What a Tangled Web We Weave

The past few weeks have been interesting ones at school. There is a superintendent search going on and we met the three finalists this past week. During one of the presentations to the general public, I sat by a friend of mine who is a computer assessment guru at a neighboring school district and lives in our district where his children attend school. He found it hard to believe that the district doesn’t have a full time computer guy on the payroll. We contract with our local ESD for a tech 1 ½ days a week. The rest of the time the librarian handles the high school’s problems. I’m not sure how the other buildings handle their needs.

Many districts still wrestle with the new technology while other districts move ahead and manage to fully exploit its capabilities. I suppose that we fall somewhere between the two extremes, unfortunately near the lower end. For example, we went the first six months of school without an antivirus software throughout the district. The high school had just been remodeled and there must have been 200 new PC computers on the school network without any protection. We were lucky.

Students and teachers have both been aggravated since the district installed an internet filter and set it to maximum security. It has put strong limitations on surfing the world wide web for all of us. Then the teachers were given a higher level of access than the students. That meant we only get blocked ¾ as many times as the students. Some of these limitations are due to the lack of sufficient bandwidth coming into the district. According to the part time computer tech, we have about 40% of what we really need. I suppose as long as we have a restrictive filter in place we moronic teachers don’t have to make any decisions regarding the web sites being visited by our students or ourselves.

I believe getting students ready for life involves giving them some chances to make some wrong decisions while the consequences of those decisions are not so terrible. As long as teachers proctor computers while their students are working on them, the internet does not need to be so strongly filtered. If teachers are sitting on their asses when kids are surfing the net, then problems will arise that are the fault of the teacher, not the kids. That being said, there are times that even the most hawkish teacher will miss a student visiting an inappropriate site. But then, that is part of education. Students do get away with things once in a while and they will occasionally get caught. That is part of life.

Yesterday I asked to have chess.com unblocked so my chess club students could practice on my computers. It is blocked as a gaming site. I haven’t heard back yet. Then a formal email arrived telling me that I was causing problems with the computer network and undermining teachers. I had shown my physics students a simple computer game called pocket tanks. Two tiny tanks shoot assorted projectiles at each other to score points. Each player sets the gun angle and the power to try and score a hit. It is a free download off the internet. I used to use it to interest the students in projectile motion. When I let students play it from my thumb drive, some of them copied it into their network folder. A few of my advanced ninth grade students did the same thing. The librarian came unglued (she is our pseudocomputer tech) and reported me to the principal as the source of the pocket tank scourge that could destroy the computer network.

Then a formal email came from the principal to me that began with the statement that video games are not allowed in school. I think he mistakenly believes that pocket tanks is a video game. If he means any computer games, then I will point out that the games section of windows needs to be removed from all of the school district’s PCs. It will be interesting to see how far that I get with that approach.

I noticed Tacoma is looking for a horticulture teacher. That might be interesting. Instead of working with computers, those students would be working with pruners.