[havblue]

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.

[ecshafer]

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).