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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 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
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.
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.