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Originally Posted by Tomkat
A large proportion of people never NEED to know when to use a database. Why teach them skills like that that are almost entirely useless? If they have an interest in databases (for their future) outside school, then they can pursue it outside the national curriculum.
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Because - and this is an important point so please read slowly so as not to miss anything - you're a
teacher. It may be my idealist expectations of such a professional, but they're supposed to teach and not neglect quite a large part of ICT merely because they personally don't find it useful through their lack of experience. It saying "I don't understand it and have never used it as I've never entered into industry so no-one else will need it and if they do need it they can go somewhere else regardless that
I'm placed here to teach them about ICT and perhaps even spark their intelligence and possible future career."
If say, I was interested in such, I would probably take a course in ICT and I would expect to learn about it properly (as it's a hugely important part of Information Communication Techonology) as opposed to learn how to format a Word document (which isn't). Learning how to format word document is only more useful if 1) you treat your students as idiots who've not learnt about such in their English language class 2) you assume they'll never need to know about databases which is somewhat more likely as
you're not teaching it properly.
You're lack of understanding of databases will cause their lack of understanding and their lack of understanding will close off one career avenue for them.
But as I said, Access is a stupid teaching aid in my experience, and as I doubt you'll actually try to understand databases in any other way to aid your students' edification, let's just call it a draw.