T w e n t y S i d e d

Halfway through the school year, Mr. B leaves Vo-Tech and is replaced with Mr. C, who looks exactly like the dad from the comic strip Family Circus. He’s even more of a computer scientist than Mr. B was, and less of a teacher. Some of the kids really hate him. They see him as obtuse and unfair.

“What do we need to know for the test?” demands one girl in exasperation.

This is what school is to her. You memorize some crap for a test. You don’t need to be able to understand it, relate it, or apply it, only recite it. Mr. C is a bit socially awkward, and he acts more like a boss than a teacher. He gives us instruction, but they’re sort of brute-force info dumps. I don’t know how well I’d absorb this material if I didn’t already know it and didn’t have a passion for it. In any case, the tests involve skill and problem-solving, not repetition. You can’t do them unless you can actually program.

The tables have turned, and now I am obliged to look up to my little brother. His height came very, very suddenly.

I thrive. For the first time in my life, school seems to have shape and meaning. An assignment is a goal: Go and make a program that can accomplish X. They aren’t particularly challenging (for me) but they require creativity, which is what makes them fun. They tickle the left hemisphere of my brain, which hasn’t happened in school since that one freak math assignment in sixth grade. At no time am I ever asked to copy things, or memorize things, or fill in worksheets. Everything I do has purpose.

A lot of the kids that were succeeding under Mr. B are now failing, and the distinction between Students and Programmers becomes dramatic. On one hand, I can empathize with these kids who suddenly find themselves failing a course, and I can see why they would want to blame the teacher. After all, they are good students and successful in other subjects, and they didn’t have any problems in this class until we changed teachers. On the other hand, they were never going to be programmers. The idea that they were “passing” a programming course with no working understanding of programming was ridiculous.

Mr. C and I discuss programming. Not assignments or homework. Just… programming. He introduces me to concepts that would be far beyond the curriculum here. He points out the problems with the Pac-Man clone that I’m making, that if it were run on a faster computer, the game itself would run faster. It’s a shame that Mr. C didn’t have a job wiriting games. The early 1990’s are going to be littered with videogames written by people who don’t understand this. A lot of those early games will break or malfunction as computers become exponentially faster.

I quietly observe the problems he’s having. He seems to be involved in a number of conflicts with students, and possibly enraged parents. He seems stressed and unhappy. He seems to be up against people who insist that schooling involves learning indisputable facts from books, doing, homework and taking tests. Now the class is more about learning a skill. It’s like a woodworking class that has the audacity to grade you on your ability to envision and construct sturdy and useful furniture. You either get it or you don’t. A lot of these students aren’t even worried about their lack of skill, they’re more concerned that they will have a bad grade on their record. This is the only class I’ve ever taken where the grade was tied to the student’s understanding of the material, and where failure to understand would result in a failing grade. We’re a long, long way from the, “Do all the work and you’ll pass” mentality that pervades the rest of the school system.

Mr. C explains to me that he won’t be around next year. I don’t know if the school is getting rid of him or if he’s leaving of his own volition, but I’m very sad to see him go. As the year winds down, he does me a favor. Somehow, he convinces the school to let me take home one of the classroom IBM machines for the summer. Up until now I’ve been using an ages-old Tandy that saved data using a tape recorder. I have fully explored the boundaries of this machine and have learned everything I can from it. Now I’m going to have a proper, modern machine. It will have a massive 640k of memory, which is forty times as much as I’m used to. The machine has two floppy disk drives for storage, and uses a proper computer monitor instead of a television. This is a massive leap forward for me.

Also, this new machine can run much better games.

I’ll never see Mr. C again, but I hope he finds someplace that appreciates him.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Eleventh grade. My junior year of high school. On one hand, I’m really looking forward to getting out of this madhouse and its bureaucratic idiocy. On the other hand, I’m terrified of what will happen next. What if I can’t get a job with computers? People keep telling me it’s impossible to enter the field without a degree. I don’t want a degree. I want to go and do something useful. I want to write software and make stuff happen. I can’t bear the idea of more school.

I’m at a new building. In contrast to the Intermediate Building, the high school is a sprawling campus. There are huge windows everywhere, and the most expedient way to get someplace is usually by going outside. It feels more like an institution of learning and less like a dungeon. In keeping with our custom over the last four years, David and I hang out in the library in the mornings.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Autoblography Part 23: Vo-Tech”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

To their delight, the other students have discovered that our history teacher can be effortlessly sidetracked. She encourages a lot of in-class discussion, and doesn’t seem to have any inclination to direct it or keep it pinned to any particular topic. Almost as soon as her lecture begins, someone sidetracks her into school gossip, celebrity gossip, movies, and other fragments of pop culture. From there it follows the logic of free association or channel surfing. Then as the class time runs out she’ll remember that she’s supposed to be teaching and assign us pages to read from the textbook.

Television network ABC produces a TV mini-series about the Soviet Union seizing control of the United States titled Amerika. (Which is obviously just a cheap attempt to take advantage of the popularity of the movie Red Dawn.) I’m not watching the series, but our teacher is, and she won’t shut up about it. She spends a good bit of the class recapping the latest episode and chattering with the other students about the characters and forming theories about what might happen next. This isn’t part of anything we’re studying, it’s just something she’s into and wants to talk about.

This is a setback for me, since I usually depend on lectures for my learning. I can’t read the pages in class, because I don’t know what pages she’ll assign. Besides, it’s too noisy for studious reading with all the chatter. I have to sit through this long gossip session between her and a few key students, and then she tells the rest of us what we’ll need to learn for on the test. So we end up doing the actual learning on our own time. What really annoys me is that the other kids sidetrack her on purpose. They think this is funny.

That’s me, kneeling. Patrick is standing. Little Ruthie is adorable.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Autoblography Part 22: UFOs and Moldova”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

“Just make sure to do all the work, and you will pass my class.”

My heart sinks. I hate when teachers say this. It means the bulk of our grade will come from doing things, not from knowing things. It’s the first day of tenth grade, I’m sixteen years old, and I’m hearing this a lot today. Some teachers even go so far as to grade the notes we take in class. This is infuriating to me. In the past I saw school as this perfectly arbitrary trial of mysterious activities. Now I see it as a house of incompetents. Our goal is ostensibly to learn things, but the system of rewards and incentives is often completely divorced from this idea, and sometimes even runs counter to it.

If we think of grades as “pay”, then we aren’t being paid to learn. We’re being paid to turn out volumes of worthless forgettable busy work.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Autoblography Part 21: Homework”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.