So you want to teach the students that bein lazy and not doing anything until the end is a better way of doing things?
It has nothing to do with laziness. I just choose not to make my gradebook public until the grading term is over. I continue to update my gradebook (remember, it's a work-in-progress), provide parents with progress reports on their children, etc.
Your resistance to change and position as a teacher of children scares me.
I teach computer science. I'm working getting web servers set up in each high school for student use. I teach other teachers various programming languages, etc. I hardly think I'm a poster child for "resistance to change." If anything, I'm looking out for the best interest of my students.
If it doesn't work then go ahead and play your childish games.
I wouldn't consider protecting the integrity of my students a "childish game."
By finding the time to keep grades reasonbaly up to date where parents can easily have access to them can give you a valuable ally in your efforts to reach struggling children.
Sometimes, at the end of a grading period, I decide to drop a test grade. But I might only do that if we were able to squeeze in three tests instead of two. I won't know until the grading period ends. At progress report time, how can I possibly know what adjustments will be made at the end of the grading period? I don't, and neither do the parents or administrators.
I tell parents that progress reports are useless as a diagnostic tool. There are too many unknowns as to how a mid-term grade is derived. How many assignments have been completed? How many tests? How many projects? Have there been any absences? How's the student behaving? Will any grades be dropped/adjusted? At the end of the grading period, I can define these variables to give a more accurate picture of what the student's grade really means.
Granted conference time is more valuable but is it a bad thing to give parents one more way to stay abreast of their childrens progress ?
I'm available in person, by phone, or by e-mail. In addition, I e-mail many of my students' parents and guardians on a regular basis to update them on what's going on in class. I've yet to be replaced by a teaching robot, but I hear the interface between robot and gradebook is currently under development.
Why on earth are you forcing the parent to call you?
I don't force anybody to call me. I'm available at all times via e-mail. Those parents who don't have e-mail (I teach at a school where most students are in a low socio-economic bracket), can always reach me by phone or in person.
Is it too much to ask for parent to take a proactive approach to monitoring their child's progress?
If you need the ability to revise a grade PUT IT IN THE FUCKING SPECIFICATION. If they won't change the spec, complain. But don't just draw a line in the sand and say I'm not moving past this spot.
Changing grades isn't the issue. We have the ability to do that. But is it fair to force a student to give up the opportunity to attend an extracurricular event because the on-line gradebook says the student is failing when, in reality, the student is not? (This has already happened to a student of mine.) It's too easy to fall into the trap of believing student assessment is an up-to-the-minute, by-the-book process which has pinpoint accuracy as to the progress of a student at any given time.
That is the fastest way to termination I have found. And belive me, I have seen a lot of asses canned.
I've yet to meet a teacher whose ass has been canned because of a gradebook inspection done between grading periods.
states attempt to measure the progress of their districts through standardized testing
The trend in education (not government administration) is to promote the use of "authentic assessment," which are basically assessments that are subjective in nature, such as interviews, projects, creative activities, etc. This is contrary to the national and states' push to quantify student progress based upon standardized testing.
So if we, as teachers, do "the right thing" and assess students with a variety of assessments other than standardized testing, we are gigged when our students don't perform at some pre-determined level on standardized tests.
We are expected to teach the standardized tests, and pay lip service giving students an actual education based upon real-world assessments.
This has been making my life a living hell for the past 2 months, every night my parents go on and check to see if i have any homework and won't let me do anything till it's done"
Navigating our school's on-line teachers' pages is so incredibly difficult, I simply don't use it. You can't link directly to the page in question, but must navigate through at least 5 drop down boxes to get where you need to be. Not to mention the site works only on Microsoft IE browsers!
It's detrimental when the grades reflected on-line do not accurately reflect the progress of the student. Gradebooks are not static documents that can be accurately interpreted simply by rendering them to a web page. They are works in progress, and may not accurately reflect a student's progress in between grading periods.
For instance, I have an A student who may have been absent for a test she's yet to make up. According to the on-line gradebook, she has an F (maybe because that's the only assignment yet graded). If someone (parent, teacher, etc.) asks me her grade, I will make an interpretive decision and most likely reply that the student is earning an A. Looking at her on-line grades, the parents have absolutely no idea what they are looking at.
Wether you believe it or not your parents are doing only because they care. You might not think it now but you will look back at some point and realise they are doing what they think is best for you.
Unfortunately, parents are being lulled (suckered?) into a false sense of security in buying into the belief that their child's progress can be accurately determined by clicking a link. This is an incredibly shallow view of the education process. Teacher-parent communications is extremely important, and no amount of web-based voodoo will ever replace teacher-to-parent interaction.
What you describe is typical of many applications intended for public school education. Software is generally contracted out to the lowest bidder, and we all know the quality at the bottom of that barrel.
For instance, we have this brand-spanking new on-line curriculum (used to dictate curriculum to teachers, a subject I won't get started on now). Only problem is, the company that wrote it has had to cut back on its staff, so we've lost our district liaison. Which means, we can no longer modify the program, add new functionality, etc. Kicker here is that the contract is for "x" number of years. So we're stuck with this piece of shit.
I am a high-school teacher, and our district is moving in this direction. The electronic gradebook is already in place, and next year parents will be able to see their child's alleged progress at any point during the school year.
Why "alleged"? Because my gradebook, like many teachers' gradebooks, is a work in progress. I might be behind in my grading, so the grade displayed might not be accurate. I might decide to drop a grade, but just haven't done so yet. There are a thousand and one things that need to be adjusted that parents simply can't see.
I intend to fight this by withholding the entry of any grades until the final week of the grading period. This way, parents (and teachers) who check on students' grades will find a 0 for the grade. They'll need to talk to me to find out the student's progress. During that discussion, we can talk about other things that might be affecting the student's grade that wouldn't show up in a simple on-line gradesheet (things like attitude, behavior, motivation, etc.).
I would urge the poster of this story to encourage their teachers (the understanding ones) to do the same.
When ATTBI was ATT@home, I had a written contract with them that stated, in writing, "static address due to home network." When ATTBI took over, they took away my static address, and basically told me to fuck off.
So getting it in writing only works if you're willing to pony up the legal fees to file a breach of contract suit. Otherwise, written agreements are no better than a roll of blank toilet paper.
Is it ethical for an American-owned and American-operated company to outsource IT jobs overseas in order to take advantage of lower wages, thereby failing to create jobs stateside for IT workers who demand a higher salary?
This question addresses whether the practice is ethical, rather than symptomatic of a capitalist, employed-at-will society.
3. Will a child be denied equal access to education because they don't have a PC at home?
3a. My child is required to develop presentations at school using Microsoft PowerPoint, and to submit them as PowerPoint presentations. Sometimes, projects need to be worked on as homework. At home, I choose to use non-Microsoft products. Is it ethical for a government institution to promote the business of one vendor over another by requiring students, constituents, etc. to patronize a particular vendor in order to receive grades, services, etc?
Processing an icon takes another level of brain processing, another level of indirection. Even the lowly trashcan: Its appearance varies widely from desktop to desktop. The word "trashcan" is widely recognized in the language of your choice, regardless of the font used (well, let's stick to readable fonts, not Wingdings). Different trashcan icons take precious brain cycles away from important stuff in order to determine that said icon is, in fact, the trashcan on the MacOS 9.x desktop (or whatever your poison might be).
It's my desire to see all icons with a simple one-word description in place of the pictures. The extra level of indirection (recognize icon using pattern recognition->translate to appropriate schemata->trigger appropriate motor response) is really unnecessary.
Desktops may not look very pretty, but they'll sure as hell be more functional with icons replaced with "wordcons."
A much better approach is to find a way to justify the higher wages of American works. In order to not get outsourced, find a way to prove you're worth the money.
We're worth more money than foreign labor because our standard of living is higher than many third-world countries. Taking away a job from an American worker and giving it to a foreign worker forces the American worker to lower their standard of living, while the standard of living of the company's CEO is actually increased due to increased profit margins thanks to decreased labor costs. Outsourcing benefits two parties: The foreign workers, and company executives.
Ever seen the price of a product reduced because of a change in manufacturing locale from the US to overseas? I haven't. Nikes are still expensive, as are Levis. I don't remember either product taking a price cut when manufacture moved overseas.
The idea of foreign labor being beneficial to the American worker through cheaper goods (which is really what free trade is all about) is a fallacious argument. Overseas outsourcing is simply another way for companies to fleece the consumer by increasing profit margins while screwing American workers.
I know a lot of people who first cut their teeth on Slack when trying Linux.
I almost didn't become a Linux convert thanks to Slackware...I made the mistake of trying to install Slackware as my first Linux O/S back in '96. It was a nightmare straight from the bowels of O/S hell. I spent weeks trying to get my 486 running with X (this with no prior Unix knowledge). I finally gave up, and a few years later discovered SuSE and their YaST installer.
Ironically, I now run Slackware on most of my machines...go figure. It's a slick distro, and I've learned a lot since those dark days of '96.
...that once I pay my tax, levy, VAT, pre-emptive fine, or whatever it's called, I'm now legal to pirate anything I want? Sounds like a good deal to me. Will I get immunity from prosecution as well?
Looks like we finally get type signatures which are way more powerful than the rudimentary prototypes available with Perl5.
If I want function signatures, I'll reach for the C compiler. Otherwise, I don't want to be encumbered with having to keep track of data types. That's the (former) beauty of Perl: Powerful yet simple.
I think Perl 6 will be the end of the Perl dynasty as we know it. What a shame.
A bill has been introduced in Congress to curb the flagrant misuse of SSNs. Here is a link to a PDF copy of the bill, the Social Security Number Misuse Prevention Act (S228).
I mean, how much credibility do you expect from the outside world by giving your project a cutesy name like "GIMP"? Last time I checked, that was a slang term for a cripple, and a not-very-nice slang term at that.
Maybe "Cinematic Layout Imaging Tool" might have been more in keeping with the spirit of cute acronyms.
A happy GNOME user myself, please someone...tell me it isn't so.
If you're happy with GNOME, why should it matter what anybody has to say about it? I've never understood the mentality that things in life are deemed "worthy" only if they're popular (pop songs, software, beer, etc.).
When I walk into my professors office, they have two walls of metal bookshelves stacked to the wall with books.
I would wager the vast majority of those books are "desk copies," provided free by the publishers as a way to provide instructors with free copies of the textbooks they're using, or to try and and entice instructors to change over.
One of the best ways to build a dead-tree collection I've discovered is to get affiliated with an institution of higher learning. I teach one computer science course a semester at a local community college as an adjunct instructor. Thanks to this affiliation, I have nearly unlimited ability to obtain free copies of dead-tree books.
If not, do researchers write C/C++ programs and use GMP or Matpack to solve math problems?"
Writing a robust, efficient, and accurate numerical analysis library is not something you do in a weekend. There's not much to improve upon with packages such as LAPACK and their kin: They've been proven to be accurate and reliable over years of use. There's really nothing to reinvent.
I'ver personally used LAPACK for digital terrain matrix (3D) processing of satellite stereo images and the mapping of spherical coordinates to and from various "flat-plane" projections generated by the IKONOS sats. There were simply no other viable alternatives to LAPACK in terms of speed and accuracy, and we certainly weren't arrogant enough to think we could write a better numerical analysis program.
I'm a teacher in a 50,000+ student school district. The district is seriously considering tossing off Microsoft's yoke, dumping both Microsoft and Novell, and setting up an all-Linux network. Microsoft has been trying to extort more and more from the district (a few months ago, one of the reps was simply asked to leave the Tech Center), and school districts in Texas are all facing reduced state funding next year.
So yes, Linux is being considered. But it's a slow road. For example, I'm working with the district to set up Linux servers for use as internal web servers in the high school computer labs. An incredible amount of emphasis is focused on security, since all grading is now on-line as well. As you can imagine, high schools have their fair share of script kiddies just wetting their pants over the opportunity to hack a new box on the network. We will be monitoring all hits on the boxes to try and profile what kind of attacks occur so we can keep the boxes as secure as possible. Whether or not the district decides to pursue Linux on the desktop depends upon how secure we can keep the lowly intranet servers.
My suggestion to anyone who is thinking about trying to convince school administrators to go open-source is to start small. Don't propose retrofitting the entire district in a summer--this simply doesn't fly, and makes you look like a zealot with an agenda. Offer to set up and administer a few Linux boxes, and go along with the security program. If they don't want qmail or sendmail running, fine -- there's time later to broach the subject.
As it is, news has quickly spread through our district's 7 high schools that we are getting our own server. Now they want one too. So I've been given the mandate to start setting them up for all the high schools. All because I pitched the idea of one lowly server for a computer science class I'm teaching.
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So you want to teach the students that bein lazy and not doing anything until the end is a better way of doing things?
It has nothing to do with laziness. I just choose not to make my gradebook public until the grading term is over. I continue to update my gradebook (remember, it's a work-in-progress), provide parents with progress reports on their children, etc.
Your resistance to change and position as a teacher of children scares me.
I teach computer science. I'm working getting web servers set up in each high school for student use. I teach other teachers various programming languages, etc. I hardly think I'm a poster child for "resistance to change." If anything, I'm looking out for the best interest of my students.
If it doesn't work then go ahead and play your childish games.
I wouldn't consider protecting the integrity of my students a "childish game."
By finding the time to keep grades reasonbaly up to date where parents can easily have access to them can give you a valuable ally in your efforts to reach struggling children.
Sometimes, at the end of a grading period, I decide to drop a test grade. But I might only do that if we were able to squeeze in three tests instead of two. I won't know until the grading period ends. At progress report time, how can I possibly know what adjustments will be made at the end of the grading period? I don't, and neither do the parents or administrators.
I tell parents that progress reports are useless as a diagnostic tool. There are too many unknowns as to how a mid-term grade is derived. How many assignments have been completed? How many tests? How many projects? Have there been any absences? How's the student behaving? Will any grades be dropped/adjusted? At the end of the grading period, I can define these variables to give a more accurate picture of what the student's grade really means.
Granted conference time is more valuable but is it a bad thing to give parents one more way to stay abreast of their childrens progress ?
I'm available in person, by phone, or by e-mail. In addition, I e-mail many of my students' parents and guardians on a regular basis to update them on what's going on in class. I've yet to be replaced by a teaching robot, but I hear the interface between robot and gradebook is currently under development.
Why on earth are you forcing the parent to call you?
I don't force anybody to call me. I'm available at all times via e-mail. Those parents who don't have e-mail (I teach at a school where most students are in a low socio-economic bracket), can always reach me by phone or in person.
Is it too much to ask for parent to take a proactive approach to monitoring their child's progress?
If you need the ability to revise a grade PUT IT IN THE FUCKING SPECIFICATION. If they won't change the spec, complain. But don't just draw a line in the sand and say I'm not moving past this spot.
Changing grades isn't the issue. We have the ability to do that. But is it fair to force a student to give up the opportunity to attend an extracurricular event because the on-line gradebook says the student is failing when, in reality, the student is not? (This has already happened to a student of mine.) It's too easy to fall into the trap of believing student assessment is an up-to-the-minute, by-the-book process which has pinpoint accuracy as to the progress of a student at any given time.
That is the fastest way to termination I have found. And belive me, I have seen a lot of asses canned.
I've yet to meet a teacher whose ass has been canned because of a gradebook inspection done between grading periods.
states attempt to measure the progress of their districts through standardized testing
The trend in education (not government administration) is to promote the use of "authentic assessment," which are basically assessments that are subjective in nature, such as interviews, projects, creative activities, etc.
This is contrary to the national and states' push to quantify student progress based upon standardized testing.
So if we, as teachers, do "the right thing" and assess students with a variety of assessments other than standardized testing, we are gigged when our students don't perform at some pre-determined level on standardized tests.
We are expected to teach the standardized tests, and pay lip service giving students an actual education based upon real-world assessments.
This has been making my life a living hell for the past 2 months, every night my parents go on and check to see if i have any homework and won't let me do anything till it's done"
Navigating our school's on-line teachers' pages is so incredibly difficult, I simply don't use it. You can't link directly to the page in question, but must navigate through at least 5 drop down boxes to get where you need to be. Not to mention the site works only on Microsoft IE browsers!
It's detrimental when the grades reflected on-line do not accurately reflect the progress of the student. Gradebooks are not static documents that can be accurately interpreted simply by rendering them to a web page. They are works in progress, and may not accurately reflect a student's progress in between grading periods.
For instance, I have an A student who may have been absent for a test she's yet to make up. According to the on-line gradebook, she has an F (maybe because that's the only assignment yet graded). If someone (parent, teacher, etc.) asks me her grade, I will make an interpretive decision and most likely reply that the student is earning an A. Looking at her on-line grades, the parents have absolutely no idea what they are looking at.
Wether you believe it or not your parents are doing only because they care. You might not think it now but you will look back at some point and realise they are doing what they think is best for you.
Unfortunately, parents are being lulled (suckered?) into a false sense of security in buying into the belief that their child's progress can be accurately determined by clicking a link. This is an incredibly shallow view of the education process. Teacher-parent communications is extremely important, and no amount of web-based voodoo will ever replace teacher-to-parent interaction.
What you describe is typical of many applications intended for public school education. Software is generally contracted out to the lowest bidder, and we all know the quality at the bottom of that barrel.
For instance, we have this brand-spanking new on-line curriculum (used to dictate curriculum to teachers, a subject I won't get started on now). Only problem is, the company that wrote it has had to cut back on its staff, so we've lost our district liaison. Which means, we can no longer modify the program, add new functionality, etc. Kicker here is that the contract is for "x" number of years. So we're stuck with this piece of shit.
I am a high-school teacher, and our district is moving in this direction. The electronic gradebook is already in place, and next year parents will be able to see their child's alleged progress at any point during the school year.
Why "alleged"? Because my gradebook, like many teachers' gradebooks, is a work in progress. I might be behind in my grading, so the grade displayed might not be accurate. I might decide to drop a grade, but just haven't done so yet. There are a thousand and one things that need to be adjusted that parents simply can't see.
I intend to fight this by withholding the entry of any grades until the final week of the grading period. This way, parents (and teachers) who check on students' grades will find a 0 for the grade. They'll need to talk to me to find out the student's progress. During that discussion, we can talk about other things that might be affecting the student's grade that wouldn't show up in a simple on-line gradesheet (things like attitude, behavior, motivation, etc.).
I would urge the poster of this story to encourage their teachers (the understanding ones) to do the same.
You can get exceptions written into your TOS.
When ATTBI was ATT@home, I had a written contract with them that stated, in writing, "static address due to home network." When ATTBI took over, they took away my static address, and basically told me to fuck off.
So getting it in writing only works if you're willing to pony up the legal fees to file a breach of contract suit. Otherwise, written agreements are no better than a roll of blank toilet paper.
Is it ethical for an American-owned and American-operated company to outsource IT jobs overseas in order to take advantage of lower wages, thereby failing to create jobs stateside for IT workers who demand a higher salary?
This question addresses whether the practice is ethical, rather than symptomatic of a capitalist, employed-at-will society.
3. Will a child be denied equal access to education because they don't have a PC at home?
3a. My child is required to develop presentations at school using Microsoft PowerPoint, and to submit them as PowerPoint presentations. Sometimes, projects need to be worked on as homework. At home, I choose to use non-Microsoft products. Is it ethical for a government institution to promote the business of one vendor over another by requiring students, constituents, etc. to patronize a particular vendor in order to receive grades, services, etc?
"Forget it. You need to be able to smell the other person's farts".
Finally, a long-sought-after incentive to get more of our youth interested in computer science.
I can see my high school students knocking down my door to sign up for the chance to smell each others' flatulence.
Thanks, Mr. Beck.
All of them. Here's why:
Processing an icon takes another level of brain processing, another level of indirection. Even the lowly trashcan: Its appearance varies widely from desktop to desktop. The word "trashcan" is widely recognized in the language of your choice, regardless of the font used (well, let's stick to readable fonts, not Wingdings). Different trashcan icons take precious brain cycles away from important stuff in order to determine that said icon is, in fact, the trashcan on the MacOS 9.x desktop (or whatever your poison might be).
It's my desire to see all icons with a simple one-word description in place of the pictures. The extra level of indirection (recognize icon using pattern recognition->translate to appropriate schemata->trigger appropriate motor response) is really unnecessary.
Desktops may not look very pretty, but they'll sure as hell be more functional with icons replaced with "wordcons."
A much better approach is to find a way to justify the higher wages of American works. In order to not get outsourced, find a way to prove you're worth the money.
We're worth more money than foreign labor because our standard of living is higher than many third-world countries. Taking away a job from an American worker and giving it to a foreign worker forces the American worker to lower their standard of living, while the standard of living of the company's CEO is actually increased due to increased profit margins thanks to decreased labor costs. Outsourcing benefits two parties: The foreign workers, and company executives.
Ever seen the price of a product reduced because of a change in manufacturing locale from the US to overseas? I haven't. Nikes are still expensive, as are Levis. I don't remember either product taking a price cut when manufacture moved overseas.
The idea of foreign labor being beneficial to the American worker through cheaper goods (which is really what free trade is all about) is a fallacious argument. Overseas outsourcing is simply another way for companies to fleece the consumer by increasing profit margins while screwing American workers.
I know a lot of people who first cut their teeth on Slack when trying Linux.
I almost didn't become a Linux convert thanks to Slackware...I made the mistake of trying to install Slackware as my first Linux O/S back in '96. It was a nightmare straight from the bowels of O/S hell. I spent weeks trying to get my 486 running with X (this with no prior Unix knowledge). I finally gave up, and a few years later discovered SuSE and their YaST installer.
Ironically, I now run Slackware on most of my machines...go figure. It's a slick distro, and I've learned a lot since those dark days of '96.
...that once I pay my tax, levy, VAT, pre-emptive fine, or whatever it's called, I'm now legal to pirate anything I want? Sounds like a good deal to me. Will I get immunity from prosecution as well?
Looks like we finally get type signatures which are way more powerful than the rudimentary prototypes available with Perl5.
If I want function signatures, I'll reach for the C compiler. Otherwise, I don't want to be encumbered with having to keep track of data types. That's the (former) beauty of Perl: Powerful yet simple.
I think Perl 6 will be the end of the Perl dynasty as we know it. What a shame.
A bill has been introduced in Congress to curb the flagrant misuse of SSNs. Here is a link to a PDF copy of the bill, the Social Security Number Misuse Prevention Act (S228).
I mean, how much credibility do you expect from the outside world by giving your project a cutesy name like "GIMP"? Last time I checked, that was a slang term for a cripple, and a not-very-nice slang term at that.
Maybe "Cinematic Layout Imaging Tool" might have been more in keeping with the spirit of cute acronyms.
A happy GNOME user myself, please someone...tell me it isn't so.
If you're happy with GNOME, why should it matter what anybody has to say about it? I've never understood the mentality that things in life are deemed "worthy" only if they're popular (pop songs, software, beer, etc.).
When I walk into my professors office, they have two walls of metal bookshelves stacked to the wall with books.
I would wager the vast majority of those books are "desk copies," provided free by the publishers as a way to provide instructors with free copies of the textbooks they're using, or to try and and entice instructors to change over.
One of the best ways to build a dead-tree collection I've discovered is to get affiliated with an institution of higher learning. I teach one computer science course a semester at a local community college as an adjunct instructor. Thanks to this affiliation, I have nearly unlimited ability to obtain free copies of dead-tree books.
If not, do researchers write C/C++ programs and use GMP or Matpack to solve math problems?"
Writing a robust, efficient, and accurate numerical analysis library is not something you do in a weekend. There's not much to improve upon with packages such as LAPACK and their kin: They've been proven to be accurate and reliable over years of use. There's really nothing to reinvent.
I'ver personally used LAPACK for digital terrain matrix (3D) processing of satellite stereo images and the mapping of spherical coordinates to and from various "flat-plane" projections generated by the IKONOS sats. There were simply no other viable alternatives to LAPACK in terms of speed and accuracy, and we certainly weren't arrogant enough to think we could write a better numerical analysis program.
Can't we just contact them and ask them how much they were paid to grant this crap?
Only if you're willing to pick up the phone:
Phone: 703.308.0640
Fax: 703.305.3719
Kristine's boss, Margaret Focarino:
Phone: 703.306.5484
Fax: 703.305.3719
Sorry, no e-mail addresses to be found. A personal discussion would probably be more enlightening anyways.
I'm a teacher in a 50,000+ student school district. The district is seriously considering tossing off Microsoft's yoke, dumping both Microsoft and Novell, and setting up an all-Linux network. Microsoft has been trying to extort more and more from the district (a few months ago, one of the reps was simply asked to leave the Tech Center), and school districts in Texas are all facing reduced state funding next year.
So yes, Linux is being considered. But it's a slow road. For example, I'm working with the district to set up Linux servers for use as internal web servers in the high school computer labs. An incredible amount of emphasis is focused on security, since all grading is now on-line as well. As you can imagine, high schools have their fair share of script kiddies just wetting their pants over the opportunity to hack a new box on the network. We will be monitoring all hits on the boxes to try and profile what kind of attacks occur so we can keep the boxes as secure as possible. Whether or not the district decides to pursue Linux on the desktop depends upon how secure we can keep the lowly intranet servers.
My suggestion to anyone who is thinking about trying to convince school administrators to go open-source is to start small. Don't propose retrofitting the entire district in a summer--this simply doesn't fly, and makes you look like a zealot with an agenda. Offer to set up and administer a few Linux boxes, and go along with the security program. If they don't want qmail or sendmail running, fine -- there's time later to broach the subject.
As it is, news has quickly spread through our district's 7 high schools that we are getting our own server. Now they want one too. So I've been given the mandate to start setting them up for all the high schools. All because I pitched the idea of one lowly server for a computer science class I'm teaching.