A recent post on YC Hacker News asks:

The new question from the yc application “Please tell us about the time you (…) most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage” filters me out right there, so far I can’t think of anything. How about you? I love that kind of stories, and I suppose giving them away now won’t hurt the applicants chances?

Almost all my hacks involve computers to some extent, but my proudest hack also involves the public school system. In 1998, going into my senior year of high school, I really wanted to take Computer Science AP. That year, the AP board was switching the course curriculum from Pascal to C++. Unfortunately for us, the school’s computer lab was ancient– a set of 8088 PCs with no hard drives, with each student given a floppy containing a bootable Pascal environment and all his/her code. The school didn’t have any money for a new lab full of computers, and was planning to cancel the course. So I came up with the idea of building one reasonably powerful linux server, and networking the existing PCs to it using a bootable “dumb terminal” disk. Cost: about $2000 for the server and 20 network cards.

Several friends and I worked over the summer to set up our linux lab. It turned out the network card device driver, built for x86 boxes, wouldn’t work on these 8088 CPUs. So we bought a big pile of old 386 motherboards with CPUs and RAM from a friendly alum for $200. It turned out the 8088 cases were not standard, with metal bumps that would instantly short one of our new motherboards. So we installed them on top of their anti-static bags, with only expansion cards to hold stuff in place. Everything except the server was overtly cheap and flimsy, like the 10-base-2 coax network we used instead of 10-base-T because it didn’t require an expensive hub. But everything was also easily replaceable, and we built extras just in case the usual firm smack didn’t fix a broken machine.

Then, on our last work visit at the end of summer, we got some discouraging news: the teacher who was supposed to lead CS AP in our new lab had suddenly departed for a better-paying job at another school district. We finished the lab, wondering how we’d get by without a teacher. The course remained tentatively scheduled and for the first few days we tried to teach everyone how to use the OS and compiler while supervised by a friendly but clueless substitute teacher.

Luckily, we ended up with a much better teacher. Brad Kuhn, a CS graduate student at the nearby University of Cincinnati, came to meet us and knew he was our only chance. Though I’m sure he didn’t enjoy some of the disciplinary responsibilities that came with being a high school teacher, he shared with us a deep knowledge of CS and an honest passion for free software. (Brad went on to become director of the Free Software Foundation, and is now CTO at the Software Freedom Law Center.) We hung out after school playing netris and debating when (or if) Microsoft would start publishing free software. There was no shortage of disagreement.

That was ten years ago in Cincinnati, but my former classmates remain among my closest friends. We’re now the age Brad was when he took that job. What am I going to do this year that will have as positive an impact on the world as Brad’s decision to take that job 10 years ago? What are you going to do?

The school is Walnut Hills High School of Cincinnati, Ohio. The friends are Ben Cooper, Coleman Kane, Ben Barker, Peter Barker, and Carl McTague.

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From the comments on one of his own blog posts:

I'm in the middle of studying for my flight instructor's rating right now. It is interesting to note that the FAA would never approve any kind of flight training or certification if done the public school way. They would say that the groups are too large, that the instructor has no way of knowing how much the students have actually learned, and that the students aren't given enough opportunity to feel like they've accomplished something. Even ground school stuff is generally done in much smaller groups and with more hands-on learning relative to the amount of lecture time.

Right on. The factory school is not about education, it's about sustaining the American economy of nuclear families with two working parents. We often forget the consequences of this:

• the forced submission of playful, creative youth to arbitrary discipline;
• isolation of teenagers from meaningful participation in society, preventing gradual assumption of adult responsibilities;
• weakening of community bonds between students, families, and teachers;
• the corrupt notion that learning comes from teachers and is not a fundamental and ubiquitous part of all life;
• and simply wasted opportunities for education.

What's a better model? Small, shopfront schools. Apprenticeships. Teaching as an open activity, not a unionized occupation. Only people, not standardized tests, can teach, measure the progress of, and motivate students.

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Sage advice about how learning from your mistakes makes you more clueful.

My software engineering professor once told me that it usually takes 6 months for a software engineer to learn the ropes at a new job and reach normal productivity. I'm at about 4.5 months today, and can anecdotally confirm that figure.

When I started here I had just come from school, where I almost never had to work with anyone else. I never had to work to understand code written by years of programmers before me. I was never given a task without some tools to help me get it done or at least some sympathy from other students.

Work has turned out to be more like research than I expected. The answers, the fixes, are not known by the person who gives you orders. You start on something and you become the expert; perhaps you write some documentation, purely from the kindness of your heart. In schooling success is largely engendered by compromising at the right times, persistence, and asking for help. In work, some help is available but there is, in some sense, more personal responsibility. On the other hand, the stakes may seem smaller than at school because evaluation is less frequent and more subjective. Which is not to say that the evaluation is any less important, but it's hard to imagine going home and crying like a Harvard student with a B if you get a $1000 raise instead of a $3000 raise.

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My academic friends thought of me as particularly well-read about the academic institution and committed to working within it, as someone who, having succeeded in getting the proverbial "good faculty job," considered it my political responsibility to care about the institution. Yet in a short period of time this caring, this emotional commitment, had apparently evaporated. Academia had gone from being my vocation to being the independent source of my most extreme alienation.

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A Swarthmore prof gives grad school advice, more relevant to humanities than science, but still an interesting read

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We all would have been really successful if we had lived here. Also, we would have no soul and our names would be Drew Newman [guest entry by Josh Ain]

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University of California legened Clark Kerr is dead. His writing seems saddeningly accurate:

Paradoxically, Mr. Kerr himself was to issue some of the most cogent warnings about giant multiversities. While maintaining that they were inevitable, he warned of the danger of “knowledge factories'' whose neglect of students through large classes, the use of teaching assistants and the selection of faculty members based on their research expertise rather than instructional capacities could turn those students into an “alienated'' class.

He joked that a university had become “a series of individual faculty entrepreneurs held together by a common grievance over parking.''

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This article is about how one school took up a fight against cheating. But the included photo is especially worth noting because it depicts a wonderfully imaginative way of hiding a cheat sheet.

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