Comment by mort96
20 hours ago
A friend almost failed an IT class because his website didn't render at all in IE6. This was during the time of IE9. The teacher just hadn't updated their browser in a long time.
I don't get how you get to be an IT teacher without knowing the most basic troubleshooting steps to get assignments to run.
I left community college after a week because my "computer" teacher required us to change our monitors to 640x480 and print out ever step that we completed in things like Notepad or Configuring the Desktop and then every day we'd punch it out and would add it to a three ring binder of all the things we've done.
Full Color.
640x480 in 16 colors is the resolution as it was prescribed in the Bible.
though shalt not wear garments of mixed pallettes
Terry Davis quote?
> God said 640×480 16 colour is a covenant like circumcision.
https://clotmag.com/oped/deus-ex-machina-deconstructing-digi...
Amen
I took a computer class in college (like 25 years ago now?) and corrected the teacher multiple times every class. And it was like 95% things that were in the book that was issued, so I could even point out the page it was on. It was absolutely embarrassing.
In college I one year had a physics teacher who refused to believe that you could hear the harmonics of a guitar string simply by lightly touching the string at the right place, e.g. in the middle (12th fret) to hear the octave. Nothing could convince him that this was possible. That year was when several of us spent a good part of the week bowling in a nearby bowling hall, either because we didn't have to take the class (the curriculum was years behind what we had already done before college), or the teachers were so incompetent that there was no point attending. Fortunately the other educational years (everything after middle school, that year excepted) were great though.
if i may rant, my middle school and high school aged kids have to literally take pictures of their homework assignments with their chromebook camera then put it the pictures in a google slides deck then submit the deck through a form all to just turn in their paper HW assignment! ridiculous.
Can’t you just hand it in?
Heh…I once was in a state-level coding event (it was a small portion of a larger competition) where half of the test was turning in code on a CD during the competition, with the written half during the event. My CD was deemed unusable for whatever reason (it had worked on XP and Fedora 6 or 7 at home) and didn't count towards my score. I still got second in the event. I declined to continue because I couldn't trust that the judges would be able judge my submission fairly and that with half of my score missing I still got second that I didn't need to prove anything else at the cost of more after-school practice hours and wrecking my perfect attendance record during my senior year to travel to nationals.
Perfect attendance is not a good goal to aspire to. Kids force themselves (or get forced by parents) to go to school while sick, which is probably bad for their health and also risks everybody else's health.
I dropped out of college (the UK version, I guess equivalent to senior high school in the US) shortly after discovering that the final assessment of my Computing project would be performed by the examiner reading a printed version of the source code, without ever executing it, because the exam board were so scared of examiners computers being destroyed.
When was this? If this was before virtualisation was common I can maybe understand that but any time in the last 20 years is pretty dumb and the last 10 so braindead I question if they would've been able to judge things properly
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Does high school attendance matter for anything? Genuine question. Always seemed like pre-college schooling always wanted you to think everything was more important long-term than it really was.
Many states pay school districts based on attendance.
Attendance typically correlates with classroom success.
Attendance avoids truancy proceedings.
One of the kids in my elementary school got a hat for perfect attendance through 6th grade.
I've never seen attendance shown on a transcript though, but you could fill some space on a resume with it, especially if you have the hat to show for it.
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It’s needed to get into college and that’s it, which is needed to get your first maybe second job and that’s it, which is needed to…
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It goes in your permanent Record Of Achievement! I was always told that this would be very a very important set of documents once I left school, and I am sure that I have no reason to doubt their statements!
Not really, but you can get in trouble for truancy if it becomes a big problem (where I'm from, that was 3 unexcused absences or any absences without a doctor's note after 10. In practice, however, this wasn't that enforced)
I assume this was at a highschool and not at university? My IT teacher in highschool was the chemistry teacher, because.. he knew how to use Word, I guess?
He knew we were computer nerds so didn't really care about teaching us (we knew more than him anyway). And we didn't mind that he just sat there drinking coffee and reading a book, as it meant we could just play videogames for an hour. Good times.
Those that can, do - and those that can't, teach.
Teaching is rewarding which is why people do it, but you're asking them to take less pay for what is often a harder job - convincing kids to learn something when they have dozens of other things competing for their interest. The math aligns on the side with the teacher having the knowledge you would expect in this scenario - with a fair number of teachers not as much knowledge as one would hope they would have. On the students side, if they are bright then this is a soft-skill learning opportunity - how to navigate knowing more than your superior to the benefit of you both.
Surely you could have made essentially the same point without regurgitating one of the most perniciously derogatory lines ever concocted to describe teaching?
All of the market forces you describe are real, but they are partly sustained by cultural templates that make teaching a low-status job among those with technical qualifications and lead to an assumption that every teacher is either (a) internally motivated and doesn't "need" competitive compensation or (b) a washout from a more prestigious track and doesn't "deserve" competitive compensation. This affects administrators, policymakers, voters, and teachers themselves, giving us the status quo where teachers are paid and treated like shit (ask a K-12 educator about the most psychotic parent they met this year and whether admin had their back) so that even many people who love teaching gradually evaporate out of the field if they can.
I suppose I'm not even arguing that the material result is much different than you describe it, just that it's lazy, amoral thinking to frame it as a market quirk or the immutable nature of teaching rather than a slow-motion sociocultural trainwreck over which we can exercise some iota of agency. (One such iota might be to simply not say "those who can..." in earnest ever again.)
I had a similar class where they threatened to fail us if we didn't use Dreamweaver and instead wrote our own html.
Dreamweaver was cool as a beginner because it took a lot of the troublesome parts out of the equation. But it did end up being more of a hindrance than a benefit the further you went in.
I never understood Dreamweaver. The first thing it asked me when making a new website was ... what the resolution of my user's screen is? I don't know that!
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What were these "troublesome parts"? The whole point of HTML's design is that it's incredibly easy for a human to write correctly.
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Just like AI vibecoded websites... Good luck understanding the code when the AI bubble explodes and you can't afford the insane price that AI will have by then.
Hmm. Dreamweaver must be what the cool kids were using instead of Frontpage.
I had a teacher who told us to make a website using Powerpoint..
Turns out you save save as HTML and any links you put between slides become anchor tags.
Pretty neat, but hurt my soul to have all my classmates do that
Was that class taught by a certain woman who had a business making websites, per-chance?
You just described my teacher, and I’m fairly certain we didn’t go to the same middle school.
Were they paying for the Dreamweaver licenses?
When I had web design a bit after 2010, they still used Dreamweaver and yeah you could get a license for free via the university. That’s pretty normal (eg giving you a Visual Studio license, Office, all that). It was more crazy that the course was so incredibly basic (nothing more than static page building in dreamweaver) at this college compared to the other one I later transferred to
Please. Universities have students by the short and curlies. They can academically do basically whatever they want, and fail you for not complying. Professors can even demand their book be purchased, and fail for not buying the book.
Most universities are unethical shitholes that can do basically whatever they want to gatekeep a diploma.
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During the time of Internet Explorer 9, it was surprisingly common for people to still be using Internet Explorer 6. This was often out of their control, for instance if they had intranet sites that required Internet Explorer 6, or if they were stuck on an old version of Windows because they had outdated hardware.
Later versions of Internet Explorer had compatibility mode, but it often wasn’t enough to get things working, especially if there was ActiveX involved or the security policies were restrictive.
Schools were especially prone to this due to their limited budgets among other reasons, and IT teachers weren’t normally the decision makers who could do anything about it. You shouldn’t assume that a random IT teacher had the authority to spontaneously upgrade a school computer that needs to be used for things besides that one student’s assignment.
I will, however, assume that an IT teacher has the ability to recognise, "this isn't working because I'm using an ancient browser". If the teacher is completely unable to use a less ancient browser, the requirement for the project to work on IE6 should be clearly stated, which it was not.
However in this case, my friend just helped the IT teacher install Google Chrome on his computer and showed that the site rendered fine there. I don't know what sort of policies were in place but there were evidently no technical measures implemented to prevent people from installing a modern browser.
I think your friend might have used portableapps.com, they offer many types of browsers . These programs are packaged to install under a restricted account, without requiring admin rights.
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I'm lucky both of my schools IT teachers were actually competent, they were both technically business teachers but were good with code.
That first teacher died shortly after, she had terminal breast cancer. I miss her a lot
Tenure. Or at least that was my experience with my comp sci teacher who required that we gave him printed out programs for our homework and then tossed them into the trash while making eye contact with you and gave you a grade later.
The schools admins told me he had tenure so there was nothing I could do.
Didn’t take me a whole year before I switched majors.
It's a built-in secret part of the teaching for any job where you interact with customers, they don't upgrade and they have no troubleshooting skills.
Or just ineptitude, but I'm hoping for the former.