[geeks] New Tech Schools: Digital Harbor in Baltimore

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Thu, 12 Apr 2007 @ 14:50 -0700, Nadine said:

> This gets back to the problem we've talked about on this list before,
> though.  They are teaching a tool that may well be obsolete by the
> time these kids in the workforce.  I mean, chose your career at 17
> when statistically, you are going to average one career every 7 years?

That's one thing that makes UNIX a good system for education.  It can do
almost anything, and can mimick the things it can't do.  It's general
purpose and doesn't have specific ties to any one organization.

Another good thing for education is to use several OS, so you see
different solutions to the same problems.

> Teach the kids how to teach themselves a new program, then have them
> go out, find something they want to use, and develop a
> document/project proving they know how to do it.  But this is *hard*,
> and not easily measurable, so it'll never happen.

Related to the above, you can partially fix this problem by teaching
several different solutions to any given problem.

You learn a lot more if you study three editors than if you only ever
use one, for example.

It would also help a lot if schools would actually have students use
their own tools to do their work.

> Schools are so hamstrung by "standards" that the children are getting
> no real education, just being spoon-fed the answers to tests.  It's

This hits the nail on the head squarely.  

I'm one of those people who does poorly at rote memorization, and it
caused me no end of grief from grade school through college.

Fortunately, college mostly wasn't like that, though partly because I
dropped any professor who taught like that.

> pathetic and makes me fear for the future.  

It should, because it is incredibly dangerous.

I know people who are walking encyclopedias, able to regurgitate the
answer to any question you ask them.

But show them something new, and they are totally lost, or worse, ask
them to do anything that doesn't come with instructions.

> One of my good college
> friends (a history & classics geek, on top of an IT geek) has been
> teaching his son, who's 8, iirc, Greek and Latin.  His son is gobbling
> up pretty much every piece of info put in front of him by his dad.  He
> loves it, so he doesn't even think it's hard.

I wish growing up I knew what was wrong. I was taught all through school
that it was my fault. I "wasn't like the other kids" and all that. At no
point did they ever stop and think, "Maybe something we are doing is the
problem."

It has always amazed me how people in government always assume they are
never wrong.

A friend of mine found out her social security number is incorrect.  Her
new card had a different number than what she'd been issued in the
1950s.

She has tried to fix this for four years now, and it only gets worse.

The lady at the social security office said, "We never make errors."

They refuse to admit they have screwed up, and they therefore refuse to
do a full search of state and federal records to find the right number.

Unfortunately, she lost her original, and the places she worked are
either gone, or they didn't keep records of it.

So you see, a deeper problem is that the state is screwed up all around.  	


-- 
shannon / There is a limit to how stupid people really are, just as there's
-------'  a limit to the amount of hydrogen in the Universe.  There's a lot, 
but there's a limit.  -- Dave C. Barber on a.f.c.