Teaching Kids to Fly, not Crash
Copyright © 1999 by Dave Badtke
The recent story about a $500,000 gift to BHS targeted at modernizing and increasing its computer facilities followed by Steve Gibbs’ column telling a funny story about a new college freshman unable to connect her computer, got me to thinking. Certainly those who gave this wonderful gift to our community will be thanked many times over as they see the impact on graduating students, and I’m sure the funds will have a significant impact on BHS facilities.
Over time more and more BHS seniors will learn how to connect their computers to college networks, which will be good. Their knowledge will decrease the demands on college system administrators and on that student, who always lives down the hall, who just loves to fix your system while discoursing on Microsoft’s or Apple’s view of the world. Their skill will also be good for those moms and dads with networking experience - usually acquired after wasting endless hours "fixing" their computers at work - who must now spend part of their first day on campus with their sons and daughters struggling through inane LAN protocol specifications.
And while all these benefits will accrue to those who learn, through class, clubs or outside interests, the intricacies of PC operating systems and applications, I hope students will use the new computer facilities to learn much more about a technology still in its infancy.
While the industry appears to be moving very fast - producing new billionaires faster than we can count them - most software running on PCs today is poorly architected and incorrectly implemented. Windows and its applications crash repeatedly not because the user doesn’t know what he’s doing, but because the systems were designed to be run by the same people who program them. As a result, the operation of computers tends to be an elaborate game in which you, the player, are forced to figure out rules with insufficient information. (The ruse is confounded by publications using "Dummy" in the title to label the user as the problem.)
Literature, science and mathematics, on the other hand, can become wondrous journeys of discovery in which ever deeper layers of understanding are uncovered. Though the nuances of meter, rhythm, end-rhyme and meaning in Shakespearean sonnets are subjective, they share more common ground with Einstein’s equivalence principle in general relativity than with the underlying TCP/IP protocol of the Internet. And when a student reaches beyond the calculus to set theory, topology and metamathematics, he begins to glimpse logical systems in which explicit rules shroud wonderful worlds of invention that have little in common with the horrors of CTRL-ALT-DEL.
My hope is that when these new computer systems are installed, BHS students will quickly learn the administrative procedures while feeling free to curse the details. Certainly, in time, computers will connect as easily as our telephones, and today’s students will be able to tell their children how they spent endless hours configuring IP addresses and domain names before their email would work. Their tales will be like my grandfather’s stories about having to fix his Model-T Ford every time he went out on a date with my grandmother. (How the Internet and dating will be involved in such unlikely tales, only our children will imagine.)
My hope is that BHS students will spend most of their time learning how to program computers, for a well written program can be as beautiful as a poem and as fascinating as the search for invariance in physics and as magical as transfinite numbers in mathematics. The more BHS students learn to program their computers at a fundamental level, at a level beyond operating-system idiosyncrasies and application gymnastics, the more likely their programs will accomplish amazing feats without crashing at the worst possible moment.
- Dave Badtke is founder of the developing Carquinez Review literary journal. Find him on the web at www.CarquinezReview.com.
Contact him at:
Dave@CarquinezReview.com or Dave@Badtke.com