (keep in mind there isn't any concurrent, AP, or distance-ed classes concerning computer science offered by my high school besides the CP1/CP2 class I'm in). Do you know any online classes I could take?

Thanks, Danny Shields

P.S: I talk about my programming experience on my StackExchange profile if it helps.

No correct solution

Licensed under: CC-BY-SA with attribution
scroll top