Comment by pizzafeelsright
2 days ago
You're a hero of mine so here is my story.
Me in math class in 1996 - I had a TI-82 things are programmable so I have no formal education, my parents are illiterate, and taught myself to program, and I begged them to buy me one.
I spent time learning how to code on it, writing from scratch, the game Spyhunter.
I couldn't figure out how to draw with lines or pixels so I used ASCII or text.
I presented this to my teacher who told me "these aren't for games". I was crushed.
I have an almost identical story. I wrote a few games: snake and a choose your own adventure fantasy thing. And likely others that I can't remember, but yeah, I had a teacher tell me basically the same thing. I was pretty sad because those really took a lot of time.
The fact that you made a game on a device that "wasn't for games" is even cooler.
The essence of hack.
You can write a game in almost every language. Check these ones written even on really low specs VM's:
https://codeberg.org/luxferre/mu808
This could be adapted https://codeberg.org/luxferre/scoundrel-ports
More info at https://luxferre.top
One time I wrote a game in English.
2 replies →
Now that's a tattoo right there. Never forget.
Seems like everyone has such a story about a teacher. „No you can’t read more advanced books because the current ones bore you“ etc etc
What is the matter with these people.
Makes me realize how lucky I was to have teachers who pushed me to actually excel in areas I was gifted in (and also pull me back in areas I was not gifted in :))
When I was in 7th grade I was getting 100% on all my math exams so my teacher had me test into 8th grade math (algebra). Then when I was a sophomore I was supposed to take precalc but my teacher thought I obviously didn't belong there either so she put me in her Calc AB class, which was the highest math class my school offered, but had me self-study for the Calc BC AP test during class time, taking her own time to sit down with me whenever I had questions.
A couple years later I TA'd for her precalc class and I spent most of my time in that class playing with my TI 8x (can't remember the exact model, maybe 84?) and programming very basic games on it. I showed her what I made and she was so impressed she said I should study computer science.
Guess what I did? Not that. I studied something completely different in college but now I've been a programmer for ten years and wonder why I ever doubted her at all.
Just goes to show how much impact a good teacher has on a student's life.
Some teachers, like many of us, have caveman emotions, live under near medieval systems and have access to god-like tech. (My version of a quote I read earlier this year.)
What could go wrong?
rigidity
Personally betting on the "crab bucket" mentality.
It's typical. They're supposed have authority and be better than you. That is the purpose of their position and their identity.
Don't be so quick to judge, because most people, including you would react the same way in similar contexts, for example if you were the top engineer at a company and someone started showing you up and being a hundred times better than you.
Not really? I've worked with people who were super productive with high quality work, and my reaction was to... gravitate toward working more with them. Some people are status driven. Some are not. Some are apparently pathologically status driven such that they'll compete with a literal child.
In any case refusing to nurture such a child (even in effectively passive ways like letting them quietly do something more advanced with no specific instruction) and not being reprimanded for it would reveal that the actual purpose of their position is daycare worker, which should be a bigger strike to the ego.
19 replies →
I relay to you a nugget from my ancestor: "Man, this teacher sounds like a real shithead!"
In high school our computer class was in BASIC. They taught us to swap two variables A & B like this:
But I knew the BASIC we used had the SWAP command. On an exam, I used SWAP A,B instead of the above. I got the lowest passing score, a 70%, and the teacher wrote, "Do it our way please". No thanks Mrs. Mott, I'll take the 70.
Those folks can FRO. The teacher my wife would have had for a Pascal class in high school refused to let her apply, saying it was not for girls. Her father said, you can take it at community college.
What a shit teacher: "No, don't be creative and learn. Do only as you're told."
I do not learn from textbooks at all. I learn from playing. I played with all my toys "wrong" when I was a kid, or so I was always told. I always turned to the last chapter of a math book to see what I'm going to learn or to see if I could figure it out from what I already knew (what I would now call "first principles"). I took appliances apart and tried to put them back together. If I failed to do so my dad would help me put them back together, as long as I didn't tell my mom he was encouraging that behavior :) I watched my older sister play piano and learned the songs she was playing by ear, then asked her to teach me to read music.
This behavior often came out as rebellious or prodigy behavior in grade school but I don't think it's any of that. I think it was just a matter of giving a curious kid space to play and learn and grow. kids like me often don't thrive in rigid environments not because we don't like rules or think they shouldn't apply to us but because our brains just don't work completely linearly.
I'd wager that most kids actually learn better like this but it's not super efficient to cater to 30 different curious kids wanting to learn 30 different things.