In an earlier post, I discussed how the Java Certification course was established in my school. This time, I’ll talk about some of the challenges and opportunities that I was faced with during the class. Firstly, since this was the first time that something like this was being done, there was no set curriculum to follow. My teacher had to come up with a plan, and discussed it with us. He took the input of every student willing to enroll in the course and finally decided how to teach everyone the material. Since all of the students had already taken the AP Computer Science A course, no one had to learn Java from scratch, which made things easier. Most of the students already knew most of the material, so having one whole year to get ready for the test did not seem like a hard task. However, since this had never been done before, we were unaware about which parts we would struggle with and which parts we would not have problems with. Due to this, my teacher struggled to keep everyone on the same page, and most of the students, including me had to rely more on ourselves than the teacher. This was new territory for me teacher, so we could not rely on him as much. Personally, I did not think that there was anything that could not be taught to high-schoolers, but there definitely were a few topics and concepts that were difficult to grasp. After we learned the topics, we went on eclipse and tested its different applications and familiarized ourselves with. Other people often asked me for help. The teacher was doing his best, but could only help a handful of students at at time, so some of the other students in need of help asked people who were ahead of them. We all tried to help each other succeed and tried to make sure that everyone passed. I think that I got something unique out of this class, something that I would not have learned otherwise. Usually, classes are led by the teacher, and it’s mostly one way instruction with limited communication from the student’s side. However, in this course, our teacher learned with us every step of the way. Students were helping each other as best as they could, and I think that brought our whole class together. By the end of the year, we had all become really good friends and came to better understand each other. Usually, people want to do better than others, but in this class, I think most of us wanted success for ourselves as well as everyone else. In the end, most of us passed the test and the hard work that we put in during the year paid off. The course gave me a truly unique experience, and I think I learned what it means to be part of a supportive and positive community through the class.
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