As a Senior in High School currently taking the AP Computer Science course, I can readily associate with the above sentiments.

My biggest beef with the course is that, despite being called AP computer science, that's not what they're teaching. They're teaching "advanced -- but crippled -- C++ using the AP board's crutches." For those that arn't familiar with the course, it depends very heavily on a group of "AP classes" such as apstring, apvector, apmatrix, apqueue, and so on. Thus, people learn to write code which depends on classes they'll never see again. This is, needless to say, a Bad Thing.

My other problem follows directly from this. The course does teach how to use these structures -- but not why and when to use them, nor how they are done "behind the scenes." It is my belief that programming depends not just on how to twiddle the dials on the black box -- but more importantly, on knowing when to use which dial, and how each one works. Unfortunatly, this is apparently the last thing on the college board's mind..

This leads me to their recent decision to switch the course over to Java, starting in 2003-2004. The parts of Java left out also seem to be fairly off-the-wall -- still not talking about the values of pre- and post-increment?

</rant>

Getting back to the point, I think that AP CS is fairly fundamentally broken. Furthermore, given the size and ponderousness of the organization behind it, it is unlikely to change. Thus, I would join with others in suggesting that we try to bring Perl into the school systems; but one reason would be to help fill the mental gap left by other computer science courses. Given that Perl is rather high level (compared to some others, at least), as well as being fast to write short snippets in, I would think it a perfect fit for this problem. Plus, I happen to think Perl is cool. ;>

 
perl -e 'print "I love $^X$\"$]!$/"#$&V"+@( NO CARRIER'