May 31, 2015

Dozens of spiders ‘attack’ students during exam

Filed under: Weird by Branko Collin @ 11:58 pm

High school students in Zaltbommel got a fright when dozens of spiders came crawling under the doors of the sports facility in which they were having their written graduation tests.

The exams continued uninterrupted, but afterwards at least one student wrote a complaint to LAKS (the union for secondary education students), which is how we found out. LAKS received a record number of complaints (140,000) from the 200,000 students taking exams this year. The complaints ranged from smelly teachers to difficult exam questions.

Why the spiders wanted to be in the hall is unknown. Trouw doesn’t tell.

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April 1, 2013

Computer science unpopular in secondary school

Filed under: IT by Branko Collin @ 12:38 pm

Only 1 in 20 Dutch secondary school students choose to take a computer science course, Webwereld reports.

On average Dutch high schools have one computer science teacher who received their last training ten years ago.

I remember when computer science was introduced at my grammar school in the mid-1980s, the instructors were our regular maths teachers who often did not know what they were doing. The booklet that came with the course was flimsy—I had finished reading it before the semester started and spent the rest of my time programming games. What was worse was that the course was aimed at the few who were interested in programming, even though learning how to use a word processor and a spreadsheet would have been more useful to the majority of the pupils.

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