In highschool, age 14, I was taking a turbo pascal class.
The teacher had assigned us to pick a project to work on for 2 weeks.
I had picked replicating some basic dos application. I legitimately just wanted to know how it worked and get down to a lower level and reimplement it.
The teacher kept asserting "it already exists, pick something else". I was young and didn't really know how to explain it to her at the time and kept insisting on that project.
It turned into some big hoopla, dragging my parents into the principal where we sat and discussed options. They had no idea of what was going on. The teacher kept pushing implementing a card game, I think it was poker. I being completely unreasonable immediately latched onto, "why does it have to be gambling? Why not something useful?"
Neither I, nor my parents had anything against a poker game morally, but that really changed the tone of the conversation and we ultimately landed on a big int implementation.
She had legitimately thought it was some gotcha and was noticeably angry when I demoed it 2 weeks later. It was of course the most naive implementation imaginable but worked well beyond the expectations assigned.
I never told her I finished it in a couple hours.
Whenever I think about it, it just kills me how disfunctional that school was on so many levels. I suppose I was lucky though to have computer science classes at that age in the 90's.
Your teacher being picky about the project you picked sounds a bit ridiculous. It sounds like she was attempting to force you to work on something you weren't interested in when you could have taught yourself better by choosing your own project.
I think in the 90s a lot of schools didn't have a large pool of qualified teachers for cs classes. In my experience, "programming" from the high school level involved finding a teacher who was available, maybe the person who was responsible for the computer lab, and telling him to crack a book.
I took a CS class in highschool the 2000s, this was about 2005 I think. The CS "teacher" had been teaching CS there for a decade I think. Which sure I think that I was lucky to have that class. But she was just a math teacher, if she had taken a computer science class, it was a single one 20 years prior in the 80s. She didn't really have any actual understanding of concepts and skipped some major parts of computer science even at that level (no concept of structs or objects or heap/stack in a C++ class).
Wow. Glad it worked out. There were at least some good high school CS teachers in the 90s. Ours knew that a lot of kids joined the class who were burned out on school, and insisted on going beyond the curriculum to the point where those guys would have a chance at a coding job right out of school - if they put in the work. We also had to implement binary arithmetic from scratch (booleans) although I think that was in the curriculum.
The teacher had assigned us to pick a project to work on for 2 weeks.
I had picked replicating some basic dos application. I legitimately just wanted to know how it worked and get down to a lower level and reimplement it.
The teacher kept asserting "it already exists, pick something else". I was young and didn't really know how to explain it to her at the time and kept insisting on that project.
It turned into some big hoopla, dragging my parents into the principal where we sat and discussed options. They had no idea of what was going on. The teacher kept pushing implementing a card game, I think it was poker. I being completely unreasonable immediately latched onto, "why does it have to be gambling? Why not something useful?"
Neither I, nor my parents had anything against a poker game morally, but that really changed the tone of the conversation and we ultimately landed on a big int implementation.
She had legitimately thought it was some gotcha and was noticeably angry when I demoed it 2 weeks later. It was of course the most naive implementation imaginable but worked well beyond the expectations assigned.
I never told her I finished it in a couple hours.
Whenever I think about it, it just kills me how disfunctional that school was on so many levels. I suppose I was lucky though to have computer science classes at that age in the 90's.