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Teachers Need an Open Source Education
palegray.net writes "Teachers are sorely in need of an education in what open source software is, what it isn't, and how it can benefit their students. A recent news story at the Reg discussed the case of a Texas teacher who accused those distributing Linux to students of committing criminal acts. A HeliOS blog entry exposes a 'higher education' culture of apathy, lies, and fear of open source software. Things have got to improve, and that improvement needs to start with misguided teachers getting their facts straight."
Tried OpenOffice writer just now, to see if it's improved...
And it hasn't. Still ugly as sin, even ignoring the icons: defaulting to a visible margin? Wtf? And still suffers from the Open-Source mental disorder where "Anti-aliasing means everything is bold and blurry all the time, even straight lines!"
Originally I had started this with "And it's much faster than when I've previously tried it!", but now after five minutes of using it, everything's slowed down to its normal "press a key, wait, something happens" routine.. okay, this experiment is over, rolling back to the previous checkpoint now. It still blows.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
This is part of the problem. At the same 24k starting salary, you were making WAY more than your non-teaching full time counterparts. You were making 24k part time. I've known plenty of teachers, and the myth that they work 60 hours a week for 73 weeks a year is just that, a myth. They are part time employees, yet people want to ignore that very relevant fact when talking about pay.
I realize that you are talking about the early 90's and New Orleans, but the data I have looked up is about today in California, so I will talk about that. Today in California, the average public school teacher's salary is 55k. While that isn't rich by any means, it is certainly a very reasonable salary level for a part time job. Remember, this isn't a MAX of 55k. It is an Average of the salaries that teachers make, so there are a ton of them that are making much more.