[geeks] New Tech Schools: Digital Harbor in Baltimore

[Mike Hebel]

On Apr 12, 2007, at 4:50 PM, velociraptor wrote:

> On 4/11/07, Geoffrey S. Mendelson <gsm at mendelson.com> wrote:
>> On Wed, Apr 11, 2007 at 02:25:18PM -0400, der Mouse wrote:
>>> If they were teaching word processing and spreadsheets, rather than
>>> Word and Excel, I'd be a lot less worried.
>>
>> I don't like it but,  in the U.S., Word is word processing and
>> Excel is spreadsheets. They are training people to get jobs as gammas
>> (office workers) and betas (administrators). That's the tools they 
>> would
>> use and what the people that hire them want.
>>
>> For them, learning OpenOffice INSTEAD of Word and Excel is a "carrer
>> limiting move".
>
> This gets back to the problem we've talked about on this list before,
> though.  They are teaching a tool that may well be obsolete by the
> time these kids in the workforce.  I mean, chose your career at 17
> when statistically, you are going to average one career every 7 years?
>
> Teach the kids how to teach themselves a new program, then have them
> go out, find something they want to use, and develop a
> document/project proving they know how to do it.  But this is *hard*,
> and not easily measurable, so it'll never happen.

Idiocracy - watch it.  It's scary and funny at the same time.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/

> Schools are so hamstrung by "standards" that the children are getting
> no real education, just being spoon-fed the answers to tests.  It's
> pathetic and makes me fear for the future.  One of my good college
> friends (a history & classics geek, on top of an IT geek) has been
> teaching his son, who's 8, iirc, Greek and Latin.  His son is gobbling
> up pretty much every piece of info put in front of him by his dad.  He
> loves it, so he doesn't even think it's hard.

Excellent!  Well on the way to being one less idiot in the world! :-)

> Like I said, my kids aren't going to public school.  NCLB just put the
> headstone at that grave.

NCLB allows me to get some serious funding for my daughter's needs - 
she's autistic and has a slower learning growth than others among other 
problems - so I can't nay-say it completely.

But I will agree that it gets in the way of teaching children to learn. 
  Life has failure modes and if you don't learn to handle failure life 
will kill you without a second thought.

Mike Hebel
----
Can't sleep!  Nuns will eat me!