“OK everyone, I think we’re almost done with the educational plan for our high school students. We have Math, English, Science, Social studies, Gym, and Spanish. But we need something else. Any ideas?”
“Perhaps we should teach these kids how to pay their taxes? Or how to apply for a job? Or how to make smart purchases? Or…”
“NO! We need to teach these kids how to manage computers and computer networks. It is a critical skill that they need to know for the future. THE FATE OF HUMANITY COULD DEPEND ON IT!”
______________________________________________________________________________
I had a different high school experience from most of my college friends. I went to what is known as a “tech school.” This meant I had to take classes in a specific career area. Which is exactly what a 14 year old should be thinking about: What am I gonna do for the rest of my life? I’m 19 and still haven’t figured out that answer.
It was a whole process during your freshman year to get into these career areas or “shops” as we called them. First, you spent 3-4 days in all the different shops to get a feel for them. There were about 20 shops at my school, so this took up your first semester. They make you do a bunch of things related to the career area. For instance, the engineering design one made you design a crab mallet. The culinary shop had you bake some cookies. And the cosmetology shop made you paint… each other’s… nails… I wasn’t a fan of that one.
Once you got through the final shop, you made a selection of your two favorite ones and spend 2-3 weeks in each of them. The only thing I remember during that time was de-soldering motherboards in the electronics shop. That’s not as fun as it sounds.
After the six weeks, you had to schedule an interview with the shop teacher of your top choice and hope you could get fit into their classes at the end of the year. So you didn’t take any actual courses in your desired career area until your Sophomore year.
Since I had an interest in computers and was just a nerd overall, I chose the Computer Engineering Technology shop. CET for short. It wasn’t the most popular shop in high school so I had no trouble getting in. A few people even switched out, leaving only eight of us by the time we graduated.
In CET, we learned the basics of computer hardware and operating systems. Basically I was taught how to put a computer together and fix common issues with the pieces of software. We also learned how to configure computer networks using Cisco brand devices. A majority of our time in that class was spent learning about computer networks. I think we learned everything a Cisco device can do. So hey, if any IT business is out there, I know a lot about networking. Computer and social.
Actually, this may not be the best replacement for a resume. After all, I goofed off quite a bit in that class. Can you blame me though? Most of our learning came from reading an online textbook. As nice as the teacher was, he didn’t do much teaching. It was our responsibility to know the material. And when you tell a young teenager to go read something, there's about a 50% chance they’ll do it.
We were pretty much on an honor code to get our work done. The only time he really looked at our screens was when it was obvious we weren’t working. He never checked any of our labs or assignments, he just gave us a google spreadsheet that we could check off if we “completed” them (more on that in a minute).
The only real thing he graded were these tests the online textbooks gave us. But even if you failed the test, he let you take it over and over again until you got a good score. Additionally, each failed attempt gave you the answers to the questions you got wrong. You couldn’t fail that class if you tried (trust me, some people did).
While there were quite a few things for us to do in that class, we often got it done quickly with a lot of extra time. So, being the unruly teenagers that we were, we would get off task constantly. And it was always different, each month there was a new way to waste our time.
Let me go back to that spreadsheet. A simple place for us to check off that we were doing our work. But our teacher made the mistake of putting very few restrictions on our access. There was a whole realm of possible ways to mess it up. We put emojis in lieu of x’s for our check marks, slanted our check boxes super far across the screen, changed the color backgrounds, the only limit was your imagination!
Probably the worst thing we did with the spreadsheet was changing access permissions. One day, our teacher was in a meeting (or something like that) when we realized we could prevent each other from writing to the document. It became a King of the Hill battle for who could reduce everyone else's permissions first.
After playing around with the permissions, we took it a step further and realized we could kick each other off the document, preventing any access to it. We had ANOTHER battle to kick everyone else off, only the person that won ended up kicking himself off. I don’t know what he was thinking with that one.
So the only person who had access to the document and could re-share it with us was the teacher. None of us really wanted to tell the teacher we were messing around with the google spreadsheet (ya know, again). We had to though, he was going to find out no matter what. When we did tell him, we each took the opportunity to throw one another under the bus. As you can tell, we had each other's backs.
In addition to the spreadsheet, we also had a secret Spongebob meme page. We didn’t share it with our teacher or let him know about it, until a certain someone had to go and get caught. Thanks a lot Todd! It’s all your fault! (that’s an inside joke from class).
The memes were related to the lessons we were learning from the textbook. It was mostly jokes about how we didn’t understand the material or just general inside jokes. Our memes also had a lot of computer jargon in it. I recently looked back at the meme page because I wanted to put one in this blog. But I realized no one would understand what any of them meant. And there were a lot of memes to look through, about 100 or so. We spent a lot of time making those memes.
I would say I definitely learned a lot during my time in that class. Not only about computer networks, but also how to have fun while learning. Even though we goofed off a lot, I think all the memories I made from having fun helped me remember a lot of the material better. The only reason I remember how VLSM works is because there is a meme of it on our shared google docs.
I have a ton of stories from that class, too many for me to put into this one blog post. I didn’t even mention setting the computer on fire. I think that is a story for another post though. Until then, stay Matt-astic!
Comments