School is not the place for hackers

[Quin]

I'm blind, so it'll probably be incredibly unsurprising to hear me say this, but I hated school. I didn't go to a specialized blindness school because they tend to go more for the students who have multiple disabilities, especially learning ones, and they mix 4 grades into one math class. When I asked them about me doing honors math, they basically said "we don't do that, but there's a high school down the street. We're not going to help you with accessibility though".
So public school it was. I was naturally the only blind one, and this lead to a lot of bullying. I was identified as gifted at a super young age, and they put me in advanced classes because of this. I ended up hating them though, it just felt like more homework and I wound up failing a math test on purpose to get dropped back down.
A lot of my time in school was spent sitting in the corner with my laptop and headphones on, because I didn't really have any friends. This situation changed somewhat in high school when I met a few other hacker nerds, but many of my young years were me sitting in a lunchroom with a laptop in front of me learning how to become the hacker (in the original and best sense of the word) I am today.
Now to the actual point of this post: the US education system is broken. I intentionally coasted through the latter half of my education and no one noticed or cared. I would do the work eventually, make sure I kept the grades up, and then just code or read or do whatever. And I repeat, no one cared. I was in the top 50 students from my graduation class of over 800 students. But I just didn't care. I still don't.
They wanted to put me walking for graduation and the fact that they successfully got a blind student to graduate on the local news here and I utterly noped out. Get your own damn publicity, fuck off and stop making my disability a way for you to make money.
There are a lot of hackers here, many of them far more intelligent than me, and I'm curious, was your school experience at least somewhat similar? Were you bored and/or not challenged? Or do you live in a country that actually gives half a shit about its citizens education?

[Caronte3D]

Not only the US education system is broken, in fact it's "normal state" in most countries
BTW: I personally admire you, I can't imagine writing even simple code without the visual sense.

[skywalk]

Yes, the public education system has steadily deteriorated. It favors average over excellence. Conformance over innovation. It suffers from a one size fits all mentality which exists nowhere in reality.

Many students could and should be in advanced lessons. Others should be held back or directed to a trade school. Disciplinary actions are avoided like the plague. Forcing the classroom to delay studies for repeated interruptions from unruly students.

The fix is privatization. If you pay for something, you appreciate it way more than a handout.

[TassyJim]

I remember my first day at university.
We were told "You thought you came here to learn to be engineers. Wrong. You are here to learn how to learn."
If only all school teaching had the same philosophy.

At the opposite end of the scale, a teacher once told my class "You don't need to know about that for the exam."

[Bisonte]

School is broken everywhere... the governments spend not enough money for the kids... and it is totally equal where you look at it...

A teacher said to me in the eighties : You don't need to know everything, you just need to know where to look it up...

And so for the most people ... Google are the best buddy

[tj1010]

EDIT: CodeForces and CodeChef and Pwn2Own rankings say it all.. I'll avoid the politics with my observations as someone who went to school all over the EU and US and has stuff all over MITRE and in reverse engineering communities..

[wilbert]

School is part of a system. The whole system is broken (as I see it).
It's build on competition, striving to be 'better' as others and overrating intellectual capabilities.
So many people are struggling emotionally, are glued to a screen or have some other kind of addiction to escape from their struggles.
I wish schools would focus more on how to deal with emotions, social interaction, empathy, compassion.
I don't know if things are different nowadays but when I was growing up, unfortunately school was mostly about acquiring intellectual knowledge.

[tj1010]

School is part of a system. The whole system is broken (as I see it).
It's build on competition, striving to be 'better' as others and overrating intellectual capabilities.
So many people are struggling emotionally, are glued to a screen or have some other kind of addiction to escape from their struggles.
I wish schools would focus more on how to deal with emotions, social interaction, empathy, compassion.
I don't know if things are different nowadays but when I was growing up, unfortunately school was mostly about acquiring intellectual knowledge.

Not introducing standardized tests is a choice.. Kids refusing to learn is because they are allowed to refuse, and in America most kids just get money from their parents anyway after eighteen.. You'll see people driving an $80,000.00 car to a job that pays $18,500.00 a year even rural towns.. lol

[Olli]

I was trying to explain our latelyness to help the blind people.

We have a pixel coded through three times eight bits.

Code: Select all

pixelCode = Point(x, y)

We ll just take the red part...

Code: Select all

pixelRed = Red(pixelCode)

To send this red color intensity, to our brain, it seems that the visual part in the brain is a set of non-constant digits.

Code: Select all

For virtualFlow = 0 To 7 Step 7
 For i = 0 To 7
  bitsMask = (1 << i) ! virtualFlow
  pixRed(i) = Bool(bitsMask & pixelRed)
  sendPixelResult(pixRed(i) )
 Next
Next

[Nituvious]

The fix is privatization. If you pay for something, you appreciate it way more than a handout.

This is not a good solution. Privatization just means education will be even more inaccessible for people especially poorer families. Education should not be limited to the elite.
And the logic behind that last sentence is extremely flawed. Just spend some time in a hospital and then let us know how proud you are of paying that bill.

And personally, I would be all for the greater population having easier access to education. It would prevent another trump from being President in the future. It would have prevented a lot of damage, including the destruction of the department of education.

[Demivec]

The fix is privatization. If you pay for something, you appreciate it way more than a handout.

This is not a good solution. Privatization just means education will be even more inaccessible for people especially poorer families. Education should not be limited to the elite.
And the logic behind that last sentence is extremely flawed. Just spend some time in a hospital and then let us know how proud you are of paying that bill.

And personally, I would be all for the greater population having easier access to education. It would prevent another trump from being President in the future. It would have prevented a lot of damage, including the destruction of the department of education.

A lot of imperfect ideas and conjecture in that text and quoted text. To support that just look at the empirical evidence of the past.

I concur with others posts asserting the value of learning how to learn and not simply the rote memorization of facts (or proposed facts). An idea exists that certain education systems are implemented in such a way as to limit innovation and independence and instead create a robotic and unthinking serfdom class. I think there's evidence supporting that that exists in public education in various degrees depending on location and other factors (including but not limited to certain teachers and educational organizations).

I'm a hacker at heart, nevermind what my individual abilities or skills might be. A hacker is creative, innovative and does things in ways that explore the limits of possibility in the systems and software or languages they hack. I think many programmers would naturally share the hacker mindset though not all.

I think schools could be a place for hackers but I would think you would rather need a hacker to facilitate that, either as a teacher or other such authority. I don't think hackers would generally want to settle into such roles, leaving their main interest but it might happen.

@Quin: It is sad to hear about your experiences in school. I attended a large school with about 500 people in just the graduating class. There was only one student in my class, that I knew of that was blind and she was in several of the advanced classes I had. Because of how far in the past this was, laptops were not a thing and she used a braille typewriter to take notes. I was envious that when she gave speeches before a group, she could read her speech with her hands and not have to memorize everything. The learning environment was very different from the one you described. She was an active part of the learning instead of being on independently studying in a possibly crowded and indifferent classroom.


** Note: Warning of possible TMI (too much information) in what follows

In my even earlier years I was in a situation where I was on my own in a room full of students being led by a teacher in a advanced math class while I studied independently on my own without instruction from the teacher or interaction with the class at my own pace and ahead of the rest of the class. It felt very strange to be present and not present at the same time. It was perhaps like being alone in a space ship. All in all though, it sure wasn't as dreary as what you seen to have experienced but I'm guessing it was for similar reasons. In my case the teachers or school just didn't have experience in different ways to teach (i.e. curriculum) or providing learning experiences beyond the limitations of their prescribed course materials which they taught to the majority of students. These same challenges happen not just for more solitary experiences of someone who might be ahead of the curve but everyday for individuals who find themselves in groups such as the growing population of young people who have some aspect of autism. That's all just to say it's a problem t that manifests itself in more than one way throughout educational systems. Those systems respond with statements like 'we don't do that here you should find a special school that handles {blank}'.

I was overall bored with my schooling experience. It was in the U.S.A.. I don't have a solution but do have a list of things that could be improved. My only daughter is currently being home schooled. She's six and her schooling will eventually move to a more formal school in some future year (possibly the next one). Those decisions all involve what to learn and where to learn it while at the same time avoiding any pitfalls (and for those that remember the game, also avoiding alligators, fires, scorpions and rolling barrels )

On another topic, I second what others on this forum have shared, I'm glad you've found your way to this forum and value your posts in many ways. You are definitely talented and add value to the various programming threads. You also provide a rare look (pun intended) into user interfaces for those with limited sight.

[Piero]

Doesn't "Hacking" mean "Do something you don't learn in school"? Not always!
Hacking Schoolmates with a Prof! (CGI course):

I Hacked Tetris high scores file; Prof faked a MEGArecord on a distant PC, screaming just before "ending the game"…

On the PC of a guy that was being EXTREMELY asocial, I "replaced" his dear Norton Commander with a FAKE "format C:" that Prof had made "unstoppable via keyboard"…

[threedslider]

True the hackers don't learn at school and they are often considered as "wizard" in computer science

These hackers have created as Unix and other stuff

[skywalk]

The fix is privatization. If you pay for something, you appreciate it way more than a handout.

This is not a good solution. Privatization just means education will be even more inaccessible for people especially poorer families. Education should not be limited to the elite.
And the logic behind that last sentence is extremely flawed. Just spend some time in a hospital and then let us know how proud you are of paying that bill.
And personally, I would be all for the greater population having easier access to education. It would prevent another trump from being President in the future. It would have prevented a lot of damage, including the destruction of the department of education.

Ask yourself why so many elected officials from both sides of the isle send their children to private schools? Private does not mean high cost. Many religious schools are quite affordable and offer variable rates.
I attended both and speak from experience. Public education remains a cookie cutter curriculum and fraught with bad actors who do not want to be there. The closer to inner cities you get, the number of bored students outnumbers the eager. Despite higher $/pupil than most private schools! Meaning, more money solves nothing, but does pad administrators' pockets and outfits classrooms with fancy ipads, tablets and electronic whiteboards.

Debating values of commodities such as education, medicine, food, etc. is beyond the scope of "hackers should not be in <public> school. If you dare, consider the free versions of any and decide which you prefer?

Only term limits can prevent Trump from becoming a future President.
As to future American Presidents, that depends on the current Trump policies effect on its economy and safety.

[Olli]

I am not blind, but the result is the same. Your texts are very long...