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Woo hoo! That makes 4 Nobel laureates for Stuyvesant HS! Axel is class of '63

Although i have never programming, my first college leve CSCI class used SCHEME (a direct descendant of Lisp if i remember correctly) as the language.

This language is structed very difficult for a new computer science student to easily understand.

The endless parenthesis does not help either.

And, on top of this, the language is completely dead!

I much rather would have learned an assembly language. This would have given students a better feel for the hardware and would have had useful applications.

While y'all are arguing about the merits of manned space travel, let me just brag about my and Prof. Weinberg's common alma mater, The Bronx High School of Science. Prof. Weinberg is one of five Nobelists in the school's 65-year history, more than most colleges (and, more importantly, three more than Stuyvesant). In fact, both Weinberg and Sheldon Glashow are members of the class of '50, making that graduating class possibly unique in world history. I wonder if their classmates had any idea they were in the presence of future greatness?

here! Be gentle, the torrent itself is hosted on my school account, and I'll get ownzored by the administration if we get /.ed.

I hate to ask it but "How would we teach the kids about open source apps?" I'm a student in a public NYC high school and I just had a 7 month project taken away from me that was going to get the school a web-server, run Linux on it, and educate a group of students in Linux systems administration to run the sever once I graduate. One of the School's "Qualified" teachers decided he should take it over and now wants to run Windows NT on it instead.

I was dumb-struck.

The reason for the switch was that the teacher already knew windows NT from our School's current computer systems. Systems that the BOE gave to the school, but systems that were all running windows.

Now a few years later from when we received these computers we finally have some teachers and 2 technicians to run and maintain our machines. Since *every* machine came preinstalled with windows our teachers only know how to operate windows, and the BOE provided technicians were only trained in windows administration. So any hope for an open source class has vanished.

On the "flip side" a different major high-school in NYC (Stuyvesant High School) mostly runs Unix and Linux on their machines. Of course they have windows labs but all their servers and a lot of their workstations run Unix and Linux. The reason why this school is different is because *before* NYC's BOE got their act together Stuy went and got their own sys admin who set up their (quite impressive) current systems.

I don't know the details of the dispute but I understand the BOE wanted to move the servers over to windows NT 4 (something called "Project connect") and take the School's private T1 connection (All other schools currently get their connection through the BOE who NATs them all behind *one* IP and forces them to use a dreadfully slow filtered proxy for web access.) away from them. This was resolved with the connection now going through the BOE (Stuy got to keep its Class B network) who seem to have frequent routing problems to their network.

I'm *only* (I use the term loosely) a student but been involved closely with the operations and setup of a few schools here in NYC. The BOE here is a Microsoft shop. All new computers are PCs mostly Dells and all with Windows. All training provided is for these systems, and anyone with any extensive outside knowledge of any alternatives is rare. While I only speak from what I've seen here in NYC I don't see how Public Schools here have any choice but to agree to Microsoft's terms and conditions.

Not just private high schools can get .edu domains. One friend of mine showed me the web page of Stuyvesant High School, a public (magnet) high school in New York City.

It would be very nice to see .edu domains that aren't only 4-year colleges, too, so I hope that happens.

Check out this computer science curriculum:
http://www.stuy.edu/academics/compsci/ Stuyvesant is a public magnet math/science High School in New York City that's got a very well developed CS department based around the efforts of a guy they call 'Z'. During my short time there I never got the chance to delve into the CS classes but the kids are fanatically devoted to whatever it is that they do. The site hints at a lot of GNU/Linux open source training and developement, and the school is infamous for its hackers. Also, they're the only High School I know of that links to /.

These selective public schools, aka "magnate" schools, usually have rigorous entrance examinations. These schools are generally much better than even the most elite private schools.

Bronx Science and Stuyvesant are the two most famous magnate schools in NYC and are consistently better than schools like Philips Academy (And the students have the added advantage of not being stuckup snobby pricks -- this is a personal observation from my experiences with BS, Stuy, and preppie students. Preppies think they are truly elite just because their parents are rich.).

My experience was different from that. When I took AP comp sci my sophomore year in high school, the gender ratio of the class was almost 50/50. Junior year, I took classes in assembly language and graphics. These classes were for people who had completed AP. Unlike AP, they had a lot more males than females. Later, I was involved in our Computer Science Team (which was involved in competitions like the USACO) and found it to be almost entirely male. Finally, I was part of the "Z-Team" who was in charge of administering the school network; that group was entirely male. It seemed pretty clear that the higher up you went, the less females there were. There were plenty of girls and guys who wanted to learn some simple programming, none of the girls ended up pursuing it very far while some of the guys did.I assume then that very few of these girls went on to major in CS at college (which I'm doing). There are definitely less females in the computer science classes here percentage-wise than in AP in high school.

The bus came by and I got on
That's when it all began
There was cowboy Neal
At the wheel
Of a bus to never-ever land

Of course, I went to Stuyvesant Highschool in new york city, a specialized science and technology highschool. Theres a test to get in (despite being a public school) so you have several hundred of NYC's smartest students...

Not suprisingly, wasn't any prejudice against geeks (nor, really much in general). I wasn't remotely the most popular person in my class (was kind of a geek, even for stuy), but didn't suffer anything like what's described here.

I actually had good experieces through all my time in the NYC public school system, probably due to the efforts of my parents (thanks mom) for making sure I wound up in the good ones.

But good schools do exist.... There is hope.

-Fyndo ('88)