[geeks] bahahahaha.

[Ken Hansen]

Naw, never touched the Basic4, but I did watch Dave S. (www.homeport.org)
use it...

For those curious, Dr. Obnox's father was my Computer Science and one of my
Math teachers at The Pennington School. His father ("Mr. G") had open book
tests ("you'll have books at work, why not during the test?"), and after our
main classroom building burned down, held Programming classes in his living
room.

My favorite test was when he asked me to write a program that drew an
american flag. I then spent the first hour of the test period hunting down
and documenting the design of the american flag (how the stars alternate,
now in vertical rows, how many red and white stripes in total, and how many
of those stripes are to the side of the field of stars, etc.

My favorite test taker was Bruce Peterson, who wrote his final project/exam
exercise as a series of print statements like so:

10 print "10 rem this program will compute the farenheit temperature"
20 print "20 rem from an input celcius temperature."
30 print "30 rem Bruce Peterson, December,  1981"
40 print "40 cls"
50 print "50 input "Please enter the temerature, in celcius";c"
etc.

It was hysterical, watching Mr. G try and keep a straight face as he asked
the student why he had all those print statements.

The answer?

So Mr. G could see his program to grade it.

He didn't get the fact that the program *needed to run* - Mr. G was quite
capable of figuring out the intracacies of the "list" command in TRS-BASIC.

He also took Dave S. and I to a computer show in Boston - when the Sinclair
ZX81 (?) was introduced. Ithink he bought one...

Ken
----- Original Message -----
From: "Doctor Obnox Son of a Bitch" <drobnox at visi.com>
To: <geeks at sunhelp.org>
Sent: Sunday, December 09, 2001 11:41 PM
Subject: Re: [geeks] bahahahaha.


> Ken Hansen, reeling from the shock, managed on Sun, Dec 09, 2001 at
11:01:39PM -0500 to scrawl:
> > You know, that *huge* MP3 convinced me of two things:
> >
> >     I will never be a high school teacher.
> >
>
> I decided I'd never be a high school teacher about 25 years ago, while
> watching my dad grade homework every night.
>
>
> >     I will never send my son to public school.
> >
> > I never heard any of this crap outside of public school (I've attended
both
> > public and private), but then again my private schools were all very
good:
> >
> >     7th Grade: http://www.hrs.pvt.k12.ca.us/ - first place I ever used a
> > computer!
> >
> >     9th - 12th Grade: http://www.pennington.org/index.cfm - Great
teachers,
> > too many TRS-80s!
> >
>
> Ken, did you ever get to work on the old BASIC4 minicomputer they had?
>
> The one that crashed into the basement of O'Hanlon Hall? The insurance
> claim from that beast allowed the purchase of a roomfull of TRS-80s
> (4K hooray!  Fire when ready, Gridley!)
>
>
> > Ken
> >
>
>
>
>
> --
> "So I am not the only one that runs around naked with my Bobba Fett
helment on?
> Cool"
> -David Smith
>
> Gustafson
>                                                     drobnox at visi.com
> _______________________________________________
> GEEKS:  http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/geeks


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