TIB: High School Computer Classes


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TIB: High School Computer Classes




I thought I'd join in on the discussion on high school computer classes.

My freshman year, I took a keyboarding class in a lab full of fourty or 
so very old Tandys - they couldn't have been anything higher than 286s. 
They all ran DOS, and used one of those old DOS word processing programs 
that only had one font and font size, and if you wanted to center text, 
you had to tab over to the middle, then press backspace once for every 
two letters in the phrase you want centered. It was slow and pokey, but 
it DID improve my WPM, and I even taught the teacher a thing or two about 
DOS, even though he once worked for a computer company (HP, I think) and 
Macs are and always will be my forte. The lab was destroyed the next year 
for an experimental education program called Century Hall, which 
(surprise!) seems to be working. (CPM, on the other hand...) To this day, 
I wonder what they did with all the Tandys.

Currently, they have a couple of computer classes, all taught on 95/98 or 
NT "workstations." I haven't taken any of them, 'cuz they're all below my 
capabilities... Using Microsoft Office, basic Web Page Design, etc. Plus 
every once in a while the Photography students go into Photoshop and 
learn how to apply simple filters. And, lemme tell you, there's a limit 
to how many Radially Blurred pictures you can look at pinned up to the 
walls of the library you can stand.

So I'm beginning to envy those of you with C/C++ classes; it'll give you 
an advantage in the eyes of the college professors. :) I tried to teach 
myself C++ a while ago with books, but some of the concepts were just too 
strange to BASIC-learnt men like myself, and there's really not a lot 
that I want to do that I can't do in REALbasic 
(http://www.realbasic.com/)... so, I wait for college.

I too think that my school's IT coordinator (also the chief librarian...) 
is mis-using the school's funds. Every one of our classrooms has a 
computer now, but most teachers use them for nothing more than taking 
roll, and they often have problems even doing that. Next time the time 
comes to buy a round of computers, save the money and the trouble and 
make 'em all iMacs. :)

Getting back to calcs, I think that math courses should use them more in, 
well, their courses. Often times, when we learn a new technique in my 
Pre-Calc class that requires five minutes per problem or something, I go 
home and look in my 86's manual's index to see if there's a function on 
my calc that'll do it instantly. If we've got these machines to do the 
number crunching for us, why do we really need to learn to do the number 
crunching? Just my opinion, anyway...


-Garrett albright@razorlogic.com