[/caption]One of the skills that I recommend to any teacher, of any discipline, is computer programming, at least in a very basic form. If there is one thing that a computer excels at is at being a particularly slow and dim-witted student. It won't come to conclusions, it won't complete or order your ideas, and it definitely won't make those deductive leaps that make a teacher's life so much easier.
Imagine trying to teach a computer to play "Happy Birthday to You". You tell the computer the notes, and it will answer "I don't understand." so you have to translate those notes into something it will understand. Once you do that, you tell it the notes again, and it will say "What's a note?" and after that you have to specifically tell it to learn each note individually and keep it in its memory and to reproduce each note at the right time, doing so for each and every thing it does. In other words, a computer is an idiot. You have to take what you want it to do and organize it and analyze it until you are sure that even an idiot would be able to follow you. Thankfully, most students aren't as slow and dim-witted as a computer although some come close with the added difficulty of having a hard drive that erases itself every few seconds.
When you program a computer, you are forced to think about your material in a completely different way. It will help you develop an analytical approach to the subjects you are teaching. It is not always about getting the computer to do something, but about what you are left with after you do. You can learn a lot from the computer, the same way one learns the most from the slowest and dimmest students in the class.
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