And they removed AP Computer Science that same year, when I was about to take it, that's why I had to settle with the class that taught VB. The state of HS education in this country makes me sad.
Back in 10th grade (2007), I had the option of choosing a programming course, but I chose not to. But at least the class was teaching C++ and not VB6.
Any form of VB is still computer programming, and would have been a big step up.
> The state of HS education in this country makes me sad.
Yes, and that is not going to change unless we privatize education.
Because poor people don't really need to learn how to read!
Yeah, go back to the glory days of the Forties. The Eighteen-Forties.
If in 100 years the government provided clothing, and I advocated privatizing clothing, you'd say, "Becuase poor people don't need to wear clothes!"
Where I'm from (in the US), many poor people _don't_ achieve a basically acceptable level of education, because the public schools don't ultimately serve them well for various reasons, and they drop out (or just don't learn but keep getting passed on through the grades). We're talking like high schoolers at a 5th grade reading level, for example.
So it's not like the status quo is a panacea.
It has in the past. Which is my point.
Good for you. The rest of us can look at history with less bias on this subject.
Which makes your claim factually incorrect.
Since you're making unfounded assumptions, maybe you need to check your whole mental model on this topic.
Or start paying higher taxes so that public education is given the funding they need to implement these programs.
There's no AB course any more either. It's just one course, the equivalent of the old A.
I taught at a school with a VB 6.0 curriculum at the end of the last decade. The (veteran) teacher just continued using his old materials; he was a math teacher with some CS experience. He kept it because budgets were tight, everything ran snappily, and new computers and textbooks are expensive.
As long as a teacher is teaching programming fundamentals, it really doesn't matter (in the long run, educationally) what a student's first language is. They'll get it. Better to go with something that the teacher's good at and that interests the students.