[geeks] New Tech Schools: Digital Harbor in Baltimore

[velociraptor]

On 4/13/07, Jonathan C. Patschke <jp at celestrion.net> wrote:
> > But is this the job of a public school trying to prepare students for
> > the future?
>
> I expect two things of government schools:
>
>    1) Prepare the academically-inclined to perform well at college or in
>       their independent scholarly endeavours.
>    2) Prepare everyone else for trade school or apprenticeship (these
>       folks are important, too).
>
> Proper use of a word processor is increasingly becoming a requirement
> for #1, in spite of the obvious fact that we still surround ourselves
> with perfectly serviceable pens and paper.  For folks looking at
> vocational clerical work, it's a mandatory skill.

Yes, but again, teaching everyone as if they were all going to become
clerical workers is no more beneficial than teaching everyone as if
they were going to become carpenters.  Given the state of change in
the world, it seems to me that kids need to be given a much
higher-level and broader viewpoint of their options and given the
tools to discover their own aptitudes more than they need to be shown
how to use X application, Y tool, etc.

> These are not conducive to the government's apparent goal of producing
> stupid citizens that will continue to vote for handouts at the expense
> of fewer liberties, rather than realizing they can care for themselves
> if they'd only but try.  Therefore, these are precisely the things that
> a modern US government school will -not- teach.

Preaching to the choir, sir, as I am sure you are aware.

> Standardized tests are a great example of this.  Texas really got on
> that bandwagon about the time I was in fifth grade.  First it was the
> TEAMS test, then the TAAS test, and now the TAKS test.  Elementary
> school was such that, if you were in one of the tested grades, you'd be
> bloody sick of hearing about the damned test by term's end because
> that's -all that was taught-.  From the beginning of term onward, you'd
> hear "and this will be on the TAAS test at the end of the year", and two
> weeks prior to the test, there were mock tests and whatever else.

I worked, for a short time, for the company that published that test.
I had the displeasure of attending meetings where "school leaders"
debated whether a child who was ESL and didn't have a phone in there
home could be expected to understand the value of a phone.  The sheer
underestimation of the intelligence of children, regardless of their
upbringing was amazing to me, coming from people who had "educator" in
their titles.

After answering tearful telephone calls from high school kids and
parents of high school students--most of which were from immigrant
families--trying to get their kids graduated from high school so they
could get into VoTech or Community Colleges, I was just disgusted by
the whole thing.  These kids could have easily passed a GED and gone
off to get educated in HVAC, auto mechanics, electronics repair, etc.
But because of the ridiculous way that English was being tested, they
were tossed to the curb.  We weren't allowed to tell them about GED
equivalencies.  I finally found another job because I just couldn't
countenance working for the place anymore.

A lot of nails went into the public school coffin, working at that place.

> Oh absolutely.  Concepts are key.  However, given that everything I
> knew how to do in Word I could do form the keyboard, I'm just as
> proficient in Word XP as in Word 6.0.  2007, though....that's quite
> another ordeal.

But arguably, that's because you educated yourself concerning the
higher-level concepts that tie WP, Word, et al together.  I mean,
ultimately they all do the same things, you just have to figure out
the methods they each use.  That's the kind of thing that 98% of
people using a word processor don't bother to think about (nor do
employers, for that matter) but they *should* think about so that they
aren't tied to a single application to do whatever they are doing.

I still stick to plain text as much as I can, and resist the
insistence from mgmt & co-workers as much as possible that I put
things in "spreadsheets" or "Word docs". <shudder>  If it's got to be
shared, where's my wiki?

(This is a "personal" variant of the argument used to convince
businesses to convert to function-based/data-type description
methodologies (SGML, XML, etc.) for handling the information rather
than presentation-oriented description methodologies--you are freed
from reliance on a single vendor and the headaches inherent
inconverting one proprietary format to another.)

=Nadine=