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Funding for Technology Classes?
SelfTaught asks; "My school district recently built a brand new football stadium and athletics field-house, both with state of the art electronics; yet when asked about implementing a computer science class district officials reply with, 'This is a property poor school district.' Apparently property poor school districts have 20 foot plasma scoreboards and multi-million dollar athletic training facilities. As a pubescent high school student, I'm not very happy with the way my district spends the money my parents pay for my education. How can I encourage my district to provide more technology classes? If I can't get technology education in school, then what would be the best way to teach myself?"
I feel for you, this has been one of my pet peeves for years now.
But, look at the bright side, our (USA) sports celebrities are the highest paid in the world.
(Just overlook the fact that academically we are falling behind faster every year)
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
I graduated from a small town high school in south texas, and the district was pretty damn broke when I left it, but our atheletic facilities were pretty decent.
Keep in mind most southern schools have "Booster Clubs" which are responsible most of the time for raising funds for the sports specifically. The only "booster club" for academics comes straight out of the general budget for the district. Meanwhile, you've got a bunch of meat heads washing cars, taking donations, etc, in a town full of people who are more than willing to fork over money for their friday night football game.
In most districts (i have lived in), sports and education are on different budgets.
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How can I encourage my district to provide more technology classes? If I can't get technology education in school, then what would be the best way to teach myself?"
Well, you'll need to define what "technology classes" you want before you get the school board or most of us to listen to you. Do you want an "Intro to PowerPoint" class? Programming classes? Computer hardware classes? Actually, 'technology' could mean anything, not just computers. What are your goals? Be more specific.
My school district recently built a brand new football stadium and athletics field-house, both with state of the art electronics; yet when asked about implementing a computer science class district officials reply with, 'This is a property poor school district.' Apparently property poor school districts have 20 foot plasma scoreboards and multi-million dollar athletic training facilities. As a pubescent high school student, I'm not very happy with the way my district spends the money my parents pay for my education.
BTW, whining about money spent on athletics isn't the best way to get the school board to listen to you, although I'm sure you'll get lots of sympathetic responses here. High school football is a really big deal to most kids and parents so it will always be funded at a much higher level than classes. Forget about trying to take money away from athletics and put it into education. Your best bet is to make a compelling case for why your school needs a class on X and bring it to the school board. If they are convinced of its importance, they'll find a way to come up with the money. Trust me on this: complaining about something that is very popular will cause people to stop listening to you.
I'm not trying to be hard on you, but saying you want money allocated for something specific (scoreboard) to be divered to something nebulous (technology classes) just isn't going to work. You need to say exactly what classes are necessary and then provide compelling arguments why they are needed so badly.
Good luck, Kid. I'm not a fan of technology in the classroom at all, but I don't want my personal opinions to get in the way of advising you. If you want to fight for this, fine. Just be a bit more cautious about how you go about it.
GMD
watch this
It's easy to see that your team is winning by having the best technology and edging out another school with every advantage that you can get. Investing in the students themselves is always a complicated situation and the results tend to be poor.
What you should do is go to the public comment period of your next school board meeting and ask if matching funds were put into classroom improvement for each dollar spent on improvement of the sports program, and are they willing to stipulate some sort of matching dollars ratio for classroom improvement in the future. Don't expect 1:1, but if you even had 5:1 (sports:classroom) I suspect the improvement would be significant. There's also a sustainability aspect. If I write a check for $1m to my local school for a new stadium, they may already have the budget for maintence of it set aside. The operation expenses, training, etc.. for a new computer lab is not insignificant, think about the power consumption of all the lightbulbs in a classroom compared to 25 computers with 400w power supplies, a few laser printers, etc.. The electric bill may surprise you.
But honestly, this is an excercise in your civic duties (you can even get extra credit if you're taking a government class), attend the meetings, as booring as they may seem, you may be able to create some impact. You may be able to convince those that do attend the meetings and vote for your local school board that these things have value to them as well and see things change, perhaps not while you're still there but for others.
Same crap when I was in high school, exactly the same, back when we had pet saber toothed badgers and rode sliderules to school, both ways, uphill in the snow. This is the US, where professional sports rule, and the schools are the tax payer funded farm teams, even though they will never admit it.
Here's the sucky part-it isn't fixable. It's been tried. Bread and circuses (the gladiator games, etc) is an established technique that keeps the plebes occupied and ye overlordes in power (helps them anyway), so it isn't going away, the fix is in. It's just not, so no sense beating yourself up over it. Work around it. The best you can do is self education as much as possible, and work with any understanding teachers (there should be a few who "get it")and groups of friends (rocket club, computer club, whatever).
As to getting your hands on tech..you own a computer, or can you get a box full of odd parts? Swell. A car (any old junker is fine) with an engine and transmission and probably a comlicated electronic system? Swell. Some radios and other odd electronic stuff? Swell.
and etc.
Now, go tear that crap completely apart and put it back together again *better* than it was before. Not just the same, *better*. See what you can come up with, little tweaks and twists and mods and enhancements. You won't get any grades on it, but you for sure will get an education that is practical. You'll learn to think in steps and sequences, you'll get discipline and focus. That is what is important. It will carry over to about any other job you might get.
Is that these stadiums and facilities are off-limits to anyone but a few select school students.
It opened my eyes when I was in Europe, that when the school gynastic grounds were not in use (after school, weekends), the people of the community could use it. More often than not, they were not even "school grounds" officially, but community grounds that the school happened to be nearby and would thus use for their athletes.
I know there will be cries about pedophiles and such, but as a society, we tend to segregrate ourselves away into our niches anyway behind fences, gated communities, security guards, and what not, so much that it has gone into a completely unhealthy territory.
The other thing that ticks me off is the continual elite treatment/sexist treatment of Football. There is simply no woman's equivalent, even though Field Hockey did make a blip every so often. I was a soccer player. Despite the sport's continuing growth here in the US, we get second rate fields, minimal funding (and the vast majority of girls' sports are similiarly ignored in many schools) in favor of Football. The soccer team/field hockey teams can be state champions and the Football team can be complete losers and they will be still be treated better.
My first suggestion is to find some other students at your school interested in computer science. A school isn't going to add a computer science course unless there is a sizable amount of students who are interested. After you find other interested students, get a proposal for a new class going. Get a few signatures of students and parents (and maybe some interested teachers) and take it to the principal's office (or whomever else deals with course offerings). If it works, then great. If not, then try again next year.
In the meanwhile, I suggest that you read Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs . This is the book that is used for the freshman computer science class at MIT. Find yourself a Scheme interpreter (and maybe even invest some time into learning Unix and maybe installing Linux or BSD if you're a Windows user. Unix, not Windows, is the main operating system used in computer science.). This book can get difficult, but you'll be very knowledgeable about the true meaning of computer science via that book. Then, after reading and finishing that book, then move on to learning C (for structured programming) and C++ or Java (for OO programming). Now that you have the theoretical background of programming understood, now you should learn some practical programming languages that you'll use for upper-division CS courses (operating systems, software engineering, systems programming, and the like) and in future industry jobs or research.
Finally, during your junior year of high school, start finding some good CS schools to apply to. MIT, Berkeley, Stanford, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, University of Texas at Austin, Harvey Mudd, and others that I've forgot now are very good undergraduate computer science schools. These schools are challenging enough to fully teach you computer science and prepare you for either a career in software engineering and development, or a research career.
I wish you a successful start in computer science.
I'm a few years ahead of you (class of 2001) and I share your pain. While my school did have a few computers and a programming class, it was horribly outdated. The problem with the school systems is (obviously?) the administrators. Even as they throw out all the buzzwords for the parents about how "technology friendly" they are, they will always spend more on asthetics because they relate how they run their schools with their own high school experience. When I say asthetics, that's something that they can show parents and other school administrators to show what a great school they have. That can be a football stadium, new cafeteria, whatever. If you just look at how much money goes into a football team, for instance: stadium, equipment, extra pay for coaches, transportation for away games, maintenance, insurance... it really is staggering. And what educational value does football provide? Absolutely nothing aside from a little "school spirit".
Anyway, off my soap box about schools... what can you do about it? I seriously doubt you're going to change the culture of your school or how they spend money. More power to you for trying, and I'd be highly impressed if you did it... I just don't think it's going to happen. Sorry. What you do have is this incredible collection of knowledge known as the Internet. Pick a programming language. Almost any modern language you pick has an open source equivalent (at some level) that you can play around with at home. Even Microsoft has student/free editions of a lot of their tools. I wanted to build web applications (remember, I started high school in 1997) so I started with what I thought was the easiest and most popular web development language: PHP. Now, almost ten years later I know or have at least played with: C/C++, Python, PHP, Ruby (RoR), C# and what makes me money: Java.
You're the master of your own destiny and being in school you typically have a lot of free time to devote to playing with new languages and getting your feet wet. My advice is to find people that are like you, I gurantee there are at least a handful at your school, and team up with them. Pick an application that you want to build and a language you want to build it in and just dive in. Who knows, you could be the next Google.
I did exactly what I described above when I was in high school. Unfortunately all the cool software development I was doing distracted from school, so I ended up barely graduating with a 1.9GPA. It's hard to focus on worksheets and study guide busy work (all copied from the Addison Wesley material anyway) when you're going home and building all these really cool things. But using everything I had learned working at my own pace with my friends I'm now 23, own my own home and make around $70k a year. Screw school, do it your own way.
...if you can. Assuming it's not a private high school, that is.
Organize your statements, as previous posters have said--define what is "technology", have concrete proposals ready.
Prepare possible cost breakdowns.
Compare science programs of other schools, communities, school districts.
Appeal to patriotism (cheap, but hey, it's America.) Sputnik caused a boom in American science education, and ChinaIndiaRussia are in the process of blowing America out of the water.
Use sound economic logic (i.e. it's a gift that keeps on giving through alumni donations, it profiles our schools as academic powerhouses and makes it more desirable to academics, it results in statistically higher admissions to good engineering schools, whatever--do research.)
Try to engage corporate sponsorship--write letters to companies like HP, Sun, Cisco, Intel, Microsoft, etc., they have entire departments devoted to creating PR through this sort of thing. Also, corporate matching funds tend to motivate people to spend public money.
Try to contact your school board reps directly, organized like-minded friends in a letter-writing campaign. Get your and their parents involved as well.
Get PR--write letters to the editor of your local paper, try to get someone to cover the story with a slant. "Schools neglecting science and technology education in favor of jocks" sells papers.
As for yourself? The truth is out there. You have a PC, an Internet connection and some equally interested friends? Start a club, start reading and hacking, and you're off.
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage
I went to Highland Park High School in Dallas. Very similar situation. I would later end up one of the coders on Doom & Quake, so you can imagine my frustration at the time. HPHS is a public school but with generally very wealthy kids, a football stadium that was truly a spectacle of steel reinforced concrete and civil engineering, a famously disciplined football program, and a super-lame lab with virtually useless PC's and one programming class taught in Pascal or Basic, if I recall. As a result, I basically held my breath until Dad bought me an Apple //e, which really served as my primary education and social experience until I outgrew Applesoft and 6502 asm somewhere in my junior or senior year and started going to my Dad's office so I could learn C on his PC.
Here's the trick. Wish I had known it then. The football budget came from donors, and that's basically the answer to your question. The stadium and the atheletic raquetball and other stuff thingy building, were named after the big donor who plunked down millions. That's the ticket.
What I suggest you do is learn something about business development, which is the kung fu required to land great facilities of any kind, because unlike the programming language, API's, and OS du jour that will be a useful tool to you for a healthy 5-10ish years, savvy business development never goes out of style, and will actually help you land a fully funded, sweetly decked out lab, along with great courses.
The proper approach will depend very much upon the specifics of your situation, who you know (both students and adults), and your various superpowers. If you want me to help you figure out The Path, drop me a line, and I'll see if I can be useful.
As far as money goes, when John Dillinger was asked why he robbed banks, he said "because that's where the money is."
The reason football teams have booster clubs is because they work. The same thing will work for high tech, and they have more money. Try to get some local company with smart people to get involved. They will have financial resources and expertise that you don't. I answered an ad in the local newspaper to help the students at my local high school organize a computer club. Organize the club, get local businesses to contribute, get local developers/database guys to come and lecture. Pretty soon, you'll have a club with enough going on to ask for a real class.
The club also answers your question: "If I can't get technology education in school, then what would be the best way to teach myself?" Working on learning something with a group is a great way to learn things. Get the club going, and then say "this month we're going to learn foobar!"
You're on your way.
Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm
I went to high school in a very small town (less than 2,500 registered) in a relatively poor Bible Belt county. Athletics and religion were the primary focuses of the education they offered. In fact, one of my teachers in particular, a world history/economics/law and government/civil studies teacher, had this strange notion of relating every facet of history, science or government to the bible or biblical scripture, often when it would have absolutely nothing to do with the subject matter at hand. Now, I'm not one against people's varying religious or spiritual practices, but such a blatant and patented disregard for objectivity in lieu of personal belief was simply unacceptable in a teacher.
Basically, if it didn't have anything to do with God or the football team, there was a good chance it wasn't going to receive much attention from the upper-echelon, let alone the school board.
That was only one of many differences I had with the local establishment and, as misfortune would have it, the method you've recommended was something I had to apply to my general education, not just my education in technology. In the sphere of technology education, I mean, we at least had effing LOGO classes when I was in second grade (in the next county over), and we got time every week to program in BASIC on the Apple IIe. In my high school, we didn't even have a computer lab until my last year, and even then it was used only for the computer club, which met twice every nine weeks.
The state of general education in the US is pitiable at best and my high school's abilities to meet my learning requirements directly reflect that. While I'd like to say that it was only a singular representation, it's far more widespread than that and to greater degrees both above and below the thin bracket of average educational competency.
The system couldn't meet my needs as an adolescent of above-average intelligence, and in the end it was up to me and my parents to request that I—an underage student at the time—use a county-based program normally allocated for dropouts to get their high school diplomas without having to resort to a GED. Though I graduated and got a diploma from my high school, I was lucky that such a loophole existed.
A lot of kids, both of above-average and below-average intelligence have special learning needs, none of which are met by the system currently in place. And with the increasing proliferation of technology into all areas of our lives, education in this field is becoming especially important.
So you or your parents taking your education into your own hands is probably the best advice to be given at the moment. Well, that and contacting county, state, and federal government representatives in regards to education reform because local bureaucrats and school board officials aren't liable to do much of anything.
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