Category: Blog

Alfred asks about teachers and the language changes. 

There tends to be three sources for computer science teachers.

One group tends to be like me — refugees from industry.  I’ve met some who admitted they weren’t competent to work in the industry, and others like me who don’t like the atmosphere. 

One group are math teachers.  Some of them have choosen to teach computer science — they decided they wanted to teach an elective.  Some were choosen by someone else, maybe because they had a few programming courses on their transcripts. 

Then there is one last group.  I run into them for time to time.  An uneducated administrator thinks that anyone can teach CS, and picks a business teacher, or a science teacher.  Again, some had had a programming class on their transcript.  Quite a few of them haven’t.  I also won’t express too much of an opinion about the last group except express my sympathy.  I too have been thrown into teaching something I wasn’t prepared to teach.

Notice I haven’t mentioned anything about the certified / alternative certification battle.  

But the issue is why does the language change drive teachers out of computer science.   Some of the people who couldn’t cope with the language changes were CS people.  Some of them were math people.

I’m lucky, I had a really good education in computer science and was even lucky enough to take a course surveying computer languages.  I also wrote the same software in several different languages when I was working in industry as we needed a common set of user interfaces on different hardware.   I doubt that I am the normal.  Throughout my career, I’ve met people who could only program in one programming language, or maybe only two or three.  I do know that it took a major shift in thinking from going to Pascal to C++.  It also took a major shift in thinking when going to C++ to Java.  Things are done differently.  It takes a good bit of writing code and making it work to make the shift.

So why did teachers quit over the language change?

First, I don’t think many quit over going from Pascal to C++.  The ones I know that quit, when they heard about them ove to Java.  When we moved from Pascal to C++ we had to throw everything out.  I know I threw trashcans of handouts and materials away.  Not the first year, but the SECOND year, because nothing I had from Pascal worked.   And it wasn’t just books and written materials, it was IDEAS!  There were few assigments that survived porting from Pascal to C++.

So a lot of people anticipated that happening again.  And they didn’t want to go through that a second time.

Second, they received zero support on moving from Pascal to C++.   I know, I taught one of those workshops.  I got no support from the College Board.  And in fact, the only thing that saved me, was a) new textbook adoption that happened at the same time, and b) a local cheap college where I could take C++ at night.  And I didn’t even know I needed to do that until November or so.  I was even lucker that I had a good professor teaching the class that would take the time after class to help me with teaching ideas.  The gas money and the tuition money came out of MY pocket.

So if I had been at retirement again when Java was announced I might well have quit to.  Just the anticipation of change and no support is enough to do it.  

I’ve been asked by several people to document my Identity Theft incident better.

Basically what happened, is that someone obtained enough information to forge checks on my checking account.  They have at the very least, both my and my husband’s DL number, probably Social Security numbers, addresss, and checking account number.

Here’s how I found out it happened.

I check all of my accounts daily.  I have Quicken set up download all of the accounts with my main accounts daily and I manually do other credit accounts at least twice a week, and I also check my cell phone account almost daily.  Yeah, anal, but that’s what alerted me.

On Thursday, I saw an transaction on my checking account I did not recognize.  It was a check for around 120.00.   I could not see what the transaction looked like until the image had been scanned and made available, so I did not know for sure until Friday as to what was going on.

It was obviously a check not written by me, it was to a business I would use a credit card at, not a check.  The handwritten was not mine, nor did the checks look like mine.

The first thing I did was to call Chase and ask what to do.  I had to go to a local branch and will out a “fraud packet”.  It wasn’t a packet already sitting and ready, but something a bank officer had to go through with me.  At the same time, they put an “alert” on the account.

Basically I had to fill out a form telling them what happened.  That’s where I described the three transactions we saw at that point.  Two more had gone through that day.

I also had to fill out another form, listing all the outstanding transactions. 

The good news, is that I had enough money in the account to cover all the transactions, mine and the fraudelent ones so nothing was bouncing.  That would have presented a lot more hassle.

The bank closed my old account and opened a new account, giving me free checks since we had just gotten new ones, and new debit card.

Note:  I should have taken a list of my outstanding transactions with me to the bank.  Do that if this happens.

My next step was to do a search on fraud alert credit account — I have to thank one of my coworkers at my school for reminding me of this problem.  I got to  http://www.fightidentitytheft.com/flag.html and followed their directions.  So far, we don’t have anything on our credit reports and I called the 1-800 number to put a fraud alert on our credit file.

One other thing you should do if you have a PayPal account is to change your banking account on PayPal.  I forgot to do that until a transaction came through and had to tell the payee what was going on.

That’s pretty easy to do, you just add the new account and delete the old one.

If I find anything else I forgot to do, I’ll document it here.

Everyone seems to be excited about Vista.  I’m not. 

I brought my Mac Mini into school yesterday and I introduced it.  At the same time, I gave every class a short “lecture” on my opinion of operating systems.

Here’s it is for the readers.

I can only think of four operating systems I’ve liked.  Novell 3.11, the Novell that is currently running on the server, I think 5.6, but don’t quote me on it, Windows 98 SP 2, and Windows XP SP 2.

So what do the 4 operating systems have in common?  Other than the fact, that most of the time they work, they aren’t a X.0 version.  I hate X.0 versions of all software, they never work.

Software is exactly like pharmaticuals.  You have no clue what they are going to do and if they are going to work until they are out in the wild.  SP1 and SP2 are direct results of all the bugs found out in the wild.

So me, I’m waiting for Vista SP 2, or even 1.  If I have to buy a new computer, yeah, I’ll get stuck with it until they fix it.  In the meantime, I’ll run Windows XP SP2.

And why don’t I like Linux, even though it’s free?  It’s a PITA to set up.  Operating systems should be no-brainers, in fact ALL software should be no-brainers.  It should just work.

It happened to us this week.  (On both blogs on purpose).

First, I freely admit I am anal, as I told my students today, some people use a blowdryer, I use Chase.  And some other accounts.

Every day I take a shower, every day, after the shower, I sit down with the accounts and check them.  Every single one — it’s not that hard with Quicken, but I check every account that we have setup on line, including my cell phone account.  Anything, anyone could tamper with.

Yesterday, a check went through for approximately $127.00  I realized pretty quickly I hadn’t written a check for that amount, but waited for a day to verify it, since the image was not available.

Someone created at least three checks, with my husband’s name, his DL (which even I don’t have at my finger tips), my name, my DL, and our address.  Of course, I don’t put the DL’s printed on the check.  I also can’t write as legible as the forger.

It’s been fun.  I had to close our checking account and I had to provide a list of known transactions (and darn, I should have pulled that before I left the house, I had to come back and get it).

I also put a fraud alert on our credit accounts.

My husband is happy.  Everyone whose heard the story realizes that they wouldn’t have caught the problem as quickly as I did, or gotten it resolved as quickly.

It pays to be anal.

 I’ll even admit to falling for a few, but when I first saw her post, I was getting ready for dog agility so I was only reading the RSS feed but bookmarked it to research later.  But at the time, I thought it was a parody site as I cannot imagine the Firefox people working with Microsoft and vice versa.  I didn’t have time to look at either the Cool Cat site for real OR the other site, but once I did look at the original site, I could tell it wasn’t a “real” site.  It’s not professional worded. 

Following are the comments with some documentation as to the non-authenticity of this site. Thank you, friends for clarifying. I’m sure I’ll get some “she’s so stupid” posts but I’ll leave this up to show how the best of us can be taken.

Source: Cool Cat Teacher Blog: Proof that the best of us can be taken: Microsoft Firefox Professional

And I’m not saying “she’s so stupid”, as I have fallen for a few. 

It’s phases like  Microsoft Firefox 2007 automatically shrinks text to abysmally small sizes, so all webpage content can fit onto a single apostrophe on your final printed page.  And phrases like:  Open multiple copies of Microsoft websites in one window with tabbed browsing.

 You are not going to see things like this in a professionally done website.  Mine own, or maybe my students, but not Microsoft.  It’s going to have better flow.

 And you haven’t even heard the other shoe drop yet.

Oh and then there is using (abusing) the computer labs.

We don’t know the full details, but it looks like we’re going to have lose our classrooms for 5 days for state testing.  I don’t know if these are field tests, or what.  And we also lose our labs for Louisiana State Testing ever since Katrina.  Mine will probably go first, since mine is the easiest to adapt for other purposes. 

These are labs funded to specifically teach business courses, webmastering, or programming courses, and we get moved out because someone else has taken over our equipment.

Last year, we lost the labs ever Friday to the math department, and they finally after over 12 years of asking, bought a lab specifically for the math classes to share.

More later when I have details.

Source: Computer Science Teacher – Thoughts and Information from Alfred Thompson

Another teacher on the same wavelength when it comes to censoring webpages. 

Link to Sicheii Yazhi » Blog Archive » Freedom and Safety for All

This site is no longer blocked by Websense.  Lessons learned — they don’t do much over the weekend and they seem to have even been off on MLK day.

I’ve learned a lot from the experience, and I am going to share some of it with my students.

I am not a big believer of censorship.  I would like that our network be set up so that students cannot get to pornographic materials, but that is as far as I would like it to go.  I think it is up to the individual to determine what they should have access to.

If my students get their assignments done early, I don’t have a problem with them checking email or doing research for another class.  I would just as soon they didn’t play games, but I’m not going to get onto the kid that has a chapter for playing a computer game.

In other words, I think Websense goes too far.

Link to Fire official: Man’s cell phone apparently sets him ablaze – CNN.com

My students have been intrigued, excited, etc over the exploding laptops, it will be interesting to see their reaction to this.

Actually, it’s mostly my 7th period class.  My AB kid has always been into technology news, and he has gotten the rest of the class into it.  So we always start out a few minutes with the issues in the news. 

The Cisco/iPhone, especially has one kid in a lather.  He actually asked if he could make a phone call last week — and when I asked, he said his stock broker.  I told him to wait until after school, which as soon as the bell rang, he whipped the phone out and made the class — I really wanted him to at least leave the room, but since I didn’t say that…

And I really hope he didn’t base the transactions on my opinion — he said he’d researched it during class …. I don’t mind TOO much as he did get his assignment done.

But it’s one of the weirdest things that have happened to me as a teacher.

if you are looking for the Diabetes site, I’m “moved” it — haven’t really, but in the past, if you typed in www.kweaver.org you got the diabetes blog and to get to this blog you had to type in www.kweaver.org/cs  I’ve swapped things to make Websense a bit happier.

I hope.

To get to the diabetes blog, click here. www.kweaver.org/blog