| | | Short version:
I know at least 5 students filing for chargeback with their credit card companies. The class was extremely disorganized with a bad teacher who couldn’t prepare a lesson plan before class or make it on time to class and then later on an industry professional teacher who left after not being paid on time by the director. The director knew how unorganizezd the class was and then on the 8th or 9th week in, he finally said we didn’t have to pay the 15% of our first year’s salary anymore…it was that bad.
Unless the school could produce a syllabus with resources and lesson plans on it as well as a teacher who is a responsible enough to prepare exercises and daily lesson plans, DON’T GO.
Long Version:
I’m from the 4th cohort of School of Devs. I heard the first one went well as instructors had a lot of experience and came from General Assembly. I heard that the second cohort ended weeks before it should have and the third lasted maybe 2 weeks but since everyone was preoccupied with the holidays in winter, it didn’t last. So now onto my cohort.
We started in Jan, and I would say we started off with about 26 people perhaps on a payment of plan of either paying $12,500 or another option that most people took of paying $2,500 + 15% of your first year’s salary.
Unprepared Teacher
The first week, I found our class wasting at least 6 hours throughout the first few days installing programs (Sublime, WebStorm, SourceTree, HipChat). Although the teacher could have just told us what to download beforehand, he couldn’t even prepare a day in advance. There seemed like no preparation for our class and no syllabus was ever provided despite multiple students asking for it multiple times. The teacher kept telling us to ask the director for it.
Our teacher, Adam, would come to class consistently late with an excuse that he doesn’t have a car so has to wait for a ride, who was another student and his friend in the class. Not only that, he would come back from lunches late as well, sometimes drinking beer during lunch. It wasn’t fair to the students who PAID for the class and came on time.
Also, when he would troubleshoot a person’s computer issue or code, I’ve seen him spend up to 2 hours on it, and forget about the rest of the class with nothing assigned to do, in essence wasting everyone else’s time instead of sticking to a schedule and moving forward.
When we would ask questions, he had a tendency to answer a different question, and told us to go online and look for the answers for ourselves and ask our classmates before asking him, which defeats the purpose of paying for the class in my opinion. When we asked him for examples, he rarely had any prepared and he would respond with, “it depends on what you’re doing and you have to know what you’re doing first,” leaving most of us confused still. When he would lecture, he would quickly go over concepts and use a lot of terminology that he never taught us and rarely did he have us code along. I think we all finally gave up listening to him and instead would ask the teaching assistant for a lot of help to learn or look up online tutorials because they were more understandable than he was. I don’t think he realized that the school was for beginners.
Excellent Teaching Assistant
We had an excellent teaching assistant named Sylvester for the first part of the class learning HTML, CSS, and Angular who reviewed with the students, answered our questions, drew diagrams and pictures on the board, and coded along with us so we could understand the concepts being taught. He was probably the reason most of us got HTML, CSS, Javascript, and Angular.
The Talk
The third week in, the students met with the director, Ounie, as a group and individually to voice their concerns about how unhappy we were with the lack of teaching by the teacher and how unprepared and disorganized the class was. Most days were not planned and it seemed like the teacher was just going in and “winging it.”
After our talk, Ounie reviewed some Javascript foundation with us for a few days and then hired an industry professional, Ron Perris, to teach us for the remaining 4 weeks of the course to teach us Node, Express, MongoDB. However, a week and a half into the class, Ron told us that he might not come back the next day because he hadn’t been paid on time by the director, Ounie. Ounie and Ron had agreed on a 4 week contract for a specific sum of money that Ounie proposed, but now Ounie wasn’t paying Ron on time. Furthermore, 2 days later, Ounie announces to the class that Ron is gone because he can’t afford to pay him. What? How do you hire someone and not know how much they are going to cost. You don’t hire someone you can’t afford and those numbers were discussed in the beginning. The other students and I were in shock…we thought the class was turning around.
Discounts and Chargebacks
I think Ounie knew how royally he f***** up so he said that we no longer had to pay the 15% of first year’s salary. Then back to Adam teaching us or just helping us as we work on “projects” or do whatever we want (still no lesson plan), and Ounie coming in a few days a week to lecture. I know at least 5 students filing for a chargeback on their credit card.
A lot of the class consisted of motivated students looking for resources online, asking each other, and then eventually even getting together to present topics they know or have researched for each other (Yeoman template, SEO, Wordpress, etc.). Although I have learned a lot, I definitely could have learned more, and this was really disappointing how little effort and organization was put into this class, especially since it’s a paid class that people left their jobs for to devote to full-time for 12 weeks. |
